I read a good bit over the past year. I always say that I want to try to read more, but when I think about it, the 54 books that I read in 2021 is a pretty respectable number. I like to read a mixture of classics, new critically acclaimed literature, genre fiction, delightful fluff, and everything in between, so hopefully I will have a recommendation for everyone. I think we can agree that it would be a bit much if I talked about every book I read last year, so I’m going to tell you about a few of my favorites.
If this isn’t enough for you, you can find a longer list of recommended books that I read last year at Black Cat Books, and you can also hear my thoughts on falling in love with J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which I reread in honor of Hobbit Day, in this post.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
One of my absolute favorite books of last year, and the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Piranesi is pretty much indescribable. I realize that this isn’t terribly helpful in my mission to try to convince you to read a book, but it is difficult to think of any way to tell you about the plot without giving anything away, because a large part of the joy of this book is the fact that you go in with absolutely NO IDEA what is going on. In fact, the first ten pages or so are a bit of a struggle as you try to figure out who the speaker is, where he is, and what exactly it is you’re reading. If you push through that first bit, though, it quickly become a captivating page turner; I read it in just a couple of days.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Another astonishingly wonderful book, in my opinion, was Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. It is also a very short, quick read, but of an entirely different type than Piranesi.
The narrator, Tony Webster, is a middle-aged man who finds his thoughts drifting back to the friends of his childhood through his young adulthood and how those relationships formed and shifted over the years. As he reassesses his past, he realizes that he may not have understood his friends as well as he thought. The mood is reminiscent of The Remains of the Day with its sense of yearning for a lost past, though the story is quite different.
This one was so good that it gave me a book hangover that lasted for days.
The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
Before you get shocked that Harry Potter is new to me, I assure you, it isn’t, but it’s a favorite series that I think deserves a reread every few years. I am exactly of the Harry Potter generation, meaning I grew up largely alongside Harry and his friends and read the books and saw the movies as they came out. Though people of all ages love HP, I think it’s hard for anyone outside of my age group to love it quite as much as we do. As such, the nostalgia runs deep. The story, the characters, even the weight of the paper that the books are printed on bring back all sorts of happy memories and emotions. Sometimes I am hesitant to reread something that I loved when I was younger, in case it doesn’t live up to the version in my mind, but I never worry about that with Harry Potter.
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
I can’t believe it took me this long to read this book. Stardust was such a beautiful little fairy tale that gave me exactly what I was looking for at the time. At it’s heart, it’s a quest tale, with a normal peasant boy going on a journey into fairy land to prove himself to the girl he loves back at home. Of course that isn’t the only quest taking place in this book by any means, but I’ll leave you to find out about the stars and witches and pirates and goats for yourself.
There are a lot of fairy tale retellings out there, and with good reason; it’s a popular genre, based off sources that are rich with material to mine for new stories. However, it is far more rare to find something like this, that produces a whole new story in the realm of fairy tale and folklore.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Another book that I’ve put off reading for way too long, One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered a groundbreaking novel in the genre known as magical realism. It follows the Buendia family, beginning with the founding of the remote town of Macondo by José Arcadio Buendía and following the further generations of the family through wars, plagues, and other disasters, triumphs, wonders, and miracles.
Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude is like having a particularly haunting dream, one of those that you remember for years. Even if you can’t recall the details of what happened in the dream, you never forget the way it made you feel.
There were far too many books that I enjoyed reading over the past year to put them all in a blog post, but if you’d like to see more of them, you can take a look at the list I put together over at Black Cat Books. If you’d like to know more about any of them, just ask!
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