What'd I Read?: 2021 Year-End Book Wrap-up
No one asked but here's the TOP ~10 BOOKS I read in 2021*: (*That I didn't already write about here.)
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD Catch-22 | Heller 1961 Grabbed me by the shirt in 10th grade and never let go. Just reread. Not everyone's into 400p of the same joke but it's a great joke! +It's no joke! IRL "illogic+power" is too easily passed off as "logic".
Mad As Hell | Itzkoff 2014 A profile of Paddy Chayefsky and "Network," one of Hollywood's most idiosyncratic writers and one of its perfect and most enduring movies. Story of how PC wrote it makes this a book about writing itself.
The Anomaly | Le Tellier 2021 Three cheers for light scifi wherein a simple, unreal event occurs and the world must react to and cope with it. With earnest but not overbearing forays into philosophical conundra by characters struggling to understand.
Klara and the Sun | Ishiguro 2021 A warm, friendly, childlike AI tries desperately and creatively to help her human friend in a lonely near-future dystopia we don't even really see. Subtle, artful and beautifully constructed.
Exhalation | Chiang 2019 Uneven short-story collection with a few of the most breathtaking and memorable tales you've come across (Exhalation, What's Expected of Us, Alchemist's Gate). TC creates worlds and interrogates them from every angle.
领英推荐
The Dawn of Everything | Graeber and Wengrove 2021 Provocative unwinding of long-held, under-examined axioms about how societies began. Perfect for your loved ones who read half of Sapiens and threw it across the room in frustration.
The Free World | Menand 2021 An entire curriculum between two covers. We've exited the post-war era, and heaven only knows what's coming, but for several decades there was some stability in some places and trends in art and ideas and they're all in here.
Transit | Cusk 2017 There. Is. Something. Hypnotic. About. These. Books. Cusk reinvented narration. The voice is so hyper-realistic, calming, and knowledgeable. The Outline trilogy is as close as you'll come to slipping into another's consciousness.
Motherless Brooklyn | Lethem 1999 Tight, funnysad neo-noir tale of a band of small-time crooks and their shifting loyalties. With extremely vivid, memorable characters and just gleefully great dialog.
Slavery By Another Name | Blackmon 2008 An inhuman, corrupt police/legal system abducted Black people into brutal de facto enslavement for decades after the Civil War. Pulitzer-winner reconstructs lives stolen and lost, and how the atrocity came about.
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism | Zuboff 2019 To get fun apps we enriched now unaccountably powerful oligarchs who harvest behavior and reduce humans to expendable digital husks. Say what you want about Soylent Green being people at least you can eat it.
Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Carbon Market Researcher, Analyst and Content Producer at neworator.com
3 年Interesting recommendations. My wife gave me Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman to read so have to find time to devour this before entering into your selection. Chiang sounds enchanting but Heller is probably worth reading ahead of me finding time to write a play about systemic irrationality (not of the Don’t Look Up style). That said, my last script went in the back burner once the pandemic hit.
Blogger, Traveler, Bicyclist
3 年Great list Eric. I read Klara and the Sun and loved it. So haunting. I reread Catch 22 two years ago. Always relevant for a soldier who served in a few wars.
Institutional Investor | Sustainable Finance | Alternatives | Insurance
3 年I’m re-reading The Carbon Age to see if I feel differently about the ending this time.
LIFEFORCE We and our Earth are intrinsically linked in interrelated systems. We are ONE.
3 年Thank you Eric, interesting selection. I’m reading Jeremy Lent, gone back to Fritjof Capra - seems to be getting more relevant through time - Brene Brown - The Gift of Imperfection - I love the idea of Kintsugi as a philosophical extension, Katherine Randell.
Regional Director Asia Earth Day Network
3 年Thanks Eric for this. It triggered a memory of our trip to Orissa many moons ago when sitting around a lamplight the villagers answered questions on what we knew as climate change.