This is the blog post you've been waiting all year for... the top books of 2021. Everyone else has done their list (Here is NPR's list, and WSJ has their list, and Christianity Today has awards), so I figure it's time to contribute.
I will make a note about WSJ's list -- I tried to read Harrow, and I'll just say that's it is bizarre. I believe it fits squarely in the dystopian genre, and by page 100 I was mindlessly paging through it. I wanted to finish it, but it's a strange, strange book. I'd say that the plot has twists, but I never had a good handle on what the plot actually was, so that may not be accurate. I'd put it down as my least favorite book of 2021, but I didn't finish it, so that's not really fair. It's my least favorite first half of any book I've read last year. Maybe it has a great ending. If so, it'd be the exact opposite of 2020's worst book, The Wandering Jew, where I stuck around for all 1,400 pages in the hopes that it would redeem itself. (spoiler: it doesn't).
My least favorite book was probably one of the Robert Galbraith books I read. These are the detective stories written by J.K. Rowling. I usually love detective stories, but these involve some pretty creepy villains, some way scarier than Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series because they're too realistic. I can do without certain images in my imagination. I read 5 of them this spring and I'd go back and figure out which was the creepiest, but I'd just as soon omit those memories from my past, so just be forewarned that it's pretty heavy reading, albeit suspenseful and filled with action.
On the whole, I didn't read a lot of great books this year. I read a lot of good books, and a few very good books, but usually there are two or three that come out of nowhere and amaze me. Outside of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I've read several times before, nothing rose to the level of previous delights such as The Overstory or A Gentleman in Moscow. For the year I ended up at 39 books and 14,978 pages. That tells you how much I didn't want to finish Harrow. Another 100 pages to finish that would've pushed me to 40 books and over 15,000 pages, but I just couldn't do it.
Without further ado, on to the list:
10) An Unhurried Life, by Alan Fadling: One of the books that society needs. I remember in business school how we were banned at one point in marketing class from using the phrase 'on-the-go', because it was so overused. We're always on the go, and products are pitched to help us keep on the go and perform better while we're going. Fadling's book invites us to slow down, to rest, and to follow the example of Jesus. Fadling follows in the footsteps of Dallas Willard, who described Jesus as 'Relaxed'. Willard talked about hurry the great enemy of the spiritual life and invited people to 'ruthlessly eliminate hurry' from our lives.
9) Red Rising, by Pierce Brown: I read the first three books of this series (I believe there are now five) after they were recommended by a friend. This is the violent tale of a young man born into the lowest caste and quite literally fighting his way to the top. The violence is a bit much at times, but this book made me think. We've heard a lot about how structures in society can be determinants of outcomes -- tragically, society doesn't give everyone an equal chance. Neighborhoods can be large influences as to health and education outcomes. It's so easy to ignore this, depending on what neighborhood you were born into. There are parts of town you'll likely never go into. The Gospel calls us to go to the underserved places, where children need additional resources, where people don't get the same chance as others. Brown's saga paints a picture of what happens when castes rebel, but it should also instruct all of us to think about people who can be unseen. The pandemic us taught us a lot about what is essential. Let's continue to think, continue to see in new ways.
8) Jade Legacy, by Fonda Lee: The third in the 'Green Bone' saga, this book follows the ruling family of a fictional island where warriors and leaders are enhanced by wearing jade. It feels a little like the Godfather to me, with constantly shifting sands between rival clans and outside influences, where the importance of family trumps all else. A fitting finale to the trilogy, these books were hard to put down for me.
7) Joe: Rounding Third and Heading for Home, by Greg Hoard: I grew up listening to Joe Nuxhall call Cincinnati Reds games. This defined summer for me, and I fell asleep as a kid with the sounds of baseball on the radio. Joe Nuxhall was an amazing person who made the game come alive to this baseball fan. Hard to believe he was pitching in the big leagues as a 15-year-old kid!
6) The Blue Age, by Gregg Easterbrook: Easterbook used to write Tuesday Morning Quarterback for ESPN, which talked about football, politics, and everything in between. I'll always appreciate Easterbrook's position that any politician running for office should have to first resign from the office they currently hold, which makes perfect sense to me -- we'd see who was really committed to the race, and we wouldn't be paying people to campaign for another job. The Blue Age is about how the US Navy has supported much of the expansion of free trade over the past century, and it asks some big questions about what the future looks like as the US pulls back from a global role.
5) Billy Summers, by Stephen King: What's great about this book is that it forces you to ask yourself what, if anything, justifies evil actions. Billy Summers is a sniper hired to kill people, but he's only willing to kill people that qualify as 'bad people'. It makes one think about how we classify people as good or bad, and also how we evaluate things that happen. Is the life of a 'bad person' worth less than the life of a 'good person'? Is death equally tragic if it happens to both?
I'd never read much Stephen King, not being interested in scary books, but Billy Summers and 11/22/63 were both good reads.
4) The Empire of Necessity, by Greg Grandin: I read Grandin's Fordlandia years ago, and it's a great read about Henry Ford's attempt to build rubber plantations in the South American jungle. The Empire of Necessity is, in my opinion, a really important book. It's an eye-opening read about the centrality of slavery in the new world, turning around an event early in the 19th century about a slave uprising on a ship and the aftermath of that encounter with another ship. Grandin pulls the various threads leading up to this event, all of it well-researched and tragic. This one's hard to read at times, as you wonder about where our humanity was around the issue of slavery and how such an evil persisted for so long, but it's worth your time and I'd highly recommend it.
3) Breath, by James Nestor: I read most of my books through the local library, but I went out and bought this one after reading it. It's incredibly educational. Basically, how we breathe can shape so much of our health and our bodies, and most likely, you're breathing wrong. I'd never before thought about how I breathe, and I pay way more attention to it now. If Nestor is right, it could make me far healthier.
2) The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman: I remember when books on Amazon had a lot of reviews if they had 1,000 reviews. This one has nearly 70,000 reviews, and 84% of those are 4 or 5 stars! 60,000 people can't be wrong, can they? This one's a whodunnit set in a retirement village, and what I loved about it was the way the mystery drove the action while human frailty and death danced in the background, sometimes moving jarringly to the foreground, due to the reality of aging taking place in the retirement village. At times poignant, at times heartbreaking, it's a reminder to all of us that life is precious, and we are wise to remember that we won't live forever.
1) The Lord of the Rings trilogy: One of the few great sagas that is essentially all about friendship. Tolkien's tale is a timeless battle between good and evil, with surprising heroes and epic battles, where humble characters have greatness thrust upon them and in the end, all the sad things come untrue due to the prevailing forces of goodness and selfless love. An easy tale to get lost in. Is it the greatest trilogy ever written (ignoring The Hobbit)? I can't think of a better one.
It's always fun to sit back and look at what I read over the previous 12 months. Who knows what 2022 has in store? I've got a great list of books on hold at the library right now, and am about to start Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet, so it'll hopefully be a great year! I'll hopefully do better about posting regular book reviews as I finish up books, but no promises there. Life is busy. (Maybe I should re-read An Unhurried Life -- clearly the lessons didn't take!)
No comments:
Post a Comment