My 2021 Reading List

The beginning of 2021 feels like several lifetimes ago. Sadly, as lockdowns grew in length, my reading list has dwindled - I only managed 26 books this year, my lowest for a while. I wasn't going to make any New Year Resolutions but then I decided on one - read more books. There are simply too many good books in the world and only so many years in a lifetime, and I'd like my hours to be filled with literature instead of doomscrolling.

Lessons learned.

On to the list!

 1. A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future by David Attenborough

A cheery start to the year. Basically the written version of Attenborough's last documentary. I think he struck a good balance between horror and depression (outlining what our world will look like in 100 years if we ignore the climate crisis), and a clear call to action. Now for the political will to follow it...

2. S.  by J. J. Abrams

How to describe S? A mystical library discovery. An experimental work of metafiction. A palimpsest. S is a fictional story of a fictional book, Ship of Theseus, written by a fictional author, with margin notes written by two fictional characters who pass the book back and forth in their University library (over multiple years, so multiple strands of story). As well as margin notes and underlining there are dozens of inserts, postcards, handwritten letters, maps drawn on napkins, secret codes and photographs tucked into the pages.

Not the easiest thing to read by any means, and it's hard to execute such an experimental story perfectly, but I give it an 11/10 for sheer inventiveness and effort (and props to the publisher for making such a delightful artefact!)

3. Caleb's Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

I love Brooks' historical fiction. Set in the mid-1600s, about the unlikely friendship between a bright young girl craving education and the first Native American man to graduate from Harvard College in America. The prose was so good I actually used a paragraph as a writing compositional study at one point. (This fact is probably of no interest to anyone but me).

4. All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

The narrative structure of this is told backwards (sort of Memento-style). It's clear that the main character is running away from something, but you don't find out exactly what started the whole chain of events until the final chapter. And not to spoil it, but I felt the 'reveal' did not really measure up to the reverse breadcrumb trail that the book had led. Still quite a dark and gripping read, though.

5 & 6: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and|
The Second Summer of the Sisterhood  by Ann Brashares

I have these in a two-for-one volume (I loaned the whole trilogy to a friend once many years ago and never got book 3 back, which is annoying). I had extremely fond memories of reading these books as a teenager, and they mostly lived up to the re-read. In parts I found myself rolling my eyes at the teenage drama somewhat more than I did when I was a teenager myself.

But... "She promised Bailey she would keep playing" dissolved me into tears just as it used to. If you know, you know.

7. A Passion for Narrative: A Guide to Writing Fiction by Jack Hodgins

I read this about a decade ago and remembered being extremely enamoured with it at the time. Read it again, and it was just another good but fairly forgettable book about writing. Fickle beasts - will I ever learn?

8. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

I had never read this book before but watched the Greta Gerwig film version, and fell a bit in love with Jo - "I'd rather be a happy spinster and paddle my own canoe!"

I do so enjoy it when very old classics are still extremely relatable.

9. An Imaginary Life by David Malouf

I saw David Malouf give the closing address at the Sydney Writer's Festival this year and felt I should read more of his works beforehand. An Imaginary Life is one of my Gran's favourites. She wrote to Malouf in the 80s telling him how much she liked it, and he hand-wrote a reply (she keeps the letter tucked inside the front cover of her copy that she lent me). She went to see him at another writer's festival in the late 90s and he signed the inside of her book - 'sixteen years since the letter'.

I considered trying to get him to sign the book again in 2021 but I thought at that point he might assume my family was stalking him, hah.

10. After Australia - edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad

A collection of short stories written by First Nations and Australian writers of colour, imagining our future. Really glad I read this for a number of reasons - not only because my reading was extremely white this year (only realising this in hindsight), but also I simply want to read more short stories and more Australian fiction in general. A great collection.

11. A Treacherous Country by K. M. Kruimink

Since I finally got around to finishing and entering my book into the Vogel Award, I thought I should read the previous year's Vogel Award winner! Such a great little book about a clueless Englishman in the Tasmanian landscape. I saw this author at the Sydney Writer's Festival too, a highlight of the year.

12. How to Fly: In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons by Barbara Kingsolver

You go into a wonderful bookshop and you happen serendipitously upon a slim hardback volume with one of your favourite author's names on the spine. You pull it from the shelf and it falls open in your hands at exactly the right poem, at exactly the right time.

Her poetry is just as good as her prose; I can think of no higher praise.

13. The Dark Tide by Alicia Jasinska

I saw the author speak on a fantasy panel at the Sydney Writer's Festival and she said something along the lines of: "I wanted to write something like the end of Wicked except Glinda and Elphaba run off to be together and live happily ever after."

I have never been sold so hard and so fast in my life.

Magical world-building that left me wanting more.

14. All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton

(Prettiest Cover Award)

This book cover is the book-cover-design version of Oscar Bait:

Trent Dalton has a unique style of Australian magical realism. I was already dreaming of a visit to Darwin and the top end of Australia before I read this, and the desire was only reinforced.

Trippy. Weird. Vibrant. Aussie. (In fact you get precisely what's advertised on the cover).

14. The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab

(Book of the Year)

LOVED. IT.

Addie LaRue makes the mistake of praying to the gods that answer after darkness, and is blessed or cursed to live forever and never be tied down to anyone. This book asks the big questions about life and art but addresses them via the most fascinating and readable story frame. What does it mean to live, to create, to be remembered, to be human?

15. Ghost Species by James Bradley

I will immediately buy any climate fiction that James Bradley writes. He has this elegiac way of finding some beauty in a dying - or at least a changing - world. This book is the written equivalent of the sound of genetically re-engineered Tasmanian tigers howling in the dark forest. Eerie, apocalyptic, strangely hopeful.

16. Writing Short Stories: A Writers' and Artists' Companion - edited by Courttia Newland & Tania Hershman

After finishing my novel in the first half of this year I had the best of intentions for keeping my writing muscles active through short-story-writing. Alas, reading this book was pretty much the full extent of it. All intentions, no follow-through...

17. A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing by Jessie Tu

I saw this author on the young writer's panel at the Sydney Writer's Festival and she was a force of nature. We were all maybe a little scared of her, but that was why I wanted to read her book. There is a lot of (bad) sex and a lot of suppressed emotion bubbling under the surface of this book, which made it kind of a stressful read. The main character utterly baffled me sometimes, and yet other times, as she walked through the streets of Sydney, I thought to myself that I saw the world in exactly the same way that she did.

Plus: what a killer title.

18. Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

An early Barbara Kingsolver novel. With this, I think I have sadly finished working my way backwards through her entire catalogue. Now I have to wait for new things from her like everyone else. Alas.

19. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

A surprise gem of a book for me, this year. I say surprise because I genuinely enjoyed reading this book in a page-turny, unselfconscious way that was quite different to the way I read many 'Classics'. Often they take me longer and I won't pretend that part of the enjoyment isn't from the sense of worthiness that I get from reading classic literature. But A Tale of Two Cities was actually AMAZING, and I cried at the end? and there were badass and terrifying female characters?? What?!?

Not what I was expecting at all, but I suppose this year really was the best of times and the worst of times...

20. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

I still cannot make up my mind on how I feel about this book (which makes reviewing it quite difficult). What if when you died you got to experience all the alternative lives you could have lived? The narrative frame never quite clicked for me - she was always an interloper in these other lives, so it seemed to me that it was not the same thing as living them, at all. The person you are is created by the life that you have lived, so you can only ever taste the one life, in spite of the Midnight Library and all the branching choices and lives you might have led.

Or so I figure.

21. Waking Romeo by Katherine Barker

Super cool mind-bendy time travel with probably the best concept in speculative fiction that I've come across in a while: What if time travel was possible, but you could only go forwards?

For reasons I can't explain without spoilers, I got really strong Umbrella Academy vibes from certain parts of this book.

The author was also on the fantasy panel at the Writer's Festival this year, and she had really cool leather boots. She was so iconic.

22. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Mum loaned me this book with the strong hint that it was the perfect book for me, and she was not wrong. It's about words, and women, and women's words, and one wonderful character in a particular lifetime of history (spanning several decades of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary).

23. Mortals: How the Fear of Death Changed Human Society by Rachel E. Menzies & Ross G. Menzies

I think I saw this book mentioned through Academic Twitter (and the cover is great). Mortality and the fear of death have been increasingly on my mind in the last couple of years (for non-pandemic-related reasons). Sadly this book did not solve my mortality-related terror, but it was still a fascinating and thoughtful read. Also, I had the perfect bookmark.

24. Honeybee by Craig Silvey

I spent perhaps too long wondering if I should read this book, as it is a cis author writing about a trans experience. In the end I concluded that as long as authors do their due diligence, we have to be able to write about experiences that differ from our own, and I trusted Craig Silvey on the basis of his previous works and the amount of research and consultation that evidently went into the book. It's still not without its critics, but on the balance of things I thought that it was a heartbreaking and empowering story, hard to read in parts but well worth it in the end.

25. The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher

A re-read from my 'tween' years. I was tripping over realisations as I read this again, things I had totally missed when I read it as a child: that it was the first post-apocalyptic book I had ever read; that it was set in Europe (at one point they explore the ancient ruins of Paris); that it was ludicrously sexist (there are only two female characters in the entire trilogy, they only appear for about 3 chapters and are basically never mentioned again, and they only exist to be damsels. There is not a single woman in the 'human resistance' group so I'm not sure how they thought they were going to rebuild the human race!) and finally: despite the ridiculous pretence that half of humanity didn't exist, it was still a hell of a page-turner. (This was the only aspect I cared about as a 12-year-old).

26. The Language Of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

She writes about writing so well:

"Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number - Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then. 
I talk about the gods, I an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth."