Favourite Reads of 2021
I suspect we’ll all look back on 2021 as a dreadful year for being alive but a pretty epic reading year. I managed to make my way through 305 books this year. It was the year in which I properly discovered YA writing, (mostly brilliant), and the year I wasted 13 reads on Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, (universally dire). As with 2020, it was a particularly good year for non-fiction writing and I could easily double my favourite picks here, another good year for Irish writing, work in translation and ground-breaking short story collections, many of which played fast and loose with the form so I’ve struggled to stick a label on them, (a few of these may well be novels, or linked collections, we can argue about that later - ideally in person, at a book festival, with a nice glass of wine in hand).
Thank you to everyone who provided me with proofs and advance copies this year. I’ve done my best to read as many as I possibly could. In this selection, I’m only listing books which are already available, but based on what I’ve pre-read I can assure you that 2022 is going to be another excellent reading year. Finally, a quick reminder that lists like this are basically redundant. These are my picks based on my strange tastes and what I have and haven’t managed to read. Please continue to read and enjoy the books which speak to you and pay little attention to what’s trendy or winning the prizes right now. A good book will still be a good book in five or ten years time and a great book will blow your mind whether you manage to move it off your TBR pile this week or fifty years from now. Also, as someone who powers through books at a crazy rate, I’m always quick to remind folks, (including myself), that reading is not a competitive sport. If you read two books this year and found within them something which comforted you, provoked thought or transported you out of this shit show of a year for a few hours, then you have had a cracking reading year.
All books listed are in no particular order. I was going to attempt to alphabetize them, then I had a large glass of wine and decided this was asking too much of myself.
My Novels of the Year:
Mel O’Doherty - Fallen
Jon McGregor - Lean, Stand Fall
Una Mannion - A Crooked Tree
Gwendoline Riley - My Phantoms
Natasha Brown - Assembly
Curtis Sittenfeld - Rodham
Virginia Feito - Mrs March
Claire Keegan - Small Things Like These
Patricia Lockwood - No One is Talking About This
Benjamin Labutut - When We Cease to Understand the World (trans. Adrian Nathan West)
Graeme McRae Burnett - Case Study
Torey Peters - Detransition Baby
My Non-Fiction Books of the Year:
Katherine May - Wintering
Mark Aldridge - Agatha Christie’s Poirot
Jenn Shapland - My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
Verlyn Klinkenborg - Several Short Setences About Love
George Saunders - A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Susan McKay - Northern Protestants on Shifting Ground
Heather Christie - The Crying Book
Olivia Laing - Funny Weather
Nicci Gerrard - What Dementia Teaches Us About Love
Caroline Magennis - Northern Irish Writing After the Troubles
My Short Story Collections of the Year:
Lucy Caldwell - Intimacies
Deesha Philyaw - The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Louise Kennedy - The End of the World is a Cul de Sac
Mariana Enriquez - The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (trans. Megan McDowell)
Cristina Sandu - The Union of Synchronised Swimmers
Lucie McKnight Hardy - Dead Relatives
Keith Ridgway - A Shock
Bernard McLaverty - Blank Pages
Brandon Taylor - Filthy Animals
Laura Van Den Burg - I Hold a Wolf by the Ears
My Poetry Collections of the Year
(This list should be longer; I read far too little poetry this year)
Moyra Donaldson - The Bone House
Ella Frears - Shine, Darling
Stephen Sexton - Cheryl’s Destinies
Gail McConnell - The Sun is Open
Jack Underwood - A Year in the New Life
Luke Kennard - Notes on the Sonnet
Victoria Kennefick - Eat or We Both Starve
Eleven Books I Really Should Have Read Before This Point But Am Glad To Have Read in 2021:
Eduardo Galeano - The Book of Embraces (trans. Cedric Belfrage)
Brian Friel - Faith Healer
Percival Everett - Erasure
Maggie O’Farrell - Hamnet
Laurie Lee - Cider With Rosie
Heidi James - The Sound Mirror
Deirdre Madden - One by One in the Dark
Julian Barnes - Flaubert’s Parrot
Kevin Brockmeier - The Brief History of the Dead
Sylvia Townsend Warner - Lolly Willowes
Daphne du Maurier - My Cousin Rachel