The idiosyncratically categorized record of my 2021 book reading:
Carried over from last year: Dante’s Inferno.
Reading comprehension was never going to be the issue in Project #SarahLearnsItalian, but I’m really proud of myself for this all the same: Se questo è un uomo by Primo Levi
I’m starting to toy more seriously with the idea of doing an MFA, but decided to take some one-off classes before committing to a whole degree; this is what I read there: Just Us by Claudia Rankine; The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison; In The Heart of Texas by Ginger McKnight-Chavers; Appropriate by Paisley Rekdal
And I’ve also been reading more poetry: Invasive Species by Marwa Helal; Hapax by A.E. Stallings; Accepting the Disaster by Joshua Mehigan; Playlist for the Apocalypse by Rita Dove
And especially prose poetry: Mean by Miriam Gurba; The Fire Eater by José Hernández Díaz
…and specifically some models of academics also writing poetry: The Day of Shelley’s Death by Renato Rosaldo; A Tithe of Salt by Ray Ball
I’m not the audience for this: Guide of the Perplexed by Dara Horn
I’m not the audience for this and was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it and how well I thought it worked: The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan
And so I continued reading the series: The Language of Secrets, Among the Ruins (I’m listening to the audiobooks and I wasn’t crazy about how the narrator handled all the accents in this one), and A Dangerous Crossing.
Skip it if you listen to the podcast: RedHanded by Suruthi Bala and Hannah Maguire, audiobook read by the authors
People take both Goodreads and Twitter way too seriously: Leaving isn’t the Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough
I needed a break from George Smiley: The Russia House by John LeCarré
And then I went back to George Smiley: The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People
This wasn’t a book I thought I’d go back and reread, but I did after watching The Unlikely Murderer on Netflix: The Man Who Played With Fire by Jan Stocklassa
Now I want to read everything that the author has written, so I’ll get started on that in the new year: The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
Best of the year: The Netanyahus, and Mean