Inspired by Brian‘s 2020 list, I decided to keep a list of all the books I read in 2021. I wish I had done this in 2020, since the lack of live sports meant that I read a ton that year. You can see evidence of the return of baseball and soccer in the 2021 list.
I only counted books that I read in their entirety – abandoned books and skimmed books (for work) didn’t count.
- City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff Vandermeer
- Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday
- Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, Derf Backderf
- How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy
- Gestures of Concern, Chris Ingraham
- Black Futures, Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham
- Your Black Friend, Ben Passmore
- Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters
- Tokyo Ueno Station, Yu Miri
- The Future of Another Timeline, Annalee Newitz
- The Hare, Melanie Finn
- No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood
- If You Kept a Record of Sins, Andrea Bajani (trans. Elizabeth Harris)
- The Gloaming, Melanie Finn
- Golem, Nick Montfort
- White Dialogues, Bennett Sims
- A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib
- Hummingbird Salamander, Jeff Vandermeer
- Haints Stay, Colin Winnette
- Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong
- Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner
- A Questionable Shape, Bennett Sims
- Acrobat, Nabaneeta Dev Sen (trans. Nandana Dev Sen)
- A Door Behind a Door, Yelena Moskovich
- The Blurry Years, Eleanor Kriseman
- The Incantations of Daniel Johnston, Ricardo Cavolo and Scott McClanhahan
- I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter, Isabel Fall
- (Re)Born in the USA, Roger Bennett
- The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
- A Children’s Bible, Lydia Millet
- The Drop Edge of Yonder, Rudolph Wurlitzer
- Transparent Designs, Michael Black
- Cloud Ethics, Louise Amoore
- The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
- A Mouthful of Air, Amy Koppelman
- Palaces, Simon Jacobs
- The Underneath, Melanie Finn
- Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability, and Inequality, Meryl Alper
- My Heart is a Chainsaw, Stephen Graham Jones
- Digital Black Feminism, Catherine Knight Steele
- Ennemonde, Jean Giono (trans. Bill Johnston)
- Darryl, Jackie Ess
- The Loneliness of the Long Distance Cartoonist, Adrian Tomine
- Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon
- The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
- Glitch Feminism, Legacy Russell
- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke
- Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi
- Grievers, Adrienne Maree Brown
- Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead
- Three to Kill, Jean-Patrick Manchette
- Barn 8, Deb Olin Unferth
About one book per week isn’t too bad, I guess. Nearly all the academic books in this list are from my Digital Inequality class, and some of the fiction came from two subscriptions: Two Dollar Radio and Archipelago.
This year I learned that I’ll likely read anything by Melanie Finn and that I need to track down all of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s stuff (fun!)
Some favorites this year: Piranesi, A Children’s Bible, and Digital Black Feminism.
I end the year in the middle of two books, so I guess those will be the first on the 2022 list:
Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell, Francis Paudras
Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, Jeff Vandermeer