2021 Reading List Recap

2021 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In my dreamscape, I was assessing my 2021 year in books, thinking how many I shared with some of you (aha-that's how I came up with some of those unusual titles and new publishers like Dorothy). So many of the same titles Fionnuala read, I too could do a biographical pattern, yet I do enjoy biographies and memoirs. These Goodreads connections add much meat to my bibliophilism and I wish you all the best reading year yet in 2022. My 65 books list was better than past challenges, mostly due to insomnia over the pandemic. A Ghost in the Throat was my favorite novel. For once, my Read list exceeds my Want to Read List but not by many. I was most proud of reading and enjoying Moby-Dick or, the Whale, one of over a million on Goodreads who did. Other highlights and top ratings went to a reread of Housekeeping, and newer books: Hamnet Essential Ruth Stone, (poetry), The Waves, The Promise,Intimacies, and The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency. Something New Under the Sun was not for me--dystopian stories rarely are and I felt Great Circle needed a tough editor. I particularly enjoyed the D H Lawrence non-fiction in tandem with Second Place and the memoirs of Abigail Thomas, Anatole Broyard, and Three Simple Lines: A Writer's Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku and Mary Morris, plus biosThe Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling and Sybille Bedford: A Life. I got a kick out of the Backlist.fm title The Bloater. Secrets of Happiness,Unsettled Ground, A Lie Someone Told You about Yourself and Should We Stay or Should We Go All contributed to contented reading during the losses of 2021.

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The Crossroads

Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Crossroads is the beginning of a trilogy from Jonathan Franzen, a detailed exploration of the life of a Midwest pastor, his wife and their four kids. With the exception of the nine-year-old, each member is pretty screwed up and the author chapter by chapter describes their failings, history and sorry denouements. There was considerable religious commentary not unusual in a pastor's story, but which left me in the dark. The plot jostles along, but nothing about the writing made me sit up or read aloud to my reading companion. I noted "lambent" as a favorite adjective among others. There is one of the best descriptions of speed-induced mental derailment I've read. But though I read compulsively, surely someone will notice and help these characters, I did not love this novel as much as I did his first book, The Corrections.

But don't mind me. Here's one of my favorite reviewers, Ron Charles of the Washington Post, reviewing this book last October: "The result is a story of spiritual crises with a narrative range more expansive than Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, which can sometimes feel liturgical in their arcane ruminations. Franzen is working closer to the practical theology and moral realism of John Updike’s “Rabbit, Run” and “In the Beauty of the Lilies.” Grasping at reeds of grace and selfishness, the Hildebrandts demonstrate in the most poignant way how mortals stumble through life freighted with ideals that simultaneously mock and inspire them."

My philosophy gaps are showing.

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I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In sometimes very funny and sharp prose, the author tells a story of a young woman fleeing her husband and baby daughter, probably with post-partum depression, to live in the Mojave Desert where she was raised, all true of the author. She starts the story with activities of her father, described on a Tecopa website, "Paul Watkins, the famous member of Charles Manson’s Family who testified against Manson, securing his conviction for the notorious Helter Skelter murders. Watkins founded the Death Valley Chamber of Commerce, and his daughter, writer Claire Vaye Watkins, grew up here, near the Old Spanish Trail." He died young and Claire Vaye Watkins focuses much of the later chapters on her erratic alcoholic mother and reliable sister and her many boyfriends. In many ways, this angry and intense tale smacks of memoir and reviewers label it as autofiction. Enchanted by the title, I moved quickly through the first half of this book but found it bogged down in the found letters from her mother as a teen. I skimmed until we were back in Tecopa and desert living as the author finds some peace in solitude: “Pull my hair. Be kind to all plants and animals and children. Leave me alone. That’s how I like it,” she demands in this look at the injustice of making mother and woman and artist and lover mutually exclusive.

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The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Plot was an entertaining suspenseful view of novel writing with an absorbing story-within-a-story scheme which hiked up the suspense. I rarely care "who done it" in a mystery, but the twist was obvious as soon as her childhood was described exactly as a famous novel. Although I thought characterization was a bit weak, especially in the main characters, Anna and Jake, I still enjoyed the story, and the level of tension kept me turning pages. Also, as a native, it was fun to read about the Seattle settings.

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A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself by Peter Ho Davies

A Lie Someone Told You about Yourself by Peter Ho Davies
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well written and complicated auto-fiction (?) story of a couple choosing to abort their probably-damaged-fetus who do eventually have a healthy child. The guilt and politics which torment them as they cope with having a new baby and the writer's introduction to fatherhood make for absorbing reading. The narrator is a writing teacher at a local college which contributes to the humorous subplot in this moving family story.

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Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was my first book from this popular author. I found it absorbing enough to finish, to find out what happened to the various relationships among the foursome, but I was not as affected by the prose as I had hoped I'd be. Competently written but not poetic. Interesting ideas crop up in the style alternating email with action such that a long philosophical chapter is relieved by a scene-filled action chapter. And her political ideas are solid (“My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence”).

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Exteriors by Annie Ernaux

Exteriors by Annie Ernaux
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trenchant observations of people and thoughts while on the subway, in the mall, at the grocery. Occasionally funny, always astute and empathetic.

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