What I Read: 2021

I decided to keep a record of the books that I read this past 2021. It's in roughly chronological order, starting just about a year ago. It's an eclectic bunch; after years of being forced to be a specialist I've reverted to my natural dilettantism. I've probably forgotten some books, both my record-keeping and my memory not so good as before.

Here they come (long drumroll):  three novels by Lewis Grassic Gibbon: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, and Grey Granite (the first is a masterpiece); Derek Wilson,  Charlemagne: a Biography; Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe, Poet and Spy; John Heisey, A Checklist of American Coverlet Weavers; H. L. Allen, American Coverlets of the Nineteenth Century (taught me a lot about Jacquard coverlets); Eric Sloane, Museum of Early American Tools and A Reverence for Wood; Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail, Edna O'Brien, In the Forest (a forceful novel); Evelyn Piper, Bunny Lake is Missing (which I read because I was curious about the film of the same name); Patrick Svensson, The Book of Eels; Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (a long important book which would have been even better if it had been edited to 2/3's its size); Benjamin Kilham, In the Company of Bears (a fascinating book set just south of us in Lyme, NH); James Essinger, Jacquard's Web, Steven Vogel, Why the Wheel is Round (which it isn't; it's circular); Elizabeth Barber, Women's Work, the First 20,000 Years; J D Schein, Coverlets and the Spirit of America; Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread (by one of the most reliable of contemporary novelists); Elizabeth Barber, Prehistoric Textiles (a fascinating story); Thomas Stumpf, South St. Louis Boy, v. ii, by my graduate school classmate and friend; William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Andy Horowitz, Katrina (sad story of governmental and bureaucratic incompetence in New Orleans); Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House; George Eliot, Middlemarch (what, fifth time?  or sixth?); Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot, the Last Victorian; Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (another perennial favorite); John Le Carre, The Mission Song; Jane Austen, Persuasion;  Klyza and Trombulak, The Story of Vermont (summer reading); Harry Reed, Harry, Scenes from my Life (another autobiography by a friend); Shaun O'Connell, Assembled Pieces, Selected Writings; Alice Munro, Carried Away; David Lee, Chainsaws, A History; Seymour Gitin, The Road Taken (reminiscences of one of Lynn's relatives-in-law); Louis Menand, Cold War (all 800 pages!); Lisa Genova, Remember;  Mark Harris, Mike Nichols; H. L. Gates, The Black Church; Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (twice); Madalaine Bohme, Ancient Bones; Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews (to 1492); John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words; two remarkable novels by Shirley Hazzard: The Transit of Venus, and The Great Fire (read twice); Valerie Trouet, Tree Story; James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America; Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu; Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Paula Fox, Desperate Characters.

I've started on a reading project for 2022: books about Brooklyn. Will I persist? The crowd is in an uproar, waiting to see how it goes. Look for a report same time, same station, next year.

Comments

[MKWakeman]

Books about Brooklyn: Give Elizabeth Strout a try, Pulitzer Prize author of MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON, OLIVE KITTERIDGE, THE BURGESS BOYS, etc.