My Year in Books, 2021

As we near the end of the year are you, like me, taking some time to reflect on the twelve months that have passed? Maybe you made a big leap in your life and feel proud. Perhaps you did something beyond stupid and have vowed to never do it again. Or you might have done absolutely sod all, and are content with that. So be it. Me, I read a lot, and in search of a sanity-retaining outlet, want to share the experience with you. Here’s my year in books.

I’ll kick-off by saying thanks to the friends who all recommended Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. Rather typically, I’m a latecomer to books people have long been raving about, so no gushing contribution I could make here would be an original one, but this is a novel that will live, relevantly, forever. Twelve characters, several decades, lives intertwined. I am in amazement at how Evaristo weaves together race, gender, sexuality, identity, family, relationships and politics in such beautiful and compelling fashion. It taught me a lot and made me ask questions I’d never before contemplated. A ton of awards won and plenty of reputable best-of-the-year lists topped. Peerless.

I’m not sure many books will leave me as stunned and openmouthed as Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker. It tells the story of the Galvins, an Air Force family living in Colorado, and the astonishing ordeal of six of the 12 children living with shizophrenia, and how the boys’ (all six suffering were boys) mother, Mimi, sought to conceal the troubles at home. She did this in a a world that was less understanding and tolerant of severe mental health conditions — the oldest Galvin boy was born in 1945 — and treatment was far less advanced and, at times, bordered on the barbaric. For decades the Galvins lived with the spectre of schizophrenia tearing through their family, experiencing suicide, sexual abuse and incessant violence. They went on to play a pivotal role in some of the most significant medical breakthroughs in diagnosing and treating the condition. Theirs is truly a remarkable, unbelievable and heartbreaking story.

The poet Lemn Sissay writes about life as a young black boy in care in 1970s Lancashire in My Name is Why. Gripped from the first pages, I managed this in one day, in one sitting. It is a powerful and moving account of life in care. With an appalling story in the news in the UK about a little boy killed by his father and stepmother, and the impending blame that will be directed at children’s services, Sissay’s story is also an important reminder of the heroic lengths social workers go to to protect vulnerable children.

Anyone who knows me knows biographies have been overrepresented in my reading over the years. I’ve made a conscious effort to even things out, but biographies still creep in and David W. Blight’s on the 19th Century American anti-slavery campaigner Frederick Douglass ranks among the finest I’ve ever read. It is up there. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom tells the story of a young boy born into slavery and his journey into the abolitionist movement, becoming its most prominent and famous figure, and who, with earth-shattering oratory, changed hearts and minds and shifted the dial on the eventual abolition of slavery in the United States. To say Douglass was one of the most consequential figures of his era would not be an exagerration. Prophet of Freedom was a Pulitzer-winner, and made it onto Barack Obama’s famed summer reading list. One day I’ll read it all over again.

In June my girlfriend and I hired a barge for a sunny weekend in Marlow in Buckinghamshire. With me came James Monroe: A Life, Tim McGrath’s impossibly huge biography of the fifth President of the United States. Given the considerations one must make when living on a vessel that can sink if everything goes wrong, a book that could probably put through a car windshield if dropped from height might not have been the wisest selection. None the less, I burned through a few chapters on the rocking barge, in between eating everything in sight and dodging the attention of massive river bugs. James Monroe was still with me when we went to Centreparcs a few weeks later and despite my most valiant efforts — when I wasn’t playing badminton or bike-riding around the grounds — it was far from finished by the time we began our drive home. After having my birthday month dominated by this doorstop, I somehow got to the end. The years covering Monroe’s two terms in the White House were worth the effort, but it was a steep climb. One for the presidential nerds I’d say, especially those with lots of patience.

I’m ending the year with Andrew Roberts’s weighty 2018 biography of Winston Churchill. Churchill’s standing in history has been undergoing a degree of revisionism in the past year or so, especially after Britain’s tortured history with race and slavery was forced onto the agenda after the toppling of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol. The floodgates have opened and Churchill has (rightly) not been spared the ire of antiracist campaigners, who point to his record on race. Roberts’s book might not be a hagiographical, entirely uncritical treatment of Churchill’s life, but, halfway through, there are times when I’m wishing Roberts would take a heavier weapon to the darker side of Churchill’s record, rather than gently poke at it, skip past it altogether, or find safety in banal passages about the era in which Churchill lived and said certain things. The necessary reckoning continues.

Shuggie Bain is the debut novel by Douglas Stuart, the Scottish-American writer and fashion designer. It tells the story of a boy struggling to fit in while growing up in post-industrial working class Glasgow, with an alcoholic mother and a detached father, while working out who he is and how to make his way in the world. It was awarded the 2020 Booker Prize and deserved it. It’s a searing, raw portrait of a life fraught with trouble and the love that can be found when all hope is lost, and I have recommended it to almost everyone I have talked to.

During an August getaway to Devon I tucked into The Overstory, Richard Powers’s Pulitzer-winning environmental novel. It tells the story of nine people whose lives come together in an effort to stop the destruction of forests. It’s an epic story and Powers, who looks a bit like Stephen King and writes just as well, “embraces a dark optimism about the fate of humanity”, according to one review. There’s a sort of celestial beauty to Power’s words, in his description of worlds, of beliefs, of events, that holds just enough grip in your imagination to be entirely believable, yet come with an otherworldly feel that makes you question how much we really know, and what we are yet to discover. I hope his most recent novel, Bewilderment, follows in the same vein. The Overstory has some notables among its fanbase. Bill Gates said it made him completely change how he looks at trees. Luxuriating under the sun on Blackpool Sands, which is the best beach in England, I could only agree.

We were fortunate enough to get out of the country this year, to Crete. It felt only natural to bring along a book to match the relaxed vibe of the place. So, true to unnatural form, I went for one about murder — The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer’s colossal ‘nonfiction novel’ that chronicles the case of Gary Gilmore, the Utah murderer who became a media sensation in 1976 when he demanded and campaigned for his execution by firing squad. Gilmore is a compelling and volatile and downright unhinged subject. In Mailer’s telling of the story of Gilmore’s life and upbringing, it seems almost inevitable that he would one day murder two innocent people for no apparent reason. The glee he took in the media circus he was at the centre of is nothing short of despicable. The Executioner’s Song goes past an uphill thousand pages but, thanks to prolonged periods in the shade, I read it cover-to-cover while I was away. We all know that oppressively sad “now what?” feeling when a book comes to unexpectedly early finish. Fortunately I’d anticipated this, and had carried a second with me, which I got to start in the airport when we were flying home. Range by David Epstein looks at how generalists triumph in a specialised world. According to Epstein, if you want to succeed in life it is better gain a breadth of skills and experiences, and to experiment and to take detours in your life choices, rather that focus on a narrow, singular interest and fall into the trap of believing the sooner in life you start a particular endeavour the likelier you are to succeed at it. It is a very persuasive argument, and reassuring to those of us the wrong side of 30 who are animated by the idea of ‘something different’.

On a short getaway to Gloucestershire in October I devoured Toni Morrison’s 1987 Pulitzer-winning classic Beloved, her haunting and brutal novel about slavery and a mother’s desperate acts to protect her children from a life in chains. Picking this up I felt a scintilla of guilt, because it was the first time I’d made the effort to read a novel by Morrison, who died in 2019. I’m only sorry it took me so long. Some books leave marks — Beloved immersed itself into my very being. It was in the news in America recently, during the election for Governor of Virginia. A few years earlier a group of parents in one Virginia county tried to have the book removed from the English reading list, due to its graphic content, and depictions of violence and sex in particular. The Democratic candidate, who eventually lost, sparked fury when he said he rejected the move (at the time, when he was last Governor) because “parents shouldn’t be telling schools what they teach.” Well, few books will ever have a stronger claim on the curriculum than Beloved, and it would be a detriment if it is taken off schools’ reading lists.

(Side note for fans of the Netflix series Sex Education: We were staying close to Symonds Yat, a popular Herefordshire tourist spot overlooking the River Wye, near the border with Wales. On a walk there we got to see the house that is used for exterior shots of where Jean and Otis live, and where they have their breakfasts with the stunning views. If you enjoy the show as much as I do, it’s worth checking out.)

There were a couple of memoirs that came onto my radar this year which I won’t be forgetting any time soon. No Time Like the Future by the actor Michael J. Fox reflects on 30 years of living with Parkinson’s disease, which he was diagnosed with when he was only 29. Fox lives everyday with the odds stacked against him, but his battle with the condition, along with his ability to continue acting, albeit less frequently — including an unforgettable and hilarious guest appearance on Curb Your Enthusiasm — and his time spearheading the phenomenal work of his Foundation is a genuine testement to the willingness to stay irrepressible in the face of a life-changing setback. In Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala writes about losing her two young sons, her husband and her parents in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and her battle to come to terms with what happened that day. The book came out nearly a decade later. Such unimaginable grief doesn’t magically subside, but Deraniyagala’s ability to rediscover meaning and purpose in life is an inspiration.

On the political front, there were some enjoyable (and sometimes alarming) escapes in 2021. Putin’s People by the Financial Times journalist Catherine Belton is a first-rate piece of investigative journalism, looking at how the KGB never truly lost power in Russia and how far into the British establishment the Kremlin’s tentacles reach. It was a strong year for books by FT journalists. In Labour’s Heartlands, Sebastian Payne visits 10 historically safe Labour seats, which make up what has been termed the ‘red wall’, most of which were won by the Conservatives in 2019, and explores how the Labour Party lost its roots with its heartlands across England and how it can chart a path to power. Across the pond, I read Reaganland by Rick Perlstein in January. It’s his fourth and final book in the series charting the rise of the conservative movement in America, launched in the 1960s as a backlash to civil rights and big government and which culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. While the second in the series, Nixonland, is unmatched, Reaganland, which starts in the wake of the 1976 presidential election, is utterly brilliant and doesn’t miss a thing. For politicos interested in how resurgent grassroots movements tap into voter discontent and redraw landscapes, this is a must-read.

Anne Applebaum, one of my favourite journalists, writes with her usual piercing authority on the tilt towards authoritarianism in parts of Europe, including the UK, and in the United States during the execrable four years of Donald Trump’s presidency in Twilight of Democracy. Equally terrifying is the unfathomable power that has been acquired by Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, laid out with forensic brilliance by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. These two books I’d call critical. They opened my eyes to recent global shifts, above and beneath the surface.

I’ll finish with a brief take on Caste by Isabel Wilkerson — it was one of the best, most illuminating books on race I have ever read. On a subject that has been written about as deeply and widely as race, especially in recent years, which is a literary triumph in itself, Caste stands out of one of the most original and most needed.

I come to the end of 2021 having had one of my most well-spent years of reading. I’ve carved out time and managed to get through more than I normally would (even more so than locked-down 2020, oddly). There has been more fiction — and sorry to anyone who’s ever had to look on perplexingly and wonder why I only ever used to read books about Richard Nixon — and my unending quest for books has taken me to new and interesting places, each one a fresh opportunity for an escape. Thank you for the recommendations — please keep them coming. Here’s to books, those portable pieces of magic!

Books I read in 2021 (in chronological order):

The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire by William Dalrymple

Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980 by Rick Perlstein

The Holocaust: A New History by Laurence Rees

The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

James Monroe: A Life by Tim McGrath

Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum

My Name is Why by Lemn Sissay

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West by Catherine Belton

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Leadership in Turbulent Times: Lessons from the Presidents by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova

The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer

Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Nine Days: The Race to Save Martin Luther King Jr’s Life and Win the 1960 Election by Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

No Time Like the Future: An Optimist Considers Mortality by Michael J. Fox

Broken Heartlands: A Journey Through Labour’s Long England by Sebastian Payne

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

Wave by Sonali Deraniygala

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard

And I’m seeing out the year with:

Churchill: Walking With Destiny by Andrew Roberts

Horizon by Barry Lopez