Posted on by Jordan

Year in Review 2021: Books

Best Books I Read in 2021

  • Obit by Victoria Chang (2020)
    Synopsis: Poems about death, both literal and metaphorical.

    A few years ago my friend sent me a link to some excerpts from Obit. My initial reaction was, and I quote, “GOD. DAMN. IT. I am so angry at how good these are.” It was one of those ideas that seems so obvious in retrospect and yet is presented to you before you can think of it yourself, and executed better than you could hope to do.

    Reading the actual collection didn’t have quite that same impact. I often found Chang’s images frustratingly obtuse—like, I don’t know what to do with “The dead are an image of wind. And when they comb their hair, our trees rustle.” The pace of the poems can often feel uneven, halting, or bounding from one (seeming) non sequitur to another.

    But there are also lines like, “Anger after someone / has died is a cake on a table, fully / risen. A knife housed in glass.” And while her style often feels in conflict with the obit form, the long poem at the center of the book, “I Am a Miner. The Light Turns Blue.”, works really well.

    I think I went in to the collection expecting the wrong things. What I was struck by initially was the novelty of the form, but these poems don’t rely on that to achieve their effect, instead revealing moments of quiet contemplation and deep, if sometimes obscure, insight.

    Also, this a very particular complaint, but the excerpts that I had read were in a more newspaper-eque font (probably Times New Roman) and even preserved the word processor’s grammar check underlines, which I found really interesting. That latter feature I could see being distracting so I understand getting rid of it, but I don’t get why the font in the collection is a very modern sans-serif deal. Admittedly, my copy is an ARC, so perhaps the font in the published version is different? I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy to check, so feel free to let me know.
  • Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison (2019)
    Synopsis: Essays about humanity’s universal need for connection, as told through whalesong, virtual worlds, and photographs.

    This collection is unique among the essay collections I’ve read in that it actually feels like a whole piece, not just a bunch of smaller pieces thrown together—like the difference between a great album and a greatest hits album. Jamison frequently references the essay we just read in the one we’re currently reading, giving us a chronological arc, and also a thematic arc, going from the more impersonal, journalistic essays to the personal, memoiristic ones. It’s probably the most well-structured essay collection I’ve ever read.

  • How Long ’til Black Future Month? by N.K. Jemisin (2018)
    Synopsis: Stories about living cities, magical recipes, and gods at the end of the world.

    The main constant throughout this collection is Jemisin’s fantastic worldbuilding. That’s not to say she’s not equally good at plot, dialogue, or prose; but even in stories that don’t find her at her best in these categories her worlds are consistently imaginative and realized in a way that’s often difficult to manage within the confines of a short story. Almost all of these worlds left me wanting to know more about them, promised a wealth of stories just beyond the page—and The Broken Earth Trilogy, prefigured here by “Stone Hunger,” is proof enough that Jemisin would be more than capable of delivering on that promise if she chose to. That series, I think, serves as a greater testament to Jemisin’s abilities, but it’s hardly a fair comparison. And since we fortunately don’t have to choose between the two, there’s no reason not to read this excellent collection.

  • Returning the Sword to the Stone by Mark Leidner (2021)
    Synopsis: Poems about pretty much everything.

    There are moments of true profundity in this collection, cresting like waves from an ocean of Brautiganesque absurdity (the absurdity itself also quite enjoyable). Unfortunately they are occasionally undercut by (to stretch the metaphor) sandbars of painfully twee cliche. Poems like “Youth is a Fugitive,” “Salad on the Wind,” and the title poem, which are basically just lists of images and aphorisms, can start to feel like first drafts that could’ve been perfected with just a little editing.

    Then there are lines like “The eyes are teeth that see,” which…I just have no idea what to do with that.

    But overall a really good collection, funny, surprising, and even sometimes moving.
  • A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays ed. by Randon Billings Noble (2021)
    Synopsis: Lyric essays, and lyric essays about lyric essays.

    Honestly the meditations about the nature of the lyric essay, while occasionally inspiring, can also be a little navel-gazy and mystical. And the editor’s insistence on fitting each essay into their narrow taxonomy feels completely antithetical to the spirit of the genre, and doesn’t seem to really serve any purpose. But there are some great essays in here, and you can learn plenty just from reading them.

  • The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay (2017)
    Synopsis: A vet is hired to find an old friend in Vegas, a young man looks for a poet in California, and a spy attempts to smuggle a revolutionary technology out of Italy.

    Very much an “it’s the journey not the destination” kind of a novel, at least in terms of the basic plot. Those looking for satisfactory resolutions may wish to look elsewhere. But the tapestry of narrative and theme that Seay weaves is enjoyably complex, drawing connections between the three main characters and their stories in ways that are interesting and sometimes surprising. The magical realist aspects build incredibly slowly—there’s always a feeling of something being not quite right, but there’s no clear indication of what until the very end, though sharper readers than I may figure out some of it before then.

    For me the biggest downside to the book is the level of detail. Seay’s world is distractingly well-researched, especially in the Crivano sections where, if you’re the kind of person who wants to stop and look up every word or reference you don’t get, you might as well just read a book about 1500’s Venice ahead of time or you won’t get anywhere. It felt a little obnoxious, as did the winking, seemingly meaningless references to figures like Machiavelli and Galileo.

    As for the David Mitchell comparisons…yes and no. True, both use nested narratives, but where Mitchell’s are a neatly arranged set of matryoshka dolls, Seay’s bounce around during the second half the book; where Mitchell plays with different genres and different narrators, Seay uses (technically) only one narrator, and while his diction changes to fit the time period and main character of each section, the style is generally the same for all of them, and the characters themselves are more similar than they are different. Seay’s thematic messages are also much less clear, and certainly less didactic, than Mitchell’s. That’s not to say one is better than the other, but if you’re interested in the book solely because of the Mitchell comparisons than you’ll likely be disappointed.

  • frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss (2021)
    Synopsis: Poems about living and dying and mourning and moving on and not moving on and loneliness and growing old and etc.

    What to say? How to say it? How to escape the adjectives, I mean, “beautiful, melancholy, haunted and haunting” etc. The page. The consistency of the page, fourteen lines and white space, no titles, nothing gratuitous, just each sonnet arriving like the tide on an empty beach and then going out again, and again, and again, and like the ocean, and the ocean is here, of course, in those opening poems, wearing away at Cape Disappointment, eroding disappointment—acceptance, then, not moving on from, not a revelation of joy, but slow, inevitable, dissolving, well, maybe that’s reading too much into it but there is, not a nihilism, per se, but more like taking nihilism as a given, as cliche, looking at nihilism and going, “And?” And I don’t know, that was something I really needed right now, it turns out.

    It’s really fucking good, is what I’m saying.

  • American Fictionary by Dubravka Ugrešić (2018)
    Synopsis: Observations of American life from an Eastern European perspective.

    Ugrešić’s fragmented, diaristic style, slanted wit, and outsider’s eye for the absurdity of American culture make for engaging reading.

  • 101 Detectives by Ivan Vladislavić (2015)
    Synopsis: Stories about a private eye convention, performance art, and a public reading.

    As much I enjoyed this collection—Vladislavić’s prose is exquisitely crafted as always, his stories precisely askew from expectation—I can’t help but feel like I read it wrong. Frequently I would get to the end of a story and feel like I missed the point, missed some dot I was supposed to connect, despite following along right up until the last sentence. Perhaps on re-reading I might get more out of it.

  • The Folly by Ivan Vladislavić (2015)
    Synopsis: A wanderer decides to build a house on some vacant land, and the neighbors are bothered.

    Though I slightly prefer his short stories (Flashback Hotel is still one of my favorite collections), it was interesting to see what Vladislavić does with longform. The absurdism and beautiful prose that mark his short fiction are both present, with the latter having much more room to play in the quieter moments that his short stories can’t necessarily make space for.

    Vladislavić always has a curious blend of realism/absurdism/surrealism/magical realism, often blurring the lines between these various styles. Here, Malgas and Otto’s vision of the mansion is given its due, yet we also see through Mrs. Malgas’s eyes the “truth” of their delusion. Though it could be argued that this shies away from full-on magical realism, it might be more interesting to think of it as a twist on the genre, one where the magical and the real aren’t fully blended but instead are in conflict (not necessarily narratively, though that is the case here, but stylistically (also the case here, I would argue)). Here, the real ends up winning out, it seems, but it could have just as easily gone the other way.

    Reminded me of Neverwas, a movie I watched on accident thinking it was Neverwhere (or possibly Stardust, another Gaiman adaptation that does actually include Ian McKellen). Probably it was actually riffing on Fisher King, a better movie. Maybe I’ll put together a list of “Movies in Which Characters Have Fantasy Worlds That Are Treated as Real to Some Extent”. Hook could also be on there, but now it’s feeling like this is just a Robin Williams retrospective.

    Anyway, good book.
  • The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace (2010 (orig. 1987))
    Synopsis: Lenore Beadsman’s grandmother goes missing along with a bunch of other nursing home residents, and Lenore tries to find them. That’s technically the plot, but it’s, like, 10% of the novel.

    I like most of the elements here, though I’m not sure they come together to form a coherent whole. The breezy absurdism was surprising, but fun once I acclimated to it. The driving plot turns out to be composed largely of overly-specific MacGuffins, but the core relationship between Lenore and pause for emphasis Richard Vigorous—wait, first, there are some truly great names in here: Candy Mandible, Judith Prietht (took me a shamefully long time to get that one), and of course the irony-laden Richard Vigorous (there’re also the Lenore/Stonecipher sets, though the Márquezian (Garcia Márquezian?) implications thereof remain largely unexplored)—anyway, the core relationship is interesting enough to mostly carry the novel until the end, which end is so jarringly unsatisfying that it has to be intentional, though what that intention is other than a post-modern betrayal of expectations I don’t know. Also I’m not sure what the point of the sections about Patrice and John Beadsman was.

    My one prose note is that several of the characters will speak, to various degrees, in a way which is maybe supposed to convey realism but ironically has the opposite effect due its familiarity from Wallace’s own non-fiction writing (see, for example, the prevalence of the “But and so” construction), and instead can sometimes come across as Sorkinesque puppetry that obscures the characters’ individuality.

    Also notable is that most if not all of the stories that Rick tells Lenore throughout the novel would not feel at all out of place in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Rick criticizes these stories as being the products of “nastily troubled little collegiate mind[s]”, which is especially pointed given that Wallace would have been just out of college himself—Amherst College, in fact, an oft-name-dropped and narratively important locale in the novel. This is either Wallace being cheekily self-deprecatory or legitimately self-critical; either option seems plausible.

  • Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (2007)
    Synopsis: Essays about English grammar, John McCain, and shockingly not tennis (ok, there’s one that’s indirectly about tennis but it’s mostly about sports memoirs).

    What struck me about this collection was Wallace’s endearing (if occasionally frustrating) lack of cynicism. It leads him to ask questions where others (including myself) might leap to judgements, and while sometimes it feels like the answer to those questions is obvious (most noticeably in “Up, Simba” and “Host,” where Wallace’s willingness to engage with conservative demagogues in good faith looks like [and maybe is] naivete from our perspective), mostly those questions are thoughtful and worthwhile.

    “Authority and American Usage” might be the best example of this, indeed probably my favorite essay in the collection, and one I would recommend to DFW skeptics as it shows Wallace engaging with his own biases and blind spots (also would recommend “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”, if only because Wallace’s critiques of Updike echo similar critiques of his own work).
  • A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by David Foster Wallace (1998)
    Synopsis: Essays about David Lynch, cruises, and of course tennis.

    “Derivative Sport” is surprisingly memoiristic, “E Unibus Pluram” failed to grab me (perhaps because the current landscape is more like what he only speculates about towards the end), “Getting Away” is surprisingly good, “Greatly Exaggerated” is interesting (and I appreciate that he acknowledges the esoteric [and somewhat pointless] nature of the debate), “David Lynch” is actually really interesting and I’ve never even watched a Lynch movie other than Dune, “Michael Joyce” is, as with all of Wallace’s tennis essays, great, and the title piece is entertaining but honestly I liked “Getting Away” better.

    You can really tell it’s a first collection, his voice isn’t as strong here and he has a harder time finding a balance between the esoteric and the entertaining (“E Unibus Pluram” leaning too much on the former, the title piece leaning too much on the latter).
  • Many People Die Like You by Lisa Wolff (2020)
    Synopsis: Short stories about an architect’s wife hiring a private detective, a woman who cries for money, and Mickey Mouse.

    In some ways reading this collection is an exercise in dissatisfaction, but I think that’s an intentional reflection of the malaise, ennui, and anxiety felt by these stories’ protagonists so I didn’t mind. Then again I’m maybe just in an ennui mood.

Honorable Mentions

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