My Year in Books: 2021
Aldous Huxley's utopia, Samantha Power's inspiring memoir, and Kazuo Ishiguro's newest AI creation
Every so often, an author will remind me why books are among life’s greatest gifts.
Nonfiction can offer direct access to the synthesized knowledge of history’s most brilliant minds. Fiction can transport us into a life that may appear completely foreign, but whose experience comes to closely resemble our own. In both cases, writers often pour years into researching and editing their work, and we can read it in a few hours. All for the price of a Chipotle burrito.
Here are the books that felt like gifts in 2021.
Top 5
Island by Aldous Huxley
Even as I praised Huxley’s Brave New World and Doors of Perception in last year’s book list, I’d never heard of Island.
I remember my confusion as I read its back cover in a bookstore. Island, published just before Huxley’s death, describes his vision of a utopian society. I remember asking myself: Why is this book relatively unknown, while every 10th grade English class in the country reads his dystopian novel Brave New World?
I found out once I started reading. I imagine the PTA wouldn’t be too charmed by some of his ideas, like teenagers taking psychedelics, practicing meditation, and receiving free birth control. It’s also more overtly political than Brave New World. Huxley reserves his strongest condemnation for totalitarianism and communism, but also criticizes capitalism and Western materialism. He also warns against the dangers of overpopulation, mechanization, mass production, militarism, and environmental destruction.
Island begs the question: What is progress?
Huxley largely rejects the easy answers: economic progress, scientific progress, technological progress, and progress along social issues. Instead, he offers an alternative. What if progress were defined purely in terms of human well-being? What if the main purpose of society was to cultivate citizens who are happy, healthy, well educated, emotionally intelligent, spiritually fulfilled, and deeply connected to nature and their community? Island offers a convincing vision for such a world.
The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power
As I closed this memoir, a surprising question struck me: Should I go into politics?
Given how inspiring Power’s story is, I imagine most of her readers ask themselves the same question. In this book, she charts her life – from her childhood in Ireland to serving as Ambassador to the UN in the Obama administration. The story that unfolds is a testament to a life of service. She spends much of her 20s dodging mortar fire as she reports on the Bosnian genocide from inside Bosnia. In her 30s, she writes a book about genocides that wins a Pulitzer. In her 40s, she fights relentlessly for human rights, even in moments it would have been far more politically expedient not to.
Power is also a brilliant writer, which makes this 600 page tome feel like a relatively quick read.
If you ever need convincing that the United States can (and should) leverage its influence to pursue positive change in the world, this book has your answer.
The School of Life: An Emotional Education by Alain de Botton
In a post earlier this year, I mentioned The School of Life, saying “If I could give one book to my younger self, it would be this one, and I have no doubt that I’ll come back to it again and again for wisdom and guidance throughout my life.”
This still holds true. This book teaches the universally important, but intangible, things that we were never taught in school, like emotional intelligence. It helped me start to answer lifelong questions like: Why is ambition such a core part of my identity? How can I process negative emotions without suppressing them? Why do I often measure my self-worth through the eyes of others? In short, it offers a playbook for emotional maturity and personal development. From the opening pages:
“Symptoms of our self-ignorance abound. We are irritable or sad, guilty or furious, without any reliable sense of the origins of our discord… We pay a very high price for our self-ignorance. Feelings and desires that haven’t been examined linger and distribute their energy randomly across our lives.”
On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser
This is the best book about writing that I’ve ever read. Each chapter is filled with practical, actionable advice. And the writing itself is so good that it reads like a novel, not a how-to book.
Zinsser demonstrates each of the lessons as he describes them: the humor chapter is hilarious, the chapter on voice reverberates with his own, and the chapter on style is free of adverbs, semicolons, and passive verbs. These “live” demonstrations make the book fun and interesting to read, as Zinsser doesn't need to lay out five examples for every point – the lessons serve as their own examples.
I now review everything I publish against this style guide I made based on Zinsser’s suggestions. I’ve been meaning to clean it up and publish it, but in the meantime, feel free to use it for editing your own writing.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro’s latest novel is on every major “Best Books of 2021” list I’ve seen, and deservedly so. The story is told from the perspective of an AI robot named Klara, who is searching for a cure for her owner, a young girl named Josie, who suffers from a mysterious illness. Despite being an AI, Klara offers a perspective that is deeply human. She balances the maturity and selflessness of a wise elder with the curiosity and awe of a young child. She is pure goodness in a tragically flawed world.
Over the course of the book, Ishiguro wrestles with ideas about parenthood, religion, faith, consciousness, nostalgia, goodness, regret, loyalty, love, and awe. My only advice: pay attention to his dedication at the beginning. It’s a helpful framing for the rest of the book.
Other Favorites
The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz
Last month, I dedicated an entire post to this book and the paradox it introduces about trying to live the best possible life. At a high-level, Schwartz argues that our intuitions about happiness and decision-making may be wrong. For example, more optionality in our decisions rarely makes us happier. He also makes an interesting (and counterintuitive) case that maximizing – or seeking optimal outcomes from decisions – is a worse long-term strategy for happiness than satisficing – or making decisions that are ‘good enough’.
If you wrestle with regret or indecision (as I do), this book offers powerful lessons for moving forward amid uncertainty.
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
After reading A Gentleman in Moscow last year, I was eager to read more of Towles’ work this year.
Rules of Civility is about a woman reflecting on her 1930s youth in New York City. For me, it stirred up pleasant nostalgia for my early 20s in NYC. For the joy of going out with friends, for the ambient energy that flows through the streets, and for the comfort of being an anonymous observer in a crowded city. As Towles writes towards the end of the book:
“Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise — that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.”
If you’re in the habit of reaching for nonfiction (as I was), this book is a great reminder of the beauty in fiction – of being plucked from the storyline of our own lives and being immersed in someone else’s.
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
The Prophet unfolds as a dialogue between a prophet and a group of townspeople, who seek his wisdom on life. The conversation that follows is broken into 26 short, poetic essays that cover the core elements of being human – love, fear, freedom, marriage, friendship, beauty, religion, death. Though it would only take an hour or two to read them all, this book is best sipped and savored, as each page is dense with insight. I leave a copy on my bedside, and read a couple essays before bed – a great nightcap.
From his essay on marriage:
“Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
Intimations by Zadie Smith
Sometimes I feel like I’m a decent writer, and then I read Zadie Smith.
She is a master at her craft, and this short collection of essays is a perfect example. Short and punchy, it offers an intimate look at pandemic life in Manhattan and the small moments within it: grabbing a coffee, getting a massage, talking to a neighbor, seeing a homeless person. Zadie Smith shows how, to a well-attuned mind, there is depth, beauty, and significance available to us in every moment in life, no matter how seemingly trivial or mundane.
I didn’t do this intentionally, but apparently nostalgia for New York City is a theme this year.
“Good Old Neon” by David Foster Wallace
For years, I shuffled past DFW’s Infinite Jest as I entered The Strand bookstore by Union Square. I never had the courage to buy it; it was 1000 pages of intimidation. But I’d listened to his speech “This is Water” and wanted to read more of his writing, so I opted for “Good Old Neon,” a 40-page short story. There are free PDFs available online, or you can buy it as part of his book Oblivion.
Warning: the story is dark. It’s a meditation on self-doubt, self-loathing, and inauthenticity, spoken from a fictional narrator as he rationalizes his own suicide. (Not a spoiler – he reveals this on the 3rd page.) It’s even more haunting knowing that DFW would eventually take his own life.
So why should anyone read this? For me, DFW has the most distinct writing style of any author on this list. It’s both rhythmic and conversational. It feels like the narrator is talking to you directly, daring to be honest about things that people rarely talk about. The opening lines:
“My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I’m not exaggerating. Pretty much all I’ve ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It’s a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it’s to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea.”
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
My girlfriend and I have a tradition whenever we travel outside the US: we read a book written by an author from that country – a book that captures the “spirit” of the culture. In Chile, it was The House of Spirits. In Colombia, it was One Hundred Years of Solitude. And in Mexico City this October, it was Pedro Paramo.
The book is haunting, beautiful, and confusing. The storyline isn’t chronological. Instead, it jumps between moments in time, and the reader has to stitch them together as they go. It’s further complicated because it’s unclear which characters in a scene are alive and which are ghosts. It probably needs to be read twice: once to figure out what’s happening, and a second time to dig into the beauty of it.
Here’s a paragraph that shows the tone of Rulfo’s writing:
“This town is filled with echoes. It’s like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone’s behind you, stepping in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years. Sounds like that. But I think the day will come when those sounds fade away.”
Like I said: haunting, beautiful, and confusing.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
The audiobook for Kitchen Confidential, narrated by Bourdain himself, is the closest thing I’ve found to a literary cure-all. If I’m in a bad mood, I listen to a chapter. If I have a headache, I listen to a chapter. If I have writer’s block, I listen to a chapter. If I want to relax and unwind, well, you get the idea. I end up listening to this book all the way through at least once or twice each year. It’s just that good.
Thanks for reading! I hope this post offers some inspiration for your reading list in 2022. If you have any favorites from 2021, please let me know by replying to this post – I’m always looking for recommendations.
Happy Holidays,
Mark