Once again, I try to cram subjective experience into the arbitrary constraints of a top 10 list. In this case, not even my sneaky pairings let me get down to 10, so this one goes to 11. There's a break between 3 and 4, but otherwise they could go in any order.
- Ted Chiang: The Story of Your Life and Others. I also read his Exhalation, which was very good. This volume, though, is extraordinary. Every story is a "hit," which in this particular case I mean that I can imagine a future in which any given story transformed the history of science fiction for ever. I wrote a monologue for my book club about how my past favorite sf novels have fallen by the wayside (after rereading). I've never really thought about it, but this is probably my favorite sf short story collection ever.
- Ben Lerner: Leaving Atocha Station. The scene where our protagonist lurks after a stranger in the museum, alternately jealous and indignant over his open outpouring of emotion in front of beauty. That's the reaction to art he seeks but cannot attain. I relate.
- George Saunders: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Nothing could be better than this: a master craftsman rejoicing in the craft of Russian masters. He breaks down each story in a mechanical but exceeding sensitive manner. A Bizarro version of this might be Best Remembered Poems edited by Martin Gardner, who is a puzzle master sharing trivia about the most widely recalled (not best) poems in English.
- Ron Silliman: Ketjak. I read this with a pencil in hand, tracking the Fibonacci sequence from section to section. I found the part where he fucked up.
- Emil Ferris: My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Mine too.
- Paul Beatty: The Sell Out. This wasn't written for me, and reading it sometimes made me feel like I was overhearing something I shouldn't. Ace satire.
- William Trevor: A Bit on the Side, Death in Summer, and Love & Summer. I think of Trevor as the last midcentury author (of the last century), who happened to survive and keep writing into the next century.
- Megan Abbot: The Turn Out. Abbot has become one of the handful of current authors I read everything by, as it comes it. Each novel takes on some dark corner of the feminine universe. This is one of the darkest corners, and one of her best.
- David Shields: How Literature Saved My Life. I also read Reality Hunger, I Think You're Totally Wrong, and Nobody Hates Trump More than Trump. In this one he explains what exactly it is he's after, and provides a cool reading list.
- Dorothy Baker: Cassandra at the Wedding. The California of Didion, just before Didion.
- Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I would pair this with David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas for a particularly lengthy double feature. Both are fantastic (in both senses) and formally audacious. I give Clarke the edge because her formalism, manifesting in mock scholarly footnotes, is more of a joy to read.
Honorable Mention: Shadows of the Short Days, Flamethrowers, My Struggle, Exit West
The theme of my 2021 reading was books published this century. I was frustrated and let down by a lot of what I read, but in the end all of the books above fit that profile except for two: Silliman and Baker. Even those might come with asterisks: Ketjak is a 70s artifact but was republished as part of the completed Age of Huts and I never would have found the lost classic Cassandra without the good offices of NYRB Books. But if you look more closely, Saunders and Gardner add recent commentary to much older works, Chiang's Story collects works mostly from the 90s, and several of the others were published in the early aughts and therefore begun in the previous century.
