I read 77 books this year compared to 2020’s 36; that’s a 113% increase in my literacy, or a 113% decrease in my mental health. Just kidding. Sort of. I feel a little unhinged tabulating all this.
When people ask how I manage to read this much, the answers are never easy. It sounds flippant to say that I make time, even if it’s the truth. I also read fast, which isn’t really a skill, but still somehow comes off as a flex. As in the past two years, TV shows and movies haven’t really held my attention, but books have. That’s mostly all it is. I also didn’t go around reading War & Peace; I generally don’t turn my nose down on anything, unless it’s badly written, which is purely subjective.
My tiny (but highly involved) book club played a role in expanding my reading horizons: notably, we read a fanfic-turned-novel (a reylo fic, cue shock and horror), and also read some duds that we all laughed at after. We also made our own bingo card, which led me to finding some interesting new books. I suppose a big part of how many books I read is the fact that there’s a challenge that I set for myself. Right now though, I’m pretty nervous about topping my book count for next year. Then again, maybe I just got lucky this year in finding all these new books that could hold my interest. We’ll see!
August was when I went truly wild with reading: 14 books, or at least three books a week. In truth: I read 14 volumes of Haikyuu!! in four days. It’s no wonder to me that I had to get glasses late last year.
There’s no narrative throughline of stories I enjoyed this year; there’s a mix of joy, horror, grief, fascination. In no particular order, here are my 12 recommendations from 2021:
General Fiction
Haikyuu!! written and illustrated by Haruichi Furudate
If there’s anything you decide to read after this substack, I beg you to pick up Haikyuu!!. I already waxed poetic about it in a previous newsletter, but it bears repeating: I haven’t encountered a story with such magnificent character growth and arcs, with such endearing characters, and with just so much heart. I’m not kidding when I say that this manga helps in reminding me that there’s beauty to small things, that caring isn’t embarrassing, and that maybe some dumb jocks deserve rights.
Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakopoulos
Natalie Bakopoulos writes about grief in such a quiet way that it’s hard to talk about. Mira, the main character, goes home to Greece after the death of her parents. There, she faces many aspects of her past (her ex-boyfriend, her best friends, her aunts, and an older neighbor who she speaks to behind the wall of a shared balcony) and finds a form of closure while writing about art, politics, and society. Bakopoulos writes sparsely, direct to the point without curlicues. Somehow, that’s what makes every other paragraph pack a punch.
Grief never appeared the way we expected, and it snuck up in terrifying, surprising waves. Others needed to see it translated into something visceral and simple, something that could be read, understood. Because when we’re in its midst it cannot be translated at all.
To return to a place again and again is to confront the sneaky passing of time. Here I am at fifteen, at twenty-five, at twenty-nine, at thirty-nine. What of those earlier selves is left in me?
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
My first experience with Donna Tartt was The Goldfinch which I’d hated, possibly because it was too hypertextual for my understanding at the time. The Secret History reads close to something similar: six friends are studying ancient Greek in an elite liberal arts college in New England. They talk almost constantly about philosophy, linguistics, and literature. It annoys me, a little, how much of it I understood and didn’t have to look up.
This book was published in 1992 and I loved every single aspect of its setting, its awful characters (poor little rich kids), and most of all, Tartt’s prose. For everyone who enjoyed Dead Poets Society, Cruel Intentions, Jawbreaker, The Atlas Six, If We Were Villains… they got nothing on The Secret History.
Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
Sci-fi
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Something about Ted Chiang’s sci-fi makes me want to dive into his brain and go for a swim. What I like most about his fiction is how fantastical it is: There’s one short story in this collection where miracles are horrifying things that leave people permanently blind; a consequence of witnessing. This collection also houses the story that inspired Arrival, which still made me cry even if I knew the ending.
The word "infant" is derived from the Latin word for "unable to speak," but you'll be perfectly capable of saying one thing: "I suffer," and you'll do it tirelessly and without hesitation. I have to admire your utter commitment to that statement; when you cry, you'll become outrage incarnate, every fiber of your body employed in expressing that emotion.
Nightfall by Eliza Victoria
I think Eliza Victoria may be one of my favorite Filipino writers. I enjoy her prose and her manner of storytelling, but most of all, I’ve loved the stories she’s chosen to tell. Nightfall is set in Manila of the close future: people have implants to increase productivity, robot nurses care for patients. Of course, there’s a black market for both, and despite the technological advancements, people still have to wait in line in the rain for a hover taxi.
“So the secret to success is in choosing your battles.”
”Isn't that the secret to everything?”
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
I absolutely enjoyed Andy Weir’s The Martian, so I knew from the get-go that I’d enjoy Project Hail Mary. I devoured this book, despite how absolutely pedestrian his prose is. I think that’s part of the charm: he narrates astrophysics without any pretention, and in a way that all the science doesn’t fly over my head. What I loved as well is the very sci-fi celebration of shared humanity, of personal relationships set against the stark emptiness of space.
Also, this book is hilarious, and I laughed out loud to myself like a loon at three in the morning because of it. 400+ pages go by quickly, half because the narrator is so gosh darn funny.
I think some internal defense mechanism is suppressing it. When I remember them, it’s going to hurt, so my brain refuses to remember them. Maybe. I don’t know—I’m a science teacher, not a trauma psychologist.
Short Story Collections
Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap
Earlier this year I wrote about how I had difficulty finding Filipino fiction that I found relatable, and god, GOD, this book made me want to stuff all those words back into my mouth. Isabel Yap made me feel seen in the best possible way: she writes about places I’ve been to (when she wrote about Sunday brunch at Powerplant mall I felt a visceral reaction in my gut), people I’ve encountered, and in some instances, observations about Filipino society that I’ve had. There’s also something about Yap’s writing that strikes me as young—and there’s one short story in this collection that reads almost like fan fiction. It’s so much fun.
Some standout stories from this collection include: Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez? which puts a spin on every exclusive girl school ghost mythos, A Canticle for Lost Girls (the aforementioned Powerplant moment, among many other awful things about teenage girlhood), and How to Swallow the Moon, which leans heavily on the myth of the bakunawa.
After that year, we simply didn’t speak. It was like our whole history as childhood friends didn’t matter. And it didn’t, not really, the loss barred from my mind except in those rare moments when we would pass each other in the hall and I’d think You traitor, we once roleplayed Pokemon together for a whole summer, how could you forget that? I was Squirtle. CJ was Bulbasaur. Tisha was Charmander.
In the Country by Mia Alvar
When Jane Austen wrote “if i loved you less i might be able to talk about it more,” she was referring to In the Country by Mia Alvar. Initially I was ready for it to be a wonderfully written collection of short stories of OFWs across different parts of the world (or, the pains of them returning), then I read Old Girl and I screamed into my pillow. Don’t get me wrong, that’s what this collection is about, but it’s nothing like anything I’ve encountered prior. Her prose belies the ache of being away without being cloying. In An Overseas Contract she tackles both class disparity and the now-familiar image of Filipinos coming back home from Saudi. The titular short story is what makes this collection perfect, though: almost a novella in length, but worth every single moment.
They’re all the same to her now, this fraternity of men, who televise their hunger strikes, print articles after they’re told to stop. They prize their causes and their names, their principles and legacies, above all. They eat the rice without wondering how it got cooked and to their table. They name sons after themselves and never once worry about those sons’ fingernails.
“He said that wouldn’t happen. He said, what’s more likely is that you’ll live another fifty years or so. Your children will grow up to ask you where you were on February twenty-third, nineteen eighty-six. What will you tell them? That you played it safe? That history was happening, and all you wanted was to save your hide? They’ll ask, What was it like? And you will have to say, Go read a book on it, because you weren’t there.”
Don’t Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier
No one can do gothic fiction like Daphne Du Maurier; after three of her books I’m half convinced she’s one of my favorite writers. Of all the horror books I read this year, this is the one that has stayed with me. This collection was published in 1971 but isn’t dated in language nor in setting; her horror has a timeless quality. The way she sets a scene—wherever it may be—always gets the hairs on the back of my neck to stand. All the stories in this collection are ominous in broad daylight. I’d recommend the titular Don’t Look Now, a story of a couple who recently lost a child and encounter fresh horrors on their vacation in Venice, Not After Midnight, a story about a professor who goes on a trip to paint and discovers sinister secrets by the water, and The Breakthrough, which is an interesting foray into almost sci-fi: scientists try to prove that intelligence may survive with the human body after its death.
My worst forebodings could not have conjured up a more forbidding place.
Nonfiction
The Book Collectors by Delphine Minoui
I made the mistake of starting this book at around 7PM and the first third of the book just had me in tears throughout. Delphine Minoui, a French journalist who reports on Iraq and Iran, tells the story of a small band of rebels who come together to scavenge books from bombed out houses in Daraya, a town outside Damascus (where the Syrian Civil War began). There is so much hope in this book, and so much love, and so much pain in between.
A melody of words against the dirge of bombs. Reading—a humble human gesture that binds them to the mad hope of a return to peace. (…) Reading to escape. Reading to find oneself. Reading to feel alive.
Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui
I read this just as Manila was put on its third round of enhanced community quarantine and I missed the sea. This book is my favorite kind of nonfiction: she weaves together research, social anthropology, and her own experiences into one great story about how and why we’re all drawn to water. This was a quick read because the topic is already so interesting to me, but it helps even more that her prose is light.
Buoyancy, floating, weightlessness. Freedom. These are the words we use to talk about swimming. Is it a coincidence that this is also the language we use to talk about the lightness of being, the wellness of being, that we strive for in this corporeal world?
Because I’ll Never Swim in Every Ocean — Catherine Pierce
Want is ten thousand blue feathers falling
all around me, and me unable to stomach
that I might catch five but never ten thousand.
So I drop my hands to my sides and wait
to be buried. I open a book and the words
spring and taunt. Flashes—motel, lapidary,
piranha—of every story, every poem I’ll never
know well enough to conjure in sleep.
What’s the point of words if I can’t
own them all? I toss book after book
into my imaginary trashcan fire.
Or I think I’ll learn piano. At the first lesson,
we’re clapping whole and half notes
and this is childish, I’m better than this.
I’d like to leave playing Ravel. I’d like
to give a concerto on Saturday. So I quit.
I have standards. Then on Saturday,
I have a beer, watch a telethon. Or
we watch a documentary on Antarctica.
The interviewees are from Belarus, Lima, Berlin.
Everyone speaks English. Everyone names
a philosopher, an ethos. One man carries a raft
on his back at all times. I went to Nebraska once
and swore it was a great adventure. It was.
I think of how I’ll never go to Antarctica,
mainly because I don’t much want to. But
I should want to. I should be the girl
with a raft on her back. When I think
of all the mountains and monuments
and skyscapes I haven’t seen, all the trains
I should take, all the camels and mopeds
and ferries I should ride, all the scorching
hikes I should nearly die on, I press
my body down, down into the vast green
couch. If I step out the door, the infinity
of what I’ve missed will zorro me across
the face with a big L for Lazy. Sometimes
I watch finches at the feeder, their wings small
suns, and have to grab the sill to steady myself.
Metaphorically, of course. I’m no loon.
Look—even my awestruck is half-assed.
But I’m so tired of the small steps—
the pentatonic scale, the frequent flyer
hoarding, the one exquisite sentence
in a forest of exquisite sentences.
There is a globe welling up inside of me.
Mountain ranges ridging my skin,
oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still
long enough, I could become my own world.
PS - I realized after writing this that I should probably just do a quarterly recommendation list.
Thanks for reading, and happy holidays! 😘 Leave a comment if you want me to talk a bit more about any of the books I’ve read. Har har.