The need to escape somewhere was an ache for me this year. I felt it beating in that hollow sitting at the base of my neck and weighing deep in my solar plexus. But, like most, there wasn’t much opportunity to physically escape — not far, anyway. So, I read. Even more than last year. And found therapy in words to dull the ache.
In the afterword for Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Jeanette Winterson wrote:
Reading stills the body for a while, allowing rest without torpor and quiet without passivity. Reading is not a passive act. Engaged in the book, in company with the writer, the mind can roam where it will. Such freedom to roam reminds us that body and mind both need exercise and activity, and that neither the mind nor the body can cope with confinement. And if the body has to cope with confinement, then all the more reason to have developed a mind that knows how to roam.
Here’s my list of 2021 books (* means I was really into it); I hope you find something beautiful or relatable in one of the below:
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje**
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong*
No One Tells You This by Glynnis MacNicol*
Freeman’s: Love by various authors
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke*
Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
Art & Lies by Jeanette Winterson
The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
Everything You Ever Wanted by Luiza Sauma
Daddy by Emma Cline
Consolations by David Whyte*
You Are the Placebo by Dr. Joe Dispenza
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt*
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
The Beauty of Your Face by Sahar Mustafah
You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked. by Sheung-King
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie**
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
So Sad Today by Melissa Broder
Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin*
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb*
Animal by Lisa Taddeo*
Summer Solstice by Nina MacLaughlin
Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty
In the Cut by Susanna Moore*
Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene*
A Year with Rilke translated by Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy**
Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel*
Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo
The Divorce by Cesar Aira
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri*
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Year of Wonder by Clemency Burton-Hill*
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
To the River by Olivia Laing
Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica J. Lee
Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney*
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
No. 91/92: A Diary of a Year on the Bus by Lauren Elkin
My Body by Emily Ratajkowski**
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson**
The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
Clarity & Connection by Yung Pueblo*
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante*
Hold Still by Sally Mann
I post my current reads in my Instagram stories, in case you want to follow along in 2022.
Image: Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959