Six months of reading // 2021

Reading Pamela Paul’s My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues a few years ago inspired me to start a list of my own. What follows, in no particular order, are some of the books I’ve enjoyed most in the first half of 2021. Thanks, as always, to all the writers, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and fellow readers who help me find good things to read.

• Assembly, by Natasha Brown
• Second Place, by Rachel Cusk
• The Liar’s Dictionary, by Eley Williams
• The Bass Rock, by Evie Wyld
• No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood
• Letters from Tove, by Tove Jansson, edited by Boel Westin and Helen Svensson & translated by Sarah Death
• The Copenhagen Trilogy, by Tove Ditlevsen
• Thin Places, by Kerri ni Dochartaigh
• Patch Work, by Claire Wilcox
• Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner
• Real Estate, by Deborah Levy
• Fifty Sounds, by Polly Barton
• The Selected Works of Audre Lorde, edited & with an introduction by Roxane Gay
• Sara Berman’s Closet, by Maira Kalman
• Seasons, written and illustrated by Blexbolex, translated from French by Claudia Zoe Bedrick
• Horizon, by Barry Lopez
• Truth-telling: History, sovereignty and the Uluru Statement, by Henry Reynolds
• Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Atlas of AI, by Kate Crawford
• The Innovation Delusion, by Lee Vinsel &Andrew L. Russell