Looking back on the books I read in 2021, one stands out as the best: John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. It is a cold-war thriller and thinly-veiled autobiography that follows a spy named Magnus Pym. Its disjointed narrative explores his life from early childhood to the novel’s present-narrated 1986. Like le Carré, Pym is raised by a widower conman, abused at boarding school, and put to work as a spy against enemies both foreign and domestic. Unlike le Carré, Pym never quite learns which way is up; he’s had to wear too many faces, for too long. When the book begins, and Pym vanishes, it is less of a shock to everybody than it ought to be. As the story proceeds, we learn why.
I don’t want to spoil too much, although you can guess the broad contours just by looking at the cover (and what a cover Penguin has chosen!). It’s less about the story than the main character anyway, and his relationship with his father. An early quote, written by Pym about himself, sums it up better than I ever could:
So there’s yet another Pym for you, Jack, and you had better add him to my file even if he is neither admirable nor, I suspect, comprehensible to you[…]. He’s the Pym who can’t rest till he’s touched the love in people, then can’t rest till he’s hacked his way out of it, the more drastically the better. The Pym who does nothing cynically, nothing without conviction. Who sets events in motion in order to become their victim, which he calls decision, and ties himself into pointless relationships, which he calls loyalty. Then waits for the next event to get him out of the last one, which he calls destiny.
A Perfect Spy is a story about a man who’s only ever wanted genuine companionship, and about how the whole world, himself included, constantly conspires to keep it from him. It is about what happens when you break a man who was never quite whole to begin with. Along the way, there are some pretty good adventures, but for the most part it’s as gloomy as the weather in the English seaside town where Pym writes his memoir. This mood isn’t always my cup of tea, but when it works, it works. Apparently it’s considered le Carré’s masterpiece; it’s not hard to see why.
Like many things, this book reminds me of a Mountain Goats song, in particular a line near the end of this one: When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don’t expect him to thank or forgive you.
What were the best books you read in 2021?
BGinCHI
Civilizations, by Laurent Binet.
What if Columbus, then the Conquistadors got their asses kicked by the locals, but (along with the descendants of some roving Norse) gave some locals the idea of sailing east to a “New World” called Europe? And what if, led by the Inca and some amazing generals and a naked Cuban princess, they conquered the continent? How would that change history? What would it do to the Reformation?
All these questions and more answered in Binet’s thrilling, incredibly-imagined novel.
joel hanes
Everything LeCarre ever wrote is worth reading.
OzarkHillbilly
A Perfect Spy was my first le Carre book. Absolutely gut wrenching. Can’t say that I’ve read everything he’s written, but it’s a pile.
hells littlest angel
A Perfect Spy is one of my favorite novels, just a masterly analysis of what it means to be a dishonest person. I remember wondering as I read it just how closely it was based on Le Carré’s real life. Turns out the answer is — very closely! What a deeply weird childhood to have to recover from.
The 1987 BBC adaptation is also brilliant, especially Ray McAnally as Rick Pym.
Mike in NC
I read Peril, Hoax, Landslide, and a few other titles about the moron from Mar-A-Lago. May he finally get what he deserves in 2022.
Chris
Never actually read a LeCarre book, something about the writing style doesn’t click with me. But I’ve enjoyed the adaptations. The Russia House with Sean Connery. The BBC version of Tinker Tailor (and the movie in lesser measure). The Night Manager.
OzarkHillbilly
The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf is one I read this year that sticks in my head. That von Humblodt guy was a hell of a dude.
Anyway
It’s a tie:
Drive your Plow over the bones of the dead – Olga Tokargczuk
Intimacies – Katie Kitamura
-A Perfect Spy- is an old favorite.
Major Major Major Major
@OzarkHillbilly: yah it’s a real bummer, but what a bummer!
OzarkHillbilly
@Major Major Major Major: I grew up in a mostly picture book loving, caring, nurturing, middle class family. When I was reading it, I kept thinking, “What kind of sick individual can imagine this shit???”
The kind who lived thru it of course.
Phylllis
A Little Devil in America : Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib. A lyrical collection of essays, with some amazing poetry, regarding Black performance in the arts, film, and everyday life in America. I read and reread his introductory poem and found something new and striking each time.
NotMax
Hm. Probably Robert Harris’ An Officer and a Spy. Never got around to it when it first appeared a few years ago. 2021 was not a year (for me) conducive to the concentration required of book reading.
trollhattan
Lighter than LeCarre but excellent writing, finally got around to reading Graham Greene, and his “Our Man in Havana” was hugely entertaining and just right for a long flight. Will be chasing down more of him, soon.
Alison Rose
The best book I read, and the one that immediately became my favorite of all time, was Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. I can’t put into words what this book meant to me. I read it in early March, and even after reading 200 books in 2021, it is still the one I think of literally every single day. It took up residence in my soul, and it’ll be there permanently.
(If you read it and didn’t like it, honestly do not tell me. I literally can’t listen to anything less than effusively positive about it.)
schrodingers_cat
@Chris: BBC’s adaptation of Smiley’s people is also pretty good. Many of the characters from Tinker Tailor are in that one
I was not too fond of the The Constant Gardener.
Evap
I just went to my library app, borrowed A Perfect Spy, and now I will read it in the Kindle app! Thanks, M^4!
Chris
@schrodingers_cat:
Yeah. The friend I watched Tinker Tailor with and I started one episode of that series, but then Covid happened and we didn’t see each other for more than a year. We’ll get back to it at some point, I expect.
les
John McPhee, Annals of a Former World. 20+ years of hanging out with the top geologists around, to tell the tale of how the US (physically) came to be. I wasn’t surprised by California…
The Bright Ages–turns out they weren’t Dark.
Major Major Major Major
@Evap: hope you enjoy!
Jerry
About five or six years ago, I was on a huge le Carré kick and read everything from A Call for the Dead through Smiley’s People, then I read some other books before getting on my current Gene Wolfe kick. I periodically take breaks from Wolfe to read some other book and A Perfect Spy was one of those in 2021, and I’m now realizing that it was because Major^4 that had brought it up.
After le Carré died, it was revealed by his son that his mother (le Carré’s wife to be clear) had contributed to le Carré’s books. A Perfect Spy took on a new meaning for me after that reveal and it then became apparent to me that she must have contributed quite a bit for that particular novel.
As for what I read that I truly enjoyed in 2021 that is not Gene Wolfe? Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. Wonderful novel. I’m a sucker for a story that has multiple characters in different eras of history whose stories somehow meet in the end. Cloud Cuckoo Land is like Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon or Reamde without the tech bro worship.
Betty Cracker
@BGinCHI: Wow, I am immediately ordering that book for my husband — sounds like something he would love. Thank you!
pluky
Liu Cixin: Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.
Hauntingly dark space opera.
Subcommandante Yakbreath
My wife gave me the final book of The Expanse series, Leviathan Falls, for Christmas and I read it by the end of the year so I’ll go with that. While maybe not my favorite of all the books, it brings the saga to a fitting end.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@hells littlest angel:
I was unaware of this. I read A Perfect Spy when it was released, and frankly don’t remember it very well. Re-reading The Spy Who Came in From The Cold has been on my list for a while
@Chris: I much prefer the Alec Guiness version, but the playwright who pretends to be Richard Nixon on twitter made a good point, that you can see in the face of Oldman’s Smiley that this is a man who has done some brutal things, because he had to. Not that you don’t see a brutal side with Guiness’s version. The way he treats Connie Sachs in both volumes is chilling.
I’m still hoping the more recent Oldman team do a version of Smiley’s People.
Math Guy
Love LeCarre’s work, but one of my current favorites is Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I see a lot of myself in Lawrence Waterhouse.
gene108
A similar theme was explored in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, one of his earlier works.
Urban Suburbanite
It’s a toss up between Red Victory by Bruce Lincoln and Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time/Children of Ruin books.
The first is about the Russian Civil War, which basically started the moment the Romanovs were forced off the throne. The author is really big on Trotsky (he’s portrayed as instrumental to the Red victory), but delves into the deranged White commanders and the bloody ruthlessness of the Reds. It’s a grim read.
Children of Time/Children of Ruin deal with the aftermath of a cataclysmic war between factions of a human interstellar empire, right as a scientist is implementing a project on a distant planet to create an intelligent servant species of primates. The war knocks her project way off its intended path, and a ship of refugees from Earth finds it centuries later.
Jerry
@pluky:
Excellent trilogy! I had a hard time trying to read anything else after that. The Dark Forest was my favorite of the three
Betty Cracker
@Alison Rose: That book is in my to-read stack. Your endorsement makes me look forward to it even more!
Major Major Major Major
@Betty Cracker: I’ve heard good things too!
AM in NC
3 that I really enjoyed this year:
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Mara – Gorgeously written. Characters you care about. And it made me ashamed that I knew nothing about the war in Chechnya even though it was on the news for years. This was my second time reading it because I gave it to a friend months ago who finally read it and loved it as her best read this year and it made me want to revisit it again. So, so good.
Hamnet – see Alison Rose’s comment above. I wouldn’t claim it as a best read of all time, but certainly one of the best I read this year.
The Overstory by Richard Powers – he speaks for the trees, and it is a story worth listening to. I then read a memoir by the scientist whose research Powers based a lot of the book on. It was interesting, but I enjoyed Powers’s novel a lot more.
And I have to include another semi-circumnavigation of the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian. I cannot quit them. I’ll read the second half of them in the coming months I’m sure. If I had to take one literary “work” with me on a desert island it’s Shakespeare or O’Brian. I needed comfort reading this year, and revisiting Jack and Stephen is like spending time with old friends.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Since time has no meaning anymore I can’t remember if it was in calendar ’21 that I read them, but I actually sat down, logged off of all screens and slowed down the brain-spins long enough to read several Robert Harris books, including the Cicero Trilogy. Actual paper books. The Cicero books are written in the voice of Tiro, who was Cicero’s slave-secretary and according to legend, invented shorthand.
pluky
@Jerry:
I hear you. I had thought nothing could top “The Cold Equations” for a brutally clear positing of reality. Well, The Laws of Cosmic Sociology along with the game theory implications put that notion to rest.
raven
Travels With Charley. I had totally forgotten the chapter about the New Orleans racists.
PJ
It’s not the best book I read this year (which was Don Quixote, however angry Cervantes makes me at times), but the one I’ve been thinking most about lately, partly because I read it last month, is George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, which is his analysis of how stories work (and don’t work), focusing on seven short stories by Chekhov (3), Tolstoy (2), Turgenev, and Gogol. He starts off taking the first story page by page, and gets down to the paragraphy and sentence level – What new information do we get here? How does it affect us? How have our expectations changed? – to show the architecture of each story and what makes them effective.
OzarkHillbilly
I am currently, and finally reading Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter. It’s been sitting on my desk taunting me for 2 or 3 years. I’m not afraid to admit that 657 pages was just a bit intimidating, but after 232 pages I’m wondering why I waited so long. It’s a really good read. Halberstam knew his craft.
Feathers
I’ve been making my way through the Margery Allingham catalogue. I’m on The Tiger in the Smoke #13 if 17. If I had to recommend one, it would be The Fashion in Shrouds, about a murder in a Phantom Threads-esque fashion house, (although they are all excellent). After all, I am reading the whole series straight through. I think I didn’t read them back when I was big into mysteries because Campion was described as Lord Peter Wimsey lite. I can see why, but the character really does grow and change away from the titles young man who changes his name of the early books. They do go beyond the fair play puzzle model pretty early on and move through different styles in each book.
Read Allingham because I picked up a Black Friday kindle unlimited subscription. Turns out there are a lot of golden age British mysteries on there. I’ve been listening to the Shedunnit podcast, so I had several authors. The podcast goes big on Gladys Mitchell as someone deserving rediscovery, but after reading a few I can see both why she has been forgotten and why people are liking them now. The sleuth, a psychologist who consults for the police, Mrs Bradley, was played by Diana Rigg in the TV series, but she is very unlike the sleuth of the books. They have a lot of occult elements and general oddness, but feel dated in a way that Allingham is not. I’m going to have to read some more Mitchell when done to figure out why.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People are part of an unofficial trilogy with The Honourable Schoolboy.
EricK
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.
It was so good that the TV Series was kind of a let down. I mean it was really well done, it just felt too by the numbers. Like OK here is that scene, there here is that one, etc. checking them off the list.
PJ
@Jerry: Which Wolfe novels have you been enjoying? The Book of the New Sun bowled me over when I was a kid, and I enjoyed the Soldier books as well, but a lot of his other novels have basic flaws that prevent me from enjoying them. He writes like someone who never left the house after 1955, and whenever he turns to a contemporary setting, it bears no resemblance to the world I have lived in, nor do the characters act like any people I’ve ever met. I know he’s more interested in exploring ideas (and creating puzzles) than psychology, but it makes me reluctant to return to him, though I’ll probably get around to all of his books eventually. And then I read a bunch of his stories a few years ago, and it seemed like the ending of half of them was “It’s Jesus!”, which made them predictable and boring.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: I know. I read all 3 after I saw the two BBC series. Apparently, BBC didn’t film the School Boy because it was set in Hong Kong and they didn’t have the budget.
burnspbesq
It was infuriating on several levels, but Alpha, David Philipps’ book about the Gallagher court-martial, was a real eye-opener. Highly recommended.
Phylllis
A friend gave me this; I’m waiting on a couple of books from the library, including Fionna Hill’s & this might be my next read in the meantime.
Jerry
@schrodingers_cat:
Also set in Cambodia (and maybe Thailand?).
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m currently listening to Adam Schiff’s book for the upcoming discussions, and I think it’s pretty good as a book. I also bought a hard copy to go back to during the book club
ThresherK
I really haven’t read spy thrillers, but I’ll look for this one.
I have a special affinity for 1986, as it’s vaguely when Chess is set, and the whole “winding down the Cold War and winning the peace” is a time I remember.
Jamie
Good one
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Summer Lightning by PG Wodehouse was pretty amusing. Wodehouse attained his ideal narrator with Bertie Wooster, so if you haven’t read the Jeeves and Wooster stuff then I would start with Right Ho, Jeeves. His first novel-length Jeeves and Wooster book is Thank You, Jeeves which is good but does feature a minstrel band/people in blackface. Nothing about the portrayal (other than people in blackface which of course is racist but was not controversial when Wodehouse wrote the book) comes off as racist per se but I could see how people could be offended, so Right Ho is the best place to start for most people. After that comes Code of the Woosters, which is sort of a sequel to Right Ho but it’s not all that essential to read them in order.
I still can’t really settle into anything very dark yet. I did also enjoy Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories which is a kids book but some kids books are wiser than a lot of fiction written for adults. I read some good non-fiction but at present can’t recall what.
E.
A Gentleman in Moscow. A really fine novel, nearly perfect. I also reread If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler for about the fifth time.
MomSense
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I’m listening to it as well. I got the audible version for Christmas. It’s very good and I am enjoying Schiff’s reading.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@BGinCHI: @Alison Rose: @E.: three books with which I will challenge those brain-spins in the near future
thank you!
narya
I re-read Eliot Pattison’s Inspector Shan novels–actually, I RE-read the first eight, then purchased and read the final two. I enjoyed working through the whole series start to finish. I re-read the LeCarre trilogy last year, too, I think (or in 2020? I feel like the last two years were a single year). I don’t know if I ever read Perfect Spy; I’ve read most of Le Carre, for sure. And I will likely finish The Expanse series this year; I forget where I am in the list. I’ve been trying to dip into some new things, too (just got 16 Ways to Defend a Walled City but haven’t started it yet). I’ve read all of Stephenson, most of it several times (even read the whole Baroque cycle twice), and Cryptonomicon remains my favorite. Oh! And I also discovered the Sister Fidelma novels, and last year I read the first 5 or 6 I think; I will go back for more of those. Currently reading Schiff, too (yes, I usually have multiple books going at once, even since I switched to e-books).
Nelle
@OzarkHillbilly: My husband read this aloud to me and I have the crocheted afghan I worked on to prove it. Halberstam is such a good writer, but I think my favorite of all is The Children, about the extraordinary courage and vision of the young people who led much of the Civil Rights Movement with their own bodies on the line.
Feathers
Reading all the love for Le Carre in the thread, I will make a second recommendation for Allingham’s Traitor’s Purse. Albert Campion, formerly private detective to the well connected, wakes up in an empty war time hospital with no memory, not even of his name, only the sense that something terrible is about to happen and only he can stop it. And the number 15 is somehow involved. And right away he overhears that he has apparently killed a policeman. So he goes on the run. I won’t spoil it beyond that, but it definitely prefigures the post war spy novels.
skerry
@AM in NC: I really enjoyed The Overstory. My book club, not so much.
Jerry
@PJ:
The Book of the New Sun/Urth of the New Sun, of course. I finished that up during the Summer and since then, I’ve read Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and A Devil in the Forest. Just last night, I finished the first book in the Book of the Long Sun series. I also read some of his short stories.
I find his work sometimes confounded, confusing, and frustrating, but by the end, worth reading and worth re-reading. Peace is the first book that I will re-read after finishing the Book of the Long Sun series. That book, especially, highlights Wolfe’s tendencies to go into detail over matters that hardly move the story forward, but will just skip on by a major reveal. As you mentioned, he likes to lock his stories up into puzzles and I can see how that would be a real turn-off for a lot of readers, but for some reason, I enjoy it even though I can’t figure any of them out until a re-read or listening to the Alzabo Soup podcast.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus is made up of three interlinked novellas. If you were to pick this book up in a bookstore and just kind of flipped through the three different novellas, you would be surprised that they were linked in any way. Great storytelling here.
One thing that Wolfe loves to play around with is identity. That seems to be a major feature in all of his stories. Identity and how trustful are his narrators. Those are his main themes and is able to couch them in puzzles.
And yeah, him being a Catholic convert plays heavily into his stories, but I think he needs more credit that what is usually given to him by critics. Wolfe is well-versed in other mythologies and is able to play with them as well in his stories. He includes more than enough Norse and Greek mythologies into his stories so that they are not 100% Jesus parables set in his own made-up worlds. I mean, Catholicism plays heavily into his stories, but I think it’s a disservice to his writings to just dismiss them as merely Christian stories.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: Incredible book. I don’t recall how much of this he covered:
50 Years Later, an Army Force Gets Its Due
Ivan X
Ross Thomas’ The Mordida Man was one of the most entertaining yarns I’ve ever read.
debbie
I used to be a constant reader, but I’ve lost my ability to concentrate during the pandemic. Most books I couldn’t be bothered to finish, but I really liked Natalie Hayne’s A Thousand Ships (the Trojan War as told by the women who were there, willingly or not) and Lauren Groff’s Matrix (based on the life of Marie of France, with a number of cameos by Eleanor of Acquitane).
Felanius Kootea
In 2021, I didn’t read as much fiction as I normally do. The best nonfiction book I read in 2021 was Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, which was truly illuminating.
On my (ever growing) to read list are Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, Nadifa Mohammed’s The Fortune Men, Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North, Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle and David Diop’s At Night All Blood is Black.
I hope I find time to read them all.
WaterGirl
@Jamie: You have an invalid URL in the URL field, so all of your comments will go into moderation. Clear that field before you post again and you should be good.
schrodingers_cat
@burnspbesq: I am thinking of watch 83. Its playing at at theater near us. As a fellow cricket fan I was wondering if you have seen it by any chance.
Ghost of Joe Liebling*s Dog
@trollhattan: I’m not sure how light it is, but if you’re looking for more of Graham Greene, I’d recommend The Ministry of Fear — it’s one I’ve come back to several times.
Annie
One Day by Gene Weingarten. It’s nonfiction— Weingarten is an editor at the Washington Post, and he chose one day on which nothing immensely newsworthy took place, and went looking for other, non-famous stories on that day. It’s wonderful. It,proves something I’ve always felt , that any event is interesting if you write about it well.
Betty
@trollhattan: One of my favorites,but it is, as far as I know, the only lighthearted Graham Greene. I enjoy all his books, even the darker ones.
CarolPW
@Jerry: You should try Pandora by Holly Hollander, the Solder in the Mist set, and The Knight set. Very different from his other stuff, and pretty astonishing in many ways.
raven
I’m just starting
The Last Gentleman, Tom Hughes and the End of the American Century. I knew a bit about him because I’ve been friends with his son for over 30 years but the book, so far, is fascinating. I wrote a note to Miki the other night but I think she missed it. Anyway :
Jerry
@narya:
I like the title of this book so I just added it to my kindle. Now that I’m between Wolfe novels, maybe I’ll read this one and a new bio of Ali (the cousin, first male convert to Islam, son-in-law of Muhammad, the last of the four rightly guided caliphs) that I just picked up. That one is named The Prophet’s Heir.
Speaking of Ali, I wonder if there is a biography of Fatimah. Anyone know of any worth reading? She seems to have quite an impact on multiple cultures.
Jerry
@CarolPW:
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll add them to the ol’ Wolfe pile.
zhena gogolia
@Betty: Travels with My Aunt?
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: It’s also illuminating that Dugout Doug never spent one night in Korea. He flew back to the Palace every night.
Ghost of Joe Liebling*s Dog
@Feathers: Tiger in the Smoke is a remarkable book (at least, to me), in ways that the other Campion novels aren’t — and I like Campion, even the pretend-emptyheaded fop of the early books. But Tiger‘s something more, I think
Taking advantage of the edit window to second your recommendation of Traitor’s Purse, too. Probably my next-favorite Allingham, after Tiger.
CarolPW
@Jerry: If you are interested in how he deals with identity, start with Soldier in the Mist, with the mother of all identity problems.
jeffreyw
I enjoyed Gibson’s Agency, the follow up to The Peripheral.
PJ
@Jerry: I liked Peace and The Fifth Head of Cerberus when I read them, a long time ago. It was the string of novels with contemporary settings that he published the mid-80s to 90s that kind of put me off him.
I agree that there is much more to his writing than Christian parables/allegories, but, as someone raised Catholic, the convert’s obsession with it was a little too much for me.
Alison Rose
@Betty Cracker: It’s so so so good. I don’t cry over books often but it made me sob multiple times.
zhena gogolia
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell. A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr. The plays of Oscar Wilde.
Roger Moore
@les:
It’s so much more than that, though. One of the things that’s really interesting about Annals of the Former World is that it really gets into the issue of how a scientist’s background affects their career and scientific worldview. This is something that’s really important about how science is actually done, but it gets surprisingly little notice even from heavy hitters in the philosophy of science like Thomas Kuhn.
PJ
@CarolPW: Pandora was one of his novels that just rang completely false for me. I didn’t buy his voice at all as the young woman writing, and I didn’t buy anything that happened in the story. It seemed written by someone who never met a teenager and who had never set foot in late 20th century America.
Kalakal
I read a lot of LeCarre years ago and enjoyed them a lot. I particularly liked A Murder of Quality. Another British spy story contemporary of leCarre I liked was Len Deighton. His early Harry Palmer novels are good ( The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin etc. ) and were filmed as anti James Bond glamour starring Michael Caine, but his real masterpice are the 9 Bernard Sampson books. They’re in 3 trilogies, Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match, Spy Hook, Spy Line, Spy Sinker and Faith, Hope, and Charity. The first 3 were made into a TV series starring Iain Holm
Kalakal
@Ghost of Joe Liebling*s Dog: Tiger in the Smoke is a real stand out, it’s excellent. I like the Campion books generally, one I particularly like is Police at the Funeral
Ghost of Joe Liebling*s Dog
I didn’t actually read this one in 2021, but these recommendations make me want to mention T.H. White’s Darkness at Pemberley, which is sort of a combination of English drawing-room high-society locked-room puzzle and thriller, built around a disturbing villain and a believable ‘tec. Not very well-known, I don’t think … another one I come back to frequently.
(Yes, that T.H. White.)
zhena gogolia
@Ghost of Joe Liebling*s Dog: Darcy’s Pemberley?
I see it is but his descendant.
Kalakal
My daughter got me 2 Alastair Reynolds books for Christmas, Inhibitor Space and Revenger. I’m particularly looking forward to reading the fourth part of The Inhibitor trilogy
J R in WV
@raven:
The Korean War was such a tragedy, so poorly led and managed that the grunts and marines had to save our bacon over and over in spite of the generals. MacArthur did a great job civilizing Japan, but as a war-time general was pretty near a dunce.
Otherwise, many of these books are ones I have read in the past with great enjoyment. Esp everything by John McPhee, who wrote Annals of a Former World in several volumes before the whole thing was published, because he needed an income stream while he was writing the subsequent volumes. Amazing that his work is non-fiction. All of it is great stuff!
The Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O’Brian are pretty good, if you enjoy that era’s maritime adventures. I was disappointed to learn that he falsified his life to a great extent, but lots of authors fail in life while succeeding on the pages. The Wolfe novels I read back when I was tearing through all the Sci-Fi and fantasy stuff as it was published, not impressed.
Looking forward to Frankensteinbeck’s newest entry in his “Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m a ???” series… those are funny and engrossing.
Thanks to everyone for all the great suggestions. I’ve tried all the Le Carre novels, some work for me, others no so much, but many suggestions are new to me, will take a swing at several. Love anything that distracts me from current sad reality~!!~
Roger Moore
I was given The American Census: A Social History as a Christmas present last year, and it’s a fascinating book. Because they’re so closely linked, it also gets heavily into apportionment. It’s the kind of deep-dive nonfiction not everyone enjoys, but if you like that kind of thing it’s a well written book.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kalakal: Faith Hope and Charity didn’t make my radar, but I really enjoyed the first two Sampson trilogies.
I started to type that I also liked Eye of the Needle, then I google-membered that that was Ken Follett. I think I remember a TV commercial for “the latest thrilling novel from Ken Follett”. That was a thing in the 70s, right? TV ads for novels?
J R in WV
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Wife and I enjoyed Follet’s novels about the cathedral building… others not so much.
CarolPW
@PJ: I loved it, and my sister (who had a daughter of a similar age at the time) loved it as well.
Heidi Mom
@Alison Rose: Oh, that was a beautiful book! It may be as close to the real Shakespeare as we can get, just as Spielberg’s Lincoln is for that historical personage.
Of the (mere) 107 books that I read in 2021, my favorite was Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby. Two fathers, one black and one white, who could not accept their gay sons in life join forces to solve their murders, and eventually realize what they lost.
Other favorites:
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi–Another family (this one is Nigerian) fails to understand who their son really is, until it’s too late.
Missionaries by Phil Klay (Marine Corps vet)–A powerful novel about America’s endless wars.
Sigh, Gone [think “Saigon”] by Phuc Tran–A hilarious, wrenching coming-of-age story that took place right here in Carlisle, PA.
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes–The Trojan War from the women’s point of view. Haunting, heartbreaking.
Ridgeline by Michael Punke (author of The Revenant)–The Fetterman Massacre (Army perspective)/The Battle of the Hundred in the Hand (Lakota perspective), from everyone’s point of view. The Lakota win.
China Room by Sunjeev Sahota–Three young women married to brothers (and they don’t even know who’s married to whom) in early 20th century Punjab.
Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead–A tense, exciting, exuberant “love letter to Harlem.”
The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller–A Swedish recluse finds more of a life than he ever imagined in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong–A son struggles to understand his beloved/awful mother, a Vietnamese immigrant. Intense, with some gut-wrenching scenes.
JustRuss
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: I’m currently re-reading a Jeeves and Wooster story, don’t recall the title but it involves an aunt and some subterfuge gone awry….
For Wooster-free Wodehouse Uncle Dynamite is a fun read, and he wrote a pile of golf stories if you enjoy a good walk spoiled.
raven
@J R in WV:
the grunts and marines had to save our bacon over and over in spite of the generals.
Same as it ever was. . .
Obvious Russian Troll
@PJ: I agree; the voice just didn’t work for me at all.
I do recommend the two Knight novels and the first two Latro novels. (I still haven’t gotten around to reading the third Latro novel, mostly because I wanted to reread the first two books and I lost my copies in one more or another.)
narya
@Jerry: I started reading 16 Ways at dinner and am very much enjoying it already.
Kalakal
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yes it was, I remember the Follett ones. It wasn’t just the ’70s, I also remember ( with absolutely no joy) ads for Jilly Cooper and Jeffrey “English as a second language” Archer
Miss Bianca
@Alison Rose: I read Hamnet last year, I think (my reading history is all kind of a blur right now). I liked it. I found the end very haunting.
My personal fave raves from 2021: non-fiction: Travelers in the Third Reich, by Julia Boyd; and The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt.
Fiction: The Second Mrs Astor, by my friend Shana Abe; and The Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden, particularly the first one, The Bear and the Nightingale.
I am pretty sure that 3 out 4 of the above all came from Balloon Juice recommendations
@Math Guy: I am currently (as in, for the past year or so) been stuck about 2/3 of the way through Cryptonomicon. I like it, want to finish it, but I keep getting bogged down.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: I’d always known he was a blowhard asshole, but I’d never known exactly how much or why.
Right now I’m still in the early days (week 3 or 4) and Halberstam is laying out the politics of Washington, Russia, China, Japan, and Stalin, Kim, Mao. and MacArthur, Truman, Acheson, Johnson, Marshall, etc, not to mention Hiss, various Senators, and the battles over Defense budgets.
It’s a little slow, but very enlightening.
les
@Roger Moore: Yeah, completely agree. Since it’s really 5 books over several decades, the insider bits on acceptance of tectonics and field v. lab geology fascinated me.
And McPhee is just an awesome writer; revisited his story on the Mississippi river this year too, just info packaged in interest.
Roger Moore
@les:
I find it fascinating as a working scientist to see his portraits of other working scientists. I can understand people who find his focus on personalities as much as science to be off putting, but I think it’s anything but. It’s the interaction between the two that really makes the series work.
ETA: This is something McPhee does way better than most other science writers. There’s a kind of writer who write about personalities instead of the science because that’s what they find interesting, and I hate it. They see the science as an excuse to write about the people, and you can tell they’d just as happily ignore the science if they could. McPhee writes about how the personality influences the science, which is a really fascinating and under-discussed topic.
raven
@OzarkHillbilly: Wait until the end when he draws a direct line from Korea to Vietnam. The Kennedy quote is something along the line of “let the next guy deal with it”!
Poe Larity
If you like speculative fiction, not quite sci-fi, try Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning. She won the best new writer Hugo a few years back. The end of the quadrology (?) just came out. Very rich view of alternative gov’t/gender/social organization in a future world.
Miss Bianca
@debbie: Oh, I forgot about A Thousand Ships, I read that one this year too, and really liked it!
I know Marion Zimmer Bradley is a controversial figure these days, but I still am going to say that if you liked A Thousand Ships, you might love The Firebrand, which is her re-telling of the Kassandra legend. I personally thought it far superior in craft to The Mists of Avalon, and an even more radical re-thinking of the Homerian world than that one was of the Arthurian.
dm
Hurrah! John M Ford’s books are coming back in print! A propos M^4’s LeCarre, Ford’s The Scholars of the Night was re-released this year. It is an espionage novel revolving around a cluster of academics and intellectuals (of the sort floating around the CIA in the fifties) and their private spying endeavors. Also, Christopher Marlowe plays an important role.
Richard Powers’ The overstory, a wonderful book about the lives of a collection of fringe characters and the trees that save them.
Thanks to BGinCHI, I reacquainted myself with Laurent Binet. Yes, Civilizations is wonderful, but also check out his The seventh function of language, a whodunit about the death of Roland Barthes, with cameos by a pile of French intellectuals, some wonderful puns as an old Parisian detective dragoons a semiotics graduate student as a guide to the post-modern demimonde. What better detective than someone who studies signs? A great cameo by Umberto Eco, intrigued by a story of a murder, a lost manuscript, and a library…. as a florist walks by carrying roses.
Sixteen ways to defend a walled city, which found its way into a lot of stockings this Christmas. Think: Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and Joseph Heller get together to write a memoir of a Roman engineer who looks over the parapets to see the barbarian horde that just finished massacring the Roman army grinning back at him. Solving problems is what he does for a living, and here’s a problem to solve if he wants to go on living….
The sequel, How to rule an empire, and get away with it is also good. The third book in the series will be coming out in a couple of months.
P Djelli Clark’s Cairo books (The haunting of tram car 015, The master of djinn, A dead djinn in Cairo). These are stories about the Supernatural Investigations Division of the Cairo Municipal Police at the dawn of the 20th Century, a generation after Cairo became a portal to the world of magical technology.
Dune. Haven’t seen the movie yet.
Matt McIrvin
Last year I read a lot of works by the africanfuturist* science-fiction/fantasy author Nnedi Okorafor. I think my favorite was Lagoon, a sprawling multi-POV novel of Lagos, Nigeria thrown into chaos by the arrival of powerful aliens, who are not actively hostile but seem imperfectly concerned with humans’ welfare. The Binti series of novellas, about a young woman from a strangely altered far-future Namibia who is admitted to a multi-species galactic university and has many difficulties coming home again, is good too.
*(don’t call her an Afrofuturist, that’s different; she’s insistent on this)
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: He’s already laying the tracks for that train in the left/right political lines that were being drawn in 1950. What’s the saying? “History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.”
Jerry
@PJ:
Gotcha. I tried to read two of his 20teens novels and couldn’t get through them. I didn’t enjoy didn’t them at all. I can’t quite put my finger on why, I just couldn’t get through them.
dm
@Matt McIrvin: I loved the first volume Binti, but haven’t made room in the queue yet for any of Okorafor’s other books.
bluefoot
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Right Ho, Jeeves is my go to whenever I need a pick-me-up. There are whole passages in it that are just perfect.
I think my favorite book of the year was Braiding Sweetgrass. It’s not normally my type of books, but it really resonated with me for personal reasons. I found myself reading it slowly just so that I could make it last longer.
CaseyL
[Reply button isn’t working, but it might be my computer, which is acting weird.]
dm – That is VERY good to hear! I have all the Ford books I can lay my hands on – everything he wrote is a gem – but must have loaned out one or two, because I now can’t find them. Alt.History is one of my major food groups, and his Dragon Waiting was a feast!
@BGinCHI: Speaking of which, I must check that one out! And here is a suggestion in return: Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. What it… the Black Plague really did kill off all of Europe? The novel starts there and works forward to the current day. Imagine a world where, among other changes, Native Americans are still in control of most of North America (they’re not called that, and the continent isn’t called that, either).
I’ve read and enjoyed most of LeCarre, though fewer of his books post-USSR collapse, except for A Perfect Spy, which was excellent.
dr. luba
@trollhattan: I read all of Graham Greene and much Le Carre back in my 20s and early 30s. Great stuff.
dm
@CaseyL: Dragon Waiting was the first to be reprinted.
Here’s the story of how a journalist investigating why his books were out of print started the process that is bringing them back into print: https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/john-ford-science-fiction-fantasy-books.html
CaseyL
@dm: Ford has been one of my favorite writers for many, many years. He was still alive and writing when I first stumbled onto his work, via his Star Trek novels. I was devastated when he died, and then really pissed off when his family apparently decided to withhold his books from print. Reading what really happened made me happy; knowing that Mike’s books will back in print makes me grin from ear to ear.
dm
@CaseyL: I first encountered him when his first novel came out — Web of Angels, which preceded Neuromancer by a couple of years, and I think was the better novel (though I’m also a William Gibson fan).
Tony Jay
@dm:
Dead thread, but….
That’s fantastic. A Dragon Waiting is one of my favourite novels, about as close as you can get to Dorothy Dunnett writing an alt-history story, which is one of the top compliments I have in the drawer.
Asparagus Aspersions
@AM in NC: Same! I read all the Aubrey-Maturin books in 2020, and am now into my second go-round. I actually just bought a couple of books that provide maps and naval glossaries from the era, so now I finally understand the difference between a ship sloop and a brig sloop, and what the westerlies are (the books are A Sea of Words, and Harbors and High Seas)
Jerry
Since Wodehouse has been brought up a few times in this thread, it must me mentioned that he was Lemmy’s favorite author. Apparently, Lemmy Kilmister of Hawkwind and Motörhead fame was never without a Wodehouse book in hand.
Ramalama
@OzarkHillbilly: Noted! That looks really good.
I’m also going add The Perfect Spy to my reading list. I’ve never read LeCarré but I’ve been a long-time viewer of films based off of his books.
Ramalama
@Alison Rose: Wow ok. Noted also.
For some reason I was reminded of a book by Jo Baker called A Country Road, A Tree – fictional depiction of the life of Beckett during World War II. It’s unlike any other thing I’ve read on the War especially in France. The protagonist leaves his home in Ireland to go to France to write and ends up doing some work for James Joyce except the war gets going and so he decides to remain there and be a witness to all that’s going on with his Jewish friends who start disappearing. He goes south but chooses to remain during the war, despite the option of living a really good life if he goes back to Ireland. No one can figure it out. He is a stubborn bastard.
I feel about this book the same way you feel about Hamnet, I guess, so I am compelled to put that at the top of my reading list.