2021 recap: reading
Ten years ago I cracked 150 books in a year; ever since, it’s been around 100 annually, give or take a few in either direction. Heading into 2021 I wanted to up that number—which felt just stuck—as much as I could. I met my minimum goal (I’m currently sitting at 120), along with some of my strategic goals, but I’m hoping to crawl back to 150 in 2022. Some of the successful strategies this past year that I hope to continue:
Adding audiobooks to my regimen.
Reducing TV viewing.
Keeping up an ongoing mix of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic works.
I didn’t crack the audiobook nut until March, nor did I drop podcasts until the fall (when a tsunami of work and illness and family commitments overtook my extra time), plus I was working on finalizing the proofs for not one but two books from May to November. Looking ahead to 2022, at the level of mere numbers, if I were to average 11 books per month during the two academic semesters and 16 books per month during the four summer months, that would come to 152. It’s doable, y’all! I’m going to make it happen. One year from today my reading recap for 2022 will be nothing but a Tim Duncan fist pump GIF.
And now, some of my favorites from the year, with scattered commentary.
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Rereads
5. George Orwell, Animal Farm
4. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
3. C. S. Lewis’s nonfiction. Some comments here.
2. G. K. Chesterton’s nonfiction. Some quotes and remarks here.
1. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia. I read all seven once as an 18- or 19-year old. The re-read (via Audible) was glorious. My favorite used to be Dawn Treader, and I had low memories of Caspian and Horse, few memories of Last Battle, and no memories of Silver Chair. Now my definitive ranking: 1. Silver Chair 2. Last Battle 3. Dawn Treader 4. Magician’s Nephew 5. LWW 6. Horse & His Boy 7. Prince Caspian. In truth none of them are bad, and Horse would be higher if its weird and indefensible religious, racial, and cultural stereotypes weren’t so interwoven in the story. As for Lion, if it weren’t the first or so foundational or so iconic, I’d rank it last. I used to think Caspian was the one bad egg, but now I think it’s no longer bad, just the seventh best. But it’s Puddleglum and Underland for the win.
Poetry
5. W. H. Auden, Early Poems
4. John Updike, Endpoint and Other Poems
3. Molly McCully Brown, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded
2. Franz Wright, selected volumes. Every year I re-read Wright’s best collections (Beforelife, Martha’s Vineyard, God’s Silence, Wheeling Motel), and every year he remains my favorite.
1. R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems. This year, though, I re-read Thomas’s best volumes (running from Laboratories of the Spirit up to Mass for Hard Times) for the first time in a decade, and he overawed me once again. The master.
Graphic novels
3. Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints. Recommended. Go in not knowing anything, and read both back to back.
2. Art Spiegelman, Maus. A classic for a reason.
1. Craig Thompson, Blankets. This one walloped me.
Fiction
8. Patrick Hoffman, Every Man a Menace. Taut, brutal, surprising, and to the point. In other words, the best sort of crime fiction.
7. P. D. James, Death of an Expert Witness. You know I had to include the Queen.
6. Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son
5. G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Orwell and Huxley are the standard scribblers of the dystopian future; what if Chesterton (Notting Hill) and Lewis (That Hideous Strength) were added to that duo? At least one result: the realization that wit and style, not to mention religious vision, don’t have to be excised from the genre.
4. Jamie Quatro, Fire Sermon
3. Charles Portis, True Grit. As promised, this one’s perfect.
2. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
1. Susanna Clarke, Piranesi. Charming and enrapturing from the first sentence to the last. I wrote about it here.
Nonfiction (popular)
11. James Clear, Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results & Cal Newport, A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload
10. Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth
9. Jesse Singal, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills. I wrote about it here.
8. Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
7. Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
6. Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. If you love style guides, as I do, this one might move to the top of your list, as it did mine.
5. Abigail Tucker, Mom Genes: Inside the New Science of Our Ancient Maternal Instinct & Ross Douthat, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. These belong together, both because their authors are married and because they tell parallel stories: about science, about knowledge, about family, about marriage and parenthood and children and illness. I wrote about Douthat here and included a nugget from Tucker here.
4. Andrew Sullivan, Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989–2021. A whirlwind tour of one of the most socially and politically influential public intellectuals and writers of my lifetime. A sort of chronological testament to that influence; you see the nation changing as time goes by in these essays.
3. Dwight Macdonald, Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain
2. E. H. Gombrich, A Little History of the World. Delightful. I wrote about it here.
1. Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays. A book that could change your life. As I read it in early 2021, I wondered why Kingsnorth wasn’t a Christian, or at least why he didn’t take serious Christian thinking and writing as a worthy interlocutor. Then he converted.
Nonfiction (scholarly)
5. Audrey Watters, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning. Watters is the very best; my review of her book is forthcoming in Comment.
4. Jason Blakely, We Built Reality: How Social Sciences Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. My review here.
3. Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left; Culture Counts; How to Be a Conservative. This year I read some of Scruton’s classics. I wrote about how they struck me as surprisingly but essentially secular here.
2. Matthew Rose, A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right. Required reading for the present moment. Get on it.
1. Allen C. Guelzo, Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. I’d never read a full-bore history of the Civil War. My mistake. This is the one. Magnificent.
Christian (popular)
5. Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age
4. Rowan Williams, The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ
3. Peter Leithart, Baptism: A Guide to Life from Death
2b. Eve Tushnet, Tenderness: A Gay Christian’s Guide to Unlearning Rejection and Experiencing God’s Extravagant Love. I can’t count how many times this book brought me to tears. Why? Because Tushnet has the preternatural ability to force her readers to come to terms with just how much Jesus loves them. She is a treasure.
2a. Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep. Christianity Today was right to crown it the book of the year. My review here.
1. Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection. First published in the late 1960s, a book that cannot be categorized by genre or style, a true N of 1. Buy it, read it, love it.
Theology (on the recent side)
5. Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini: Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation
4. Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Revelation
3. Timothy P. Jackson, Mordecai Did Not Bow Down: Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Christian Supersessionism. My review here.
2. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., Blood Theology: Seeing Red in Body- and God-Talk. My review here.
1. Paul Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar & Regret: A Theology. Now that Jenson has passed, there is no living theologian I take greater pleasure in reading or learning from—or being provoked by—than Griffiths. He never fails to make you think, or to re-think what you thought you thought before.
Theology (less recent)
5. François Mauriac, What I Believe
4. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom
3. Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture. All Christian undergraduates should read this book, certainly those who already know they are interested in the life of the mind.
2. Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? I sometimes wish this little book had a different title, because it obscures both its subject matter and its relevance. Tolle lege.
1. Michael Ramsey, The Resurrection of Christ: An Essay in Biblical Theology. A model of succinct, stylish, substantive, scripturally normed, academically informed, and theologically rich writing. I want every book I write to be patterned on this minor classic.
