Our year-end survey. What the hell did we read in 2021??? 

Books mentioned: 

Run, Don’t Walk: The Listening House, Mabel Seeley; Hidden Valley Road, Robert Kolker; Piranesi, Susanna Clarke; Intimacies, Katie Kitamura; Visitation, Jenny Erpenbeck; Native Speaker, Chang-rae Lee; 

Thumbs Up: The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz; The Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen; To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, Christopher Paolini; The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin; Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich; Clockwork Boys, The Wonder Engine, A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher; My Year Abroad, Chang-rae Lee; No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood; Matrix, Lauren Groff;  Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, David Grann; Under the Whispering Door, The House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune; A Separation, Katie Kitamura; The 10,000 Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Süskind; Crossroads, Jonathan Franzen; Billion Dollar Loser, Reeves Wiedeman.

Thumbs Down: A Man of Parts, David Lodge; The Midnight Library, Matt Haig; The Decagon House Murders, Yukito Ayatsuji; Little, Big, John Crowley;

Pumped to Read: Klara and The Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro; To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara; Leviathan Falls, James S.A. Corey; The Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim; The Hare, Melanie Finn; Small Pleasures, Clare Chambers; Maggie Hope Series, Susan Elia MacNeal.

Articles and Links:

• Tweet Thread on Anne Rice
• Jenny Erpenbeck Profile (New Yorker)
• (Sigh) Bad Art Friend (NYT Magazine)
• Jeremy Strong Profile (New Yorker)
• Review of Yanigihara's To Paradise (Harpers)
• 100 Notable Books of 2021 (NYT)
• Joan Didion Archive at the New York Review of Books
• Sign up for Molly Young’s books newsletter here (NYT)