December 17, 2021 Best of 2021 Our Staff’s Favorite Books of 2021 By The Paris Review In which we tell you some of the things we most enjoyed reading this year. Rhian Sasseen’s reading log. Maybe this is unsurprising for an audio producer, but I like listening to people talk: about their job, their bad childhood, their love life, the bigots living next door. People are funny, especially when discussing things that aren’t. Here are some of the books I read this year that felt like listening. In Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, Belarusian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich sits at kitchen tables across the former USSR and records people’s stories. Not for the faint of heart. Or if you are, I recommend taking frequent breaks to watch dogs at the dog park. In the seventies, right before computers would change almost everything, Chicago radio interviewer Studs Terkel walked the streets and asked people “what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” Every single one-and-a-half-page testimony in Working feels like a novel. For The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson picked just three people to tell the story of the Great Migration: a sharecropper from Mississippi, a labor organizer in Florida’s orange groves, and a doctor from Louisiana. It’s filled with such great details, it makes me weepy with gratitude that someone saved them from the dustbin. A set of ocher silk sheets, her mother’s death, her electric bike, the time her father was imprisoned in South Africa—Deborah Levy treats every morsel of her living autobiography (Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living, Real Estate) with equal aplomb. It’s like listening to someone’s mind. Minus the repetition. —Helena de Groot Read More
December 10, 2021 Best of 2021 Our Contributors’ Favorite Books of 2021 By The Paris Review Bud Smith’s “To Read and Reread” fridge list. Some Paris Review contributors—from across our print issues, our website, and our podcast—give us a peek into their reading habits. I still got that list of books on my fridge that I’m working through (one of the first pictures on my Twitter). Made it a few years ago. Classics and famous books I hadn’t read yet. When I finish one I circle it on the list and whenever I wonder what to read next and feel stumped, I just walk over to the fridge. This year I read The Brothers Karamazov, which amazed me. It was hairy and funny and, as always with the books I love, not what I expected. Easily one of the best pieces of art added to the little thing called my life. I’d read other Dostoyevsky novels and didn’t connect with them on that same crazy level I felt connected to Brothers Karamazov. The copy I had was 776 pages and I couldn’t imagine cutting it down at all. Read More