{"id":156372,"date":"2021-12-10T12:00:20","date_gmt":"2021-12-10T17:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156372"},"modified":"2021-12-13T10:58:14","modified_gmt":"2021-12-13T15:58:14","slug":"our-contributors-favorite-books-of-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/12\/10\/our-contributors-favorite-books-of-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Contributors\u2019 Favorite Books of 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Bud Smith\u2019s \u201cTo Read and Reread\u201d fridge list.<\/p><\/div>\n

Some Paris Review contributors\u2014from across our print issues, our website, and our podcast\u2014give us a peek into their reading habits.<\/em><\/p>\n

I still got that list of books on my fridge that I\u2019m working through (one of the first pictures on my Twitter). Made it a few years ago. Classics and famous books I hadn\u2019t 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<\/a><\/i>, <\/i>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\u2019d read other Dostoyevsky novels and didn\u2019t connect with them on that same crazy level I felt connected to Brothers Karamazov<\/i>. The copy I had was 776 pages and I couldn\u2019t imagine cutting it down at all.<\/p>\n

Right now I\u2019m reading Malone Dies<\/i><\/a>, the second novel in Beckett\u2019s trilogy (Molloy<\/i>, Malone Dies<\/i>, The Unnamable<\/i>). I\u2019m halfway through and just astounded. Molloy<\/em> was amazing, too, a very funny book, laugh so hard you cry\u2026 It reminded me a bit of The Sound and the Fury<\/i>, when Jason Compson is chasing his niece around. In Part II of Molloy<\/em>, it becomes a metafictional Smokey and the Bandit. <\/i>I don\u2019t want to give anything away, spoil anything for new readers of it. There\u2019s a big payoff. All the things I\u2019ve heard about Beckett, nobody ever told me how funny he is.<\/p>\n

I also recently read Martha Grover\u2019s new memoir, Sorry I Was Gone<\/i><\/a>. Her work is killer. She\u2019s got a part in there she wrote called \u201cThe Math Class,\u201d and I\u2019ve picked up the phone on more than a few occasions just to read that to people because I thought it would blow their mind. I taught it in some prose workshops I teach out of this apartment of mine. Martha Grover writes about her life in a conversational way that slips into these wild lucid-dream stretches of prose\u2014she\u2019s an artist like Tove Jansson or Lucia Berlin. I\u2019d read anything she wrote about because the voice is so great. People should also check out her first two books, One More for the People<\/i><\/a>\u00a0and The End of My<\/i> Career<\/em><\/a>, both out from Perfect Day (a really great small press in Portland, Oregon).<\/p>\n

I also just read Atticus Lish\u2019s new novel, The War for Gloria<\/a>, <\/i>and thought it was great, so tough and smart and true, very personal. His first novel, Preparation for the Next Life, <\/i>introduced me to a whole world of underground writing through presses like Tyrant Books, Two Dollar Radio, and many others that are gone now. But whenever I don\u2019t feel like carrying around War and Peace<\/i>, for fuck\u2019s sake, I just go on the internet and look to see what the underground writers and presses are doing, that stuff always feels so immediate and powerful and raw, straight to the vein.<\/p>\n

I was talking to an author the other day who was trying to find a publisher for their book of poems. They didn\u2019t feel like they had any idea where they could send anymore\u2014didn\u2019t want to enter another university poetry contest after already spending an endless waterfall of submission fees. I told the poet what they should do is call around to bookstores and see if any of their local ones have a really great small press section, well curated and cared for. Just ask the person who runs the section, what are the small presses that are really moving the hearts of the people? Or even better than a phone call or email, go in to the store, talk face-to-face with the bookseller. They\u2019ll pull their favorite book that nobody is reviewing yet right off the shelf. Buy that book from the store. I\u2019m telling you. Somebody looks you in the eye and says, This right here is incredible (and they\u2019re probably shaking it at you), this will move you, it\u2019s from this artist who is important to me<\/em>, from this publisher that is important to me. <\/i>That\u2019s worth so much more than what the New York Times Book Review<\/em> says or doesn\u2019t say. You\u2019ll find the best books of your life that way.<\/p>\n

Took me a while to learn what I even liked in contemporary writing. Like most people, I just had that stuff we were assigned in high school English, and that was all right, but if it did speak to me, it didn\u2019t feel like there was a chance I could ever speak back to it. I got a little bit away from school and started reading classics that were just classics because people, centuries later, still couldn\u2019t shut up about how incredible The Brothers Karamazov <\/i>is. <\/i>And then on top of that, a steady diet of photocopied zines and handmade chapbooks, and small press novels I had recommended to me, face to face, because I went looking and asking. I\u2019m thankful anybody takes the time to suggest anything to me. I can\u2019t get to it all, but if a couple people shake it at me, I have no choice but to add it to my fridge list and eventually let my life be changed by it.<\/p>\n

These days I read a lot of great work online, of course. I\u2019m looking forward to December 31, when Brian Alan Ellis begins serializing his new novel, Hobbies You Enjoy<\/i>, on his Instagram (@hobbiesyouenjoy<\/a>). Every day, a new post from the novel. I\u2019ve already read Hobbies You Enjoy<\/i>; it\u2019s hilarious, and deep, and moving\u2014a special thing. Keep an eye out. \u2014<\/strong>Bud Smith<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I found myself pushing Eyal Press\u2019s book Dirty Work<\/i><\/a> on people this year, because it gets at something broken about our political culture. Unfortunately this something is broken in a way that is all too convenient for America\u2019s elite, on the left as well as the right, so it will be hard to fix. With in-depth interviews, Press tells the stories of people who do America\u2019s dirty work and bear the scars on their bodies and souls: prison guards, drone operators, border patrol agents, slaughterhouse workers, oil rig roustabouts. Some of these jobs come with a risk of maiming and death; others, such as drone operation, do not. But all come with a risk of what sociologists call moral injury: the people who hold the jobs often have to compromise the values of their core self. In doing so, they take on stigma. They become seen, and sometimes come to see themselves, as morally reprehensible, undeserving of sympathy\u2014which lets the rest of us off the hook. In other words, part of the job description is to bear the shame of doing what the rest of us, as a society, have decided that we want but that we don\u2019t want to be stained with. To imprison large numbers of people while spending as little as possible. To keep the price of meat low. To project American power abroad without much concern for the deaths of innocent bystanders. The people who do the dirty work are paid\u2014not very well, usually\u2014to be broken. To have the nightmares. To be the ones who have to try to numb themselves by drinking and using. You might ask: But what kind of person would take a job as a prison guard, anyway? Press\u2019s answer: someone who doesn\u2019t have a better economic option. In our society, economic need is a kind of force. Shaming, Press suggests, is a way of covering our tracks. Dirty Work<\/i> is heartbreaking, and I hope it triggers a reconception of personalized guilt as the result of a political and economic system.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a member of the pandemic class of new birders, which means now I read bird books, and this year the best one I found was Jonathan Meiburg\u2019s A Most Remarkable Creature<\/i><\/a>. It\u2019s about striated caracaras, which Charles Darwin observed stealing hats and compasses when he visited the Falkland Islands, where some of the birds still live today. As a rule, birds of prey are solitary and single-minded, interested in little but hunting. The striated caracara, however, is playful, curious, trusting, and open to new experiences. If you offer your keys, it will grab at them excitedly; from a collection of stuffed animals, it can learn to fetch Nemo and Piglet by name. Worldwide, only a few thousand survive, including fifty or sixty in Great Britain, descendants of a handful imported in the middle of the twentieth century by an eccentric millionaire enthusiast known as the Penguin King. The birds sound personable<\/i>, and Meiburg\u2019s digressive account of being smitten with them, and of traveling to Argentina, Chile, and Great Britain to meet them, and up the Rewa River and into the jungles of Guyana in search of the red-throated caracara, one of its relatives, impresses on the reader that the world is still, even now, full of marvels. \u2014<\/b>Caleb Crain<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because I have a tendency to read passively and allow myself simply to be immersed in the action of a story that George Saunders\u2019s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain<\/a>\u00a0<\/i>felt to me like a revelation. Saunders presents seven great Russian stories alongside essays exploring why they\u2019re great and why, when reading them, we might feel what we feel. With the first story, Chekhov\u2019s \u201cIn the Cart,\u201d Saunders gives us a page of the text, then interrupts himself to discuss how the reader may react to what they\u2019ve just read. He does this in simple terms: What do we know, having read the page, that we didn\u2019t know before? What are we curious about? What are we expecting to happen next? Then he gives us the next page. And so on. It\u2019s a risky, brilliant move. The idea is that close, intense attention to a story will inform our own writing, that some craft or instinct will be assimilated. Do I believe this? Maybe. Probably.<\/p>\n

In any case, there was something thrilling about encountering Chekhov\u2019s story in the company of another reader\u2014and one as attentive as George Saunders\u2014a page at a time. Saunders\u2019s approach to thinking about all of the stories is usefully workmanlike, but he doesn\u2019t forget the forces of strangeness, of mystery, of not knowing what things mean (see the astonishing fifth essay on Gogol).<\/p>\n

The subtitle of the book is In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life<\/i>. A blurb notes: \u201cthe process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is as much a craft as it is a quality of openness and a willingness to see the world through new eyes.\u201d In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain<\/i>, he shows us that the same can be said of reading.<\/p>\n

Maybe it was finishing A Swim in a Pond in the Rain <\/i>early in the year that led me to spend much of 2021 going back to books I have loved: The Ice Palace<\/i><\/a>, by Tarjei Vesaas (translated by Elizabeth Rokkan); They Came Like Swallows<\/i><\/a>, by William Maxwell; Where Reasons End<\/i><\/a>, by Yiyun Li. Maybe I thought I would come away from these books with a new understanding of them and maybe I did, a little, I\u2019m not sure. But I know that I felt more deeply how beautiful these books are and, in the end, how mysterious. \u2014<\/b>Chetna Maroo<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Recently I\u2019ve been hopping among books of nonfiction, having trouble sticking with a novel. I reread Kafka\u2019s diaries: \u201cI don\u2019t read him to read him, but rather to lie on his breast,\u201d he wrote of Strindberg on May 4, 1915. \u201cHe holds me on his left arm like a child. I sit there like a man on a statue. Ten times I almost slip off, but at the eleventh attempt I sit there firmly, feel secure, and have a wide view.\u201d Around the same time I was chomping through Michael Zantovsky\u2019s biography of V\u00e1clav Havel, in which I learned that Kafka\u2019s un-banning by the Communists in 1963 might have precipitated the Prague Spring. The language of two new books of poems, Wendy Xu\u2019s The Past<\/i><\/a> and Geoffrey Nutter\u2019s Giant Moth Perishes<\/i><\/a>, really gripped me (not exactly nonfiction, perhaps?). Having just introduced my five-year-old to movie musicals, I was charmed and often amazed by Earl Hess and Pratibha Dabholkar\u2019s Singin\u2019 in the Rain: The Making of an American Masterpiece<\/i><\/a>. And the other night I read the reissue of Lucille Clifton\u2019s memoir, Generations<\/i><\/a>. The book belongs to Clifton\u2019s charismatic father, Samuel\u2014he\u2019s quoted so much he becomes a kind of second narrator. As a child he was cared for by his great-grandmother, Mammy Ca\u2019line, who was captured in Africa as a child in 1822. Much of what she remembered she never told him, and a painful refrain is Ca\u2019line\u2019s refusal to put certain parts of her experience into words: \u201cAnd I would ask her what it was like on the boat and she would just shake her head.\u201d She shakes her head a number of times in Generations<\/i>, and it\u2019s the sense of facts withheld, gaps in the record, memories unspoken that made me feel this short book\u2019s awful intensity. \u2014<\/b>Jana Prikryl<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

This year, due to ongoing insomnia, I listened to a lot of books while trying to fall asleep. Some of them so many times I\u2019d be embarrassed to know the actual number. Primarily these were old favorites, Samantha Irby\u2019s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life <\/i>and Wow, No Thank You<\/i>, and R. Eric Thomas\u2019s Here For It<\/i>. What I have noticed, listening to these essay collections multiple times, is that with both authors, the humor is so delicious it almost distracts from how brilliant they are. I also loved listening to Rachel Yoder\u2019s Nightbitch <\/i><\/a>and Jenn Shapland\u2019s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers<\/a>. <\/i>Beyond audiobooks encountered in the middle of the night, I thought Claire Vaye Watkins\u2019s I Love You But I\u2019ve Chosen Darkness <\/i><\/a>was a masterpiece. So chaotic and feral and good. And based on early manuscripts I’ve had the pleasure of reading, I\u2019m eagerly anticipating Gabrielle Civil\u2019s the deja vu<\/a><\/i> <\/i>and Raquel Gutierrez\u2019s Brown Neon<\/a>. <\/i>\u2014<\/b>Aisha Sabatini Sloan<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I always learn something new about black people from white people. No matter how much I observe myself and the other black people I know, I always find, reading a book like Pete Dexter’s Train,<\/i><\/a> these intriguing dimensions of experience and language that I had not noticed, revealed from another dimension. It disturbs me. It delights me. Fan of Chester Himes that I am, I was fascinated by Dexter\u2019s portrait of a malevolent caddy dispatcher, and by that character\u2019s counsel to the black golf caddy, Train, that an inquisitive life is better with \u201csomething on his person.\u201d<\/p>\n

I read Jonathan Franzen\u2019s Crossroads<\/i><\/a> and was shocked to find him dealing with the same themes I am trawling through in my latest book: liturgy and the Christian seasons and the problem of Christian moral duty, sinful guilt and redemption. I noticed on the cover that his name is in bigger type than the title, so it is kind of as if he is the marquee. The characters are almost types and the situations staged and the idealized debates and conversations perfunctorily academic. And yet I think that is a problem we are having in the country today: not enough Americans have been to a good college\u2014a damn elitist thing to say, but it still seems right.<\/p>\n

In the summer, my son who is sixteen turned me on to a song by Chicago rapper G Herbo called \u201cSome Nights<\/a>.\u201d We were driving to Greensboro and I was trying to stay awake and I asked him why had he put on soporific cartoon music, my general critique of post-1996 hip-hop. But on the road from old Confederate Route 29 between Danville and Leesburg, I listened to Herbo\u2019s two minutes on Swervo<\/i> and was energized and transported to my youth. In his 128 bars, he echoed our attitudes of confrontation with police and the structural force they represented, and my prayer that my own sons won\u2019t seek out the same confrontation. \u201cWhat about the Opp?\u201d The theme of dynamic maroon-like survival is enjambed in every single overstuffed line of his. \u201cHe\u2019n een get thu process n this nigga\u2019s snitchin.\u201d Not much alliteration tops that. There are the plaintive, affective dimensions of the humble lyricist who bangs the introduction \u201cStraight up out the trenches,\u201d and the minimalist existentialism of these twenty words squished into eight bars: \u201cWhile I\u2019m out in public I think about leaving in a blink I throw all my shit in a hoodie.\u201d I sent a text message to my youngest son connecting \u201cSeen you in there wit you bop you know I gotta top for uh\u201d to the history of the blues and bebop. \u2014<\/strong>Lawrence Jackson<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paris Review contributors\u2014from across our print issues, our website, and our podcast\u2014give us a peek into their reading habits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68319],"tags":[68320,41516,67827],"class_list":["post-156372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2021","tag-68320","tag-favorite-books","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOur Contributors\u2019 Favorite Books of 2021 by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"December 10, 2021 \u2013 Paris Review contributors\u2014from across our print issues, our website, and our podcast\u2014give us a peek into their reading habits.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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