Time for a thread on the best books that I read in 2021. Here are my ‘Ten’. Five works of fiction & memoirs, and five non-fiction.
Fiction & Memoir
- Land of Big Numbers — Te-Ping Chen. Picked this up early in the year when the stores opened, initially thinking it was a non-fiction. In the collection of stories, Te-Ping vividly imagines multitudes of lives in China with a touch of magic realism. My favorites: New Fruit and Lulu.
- Piranesi – Susanna Clarke. I loved getting lost in the labyrinthine footnotes in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. After 16 years of wait, the strange watery exploration in Piranesi is no less mesmerizing.
- Neapolitan Quartet —Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein. (Review of Book 1, Review of Book 2) I am late to this quartet. The second book is a scorching bildungsroman of lives in poverty, violence, and hope. It is a brutal irony of language & history that Ferrante refers to her characters speaking in dialetto but not writing the Neapolitan dialect itself.
- Copenhagen Trilogy — Tove Ditlevsen. Sparse, searingly raw, and tender confessional by Tove Ditlevsen. The first two books were translated by Tiina Nunnally who did a great translation of Kristin Lavransdatter. Btw: I learned that ‘Gift’ (title of book 3 in Danish) stands both for ‘married’ and ‘poison’.
- Stories from Sahara — SanMao. I realize I am late to SanMao, who is utterly brilliant. I wrote a thread about this book and SanMao here.
Finally, to wrap the fiction list off – my kid recommends The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.
Non-Fiction Reads
- Career and Family by Claudia Goldin. The most personal and thought-provoking book I read this year, as we struggled through balancing work, life, and family during the fog of the pandemic. Goldin deftly characterizes “greedy jobs” and the complex relationship between gender imbalance in various careers and the scheduling hours of those jobs as they evolved through the century. Decades of research backing the beautiful writing — loved the book.
- Scout Mindset by Julia Galef. Excellent addition to Julia Galef’s podcast. I have a fondness for open-minded authors trying to grok concepts through consistent effort. One impressive takeaway is on the nature of emotions: being emotional does not mean being irrational — a concept that I want to come back to and expand on later here.
- Shape by Jordan Ellenberg. A big hit at home as my kid “borrowed” it from me before I could get halfway in. A delightful tour of geometry from Markov to gerrymandering. I loved the detours, with rich details and gentle humor living within the subspaces in footnotes.
- AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans by Melanie Mitchell. A lucidly written overview of AI research starting from 1955 Dartmouth approached with humor and care. I love the idea of thinking about complexity in learning through the construction of analogies. The wickedly delightful picture from Andrew Karpathy does strengthen the embodiment hypothesis – the value of lived experience in the physical world.
- On the Abolition of Political Parties by Simone Weil. Has there been a more saintly intellectual from the twentieth century than Simone Weil? She finds the “transposition of the totalitarian spirit” pervading everywhere even outside of political parties: in the sciences, in arts and literature, in churches, schools, and universities. Her sharp observations have been more salient than now.
My Twitter thread on 2020 books is here:
0/n A delayed thread to recommend some books I read in an unusual 2020 (My reading dropped off precipitously after May 2020). An unranked list, arranged by topic.
— Senthil Veeraraghavan (@senthil_veer) January 10, 2021