Books Wot I Read in 2021

It’s been a bumper year for reading, and not just because I left my day job in June; the 73 books on this list were actually spread fairly evenly throughout the year. I don’t know why, but it feels like life turned a corner. I’ve been happier and more motivated, and I’ve been intellectually curious in a way that I haven’t been since my long depression years ago. I’ve had some realisations about my life and my career and I have a lot of good ideas about where I want to go next. Maybe I’ve become more placid and equanimous as I hurtle towards the grave. It’s a nice feeling.

The year’s books always give me the chance to reflect on who I was and what I was doing when I read them. I read Don’t Tell Alfred before the January 6 insurrection and I’ll take all the credit for my uncanny foresight. Swamplandia! was the last book my New Orleans book group read before finally disbanding due to everyone going through major life changes at the same time — I still haven’t found a replacement for those wonderful people. I read A Confederacy of Dunces knowing I was leaving New Orleans soon, and Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet while sitting on the train headed for my new home with a snake smuggled in my luggage hoping she wouldn’t escape in the night and eat a tourist. I read Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day while lying on an air mattress, body wracked with pain and bones made of glass because our furniture took five weeks to arrive from New Orleans. I read Beowulf while writing 1,600 words a day for National Novel Writing Month, desperate to be productive again and awash in admiration for a whole idiom of epic poetry that was new to me. Where else would someone “unlock his word horde”?

The thing about doing anything well is I feel an obligation to keep it up (cue Kenneth Williams: “It’s fairly easy to get it up — it’s getting it to stay up, that’s what counts!”) But I’d drive myself crazy that way. It’s impossible to keep all the plates spinning, and you just have to let some of them break. I can’t promise to be half as productive next year, but I will set myself a mission: to read at least one difficult book I’ve been putting off for a while. There’s a number that fit the bill — Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, Summa Technologiae by Stanisław Lem, and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter are all candidates. Wish me luck.

Don’t Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford

A novel about a diplomat who shows up to a new posting to find out her predecessor is still there and refuses to leave. It seemed relevant at the time! Apparently not Nancy Mitford’s best work, but it was enjoyable enough for me. I look forward to reading some of her others.
Max and the Multiverse by Zachry Wheeler
Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

Allie Brosh is a national treasure. Solutions is every bit as deep and rib-crackingly funny as her first book, Hyperbole and a Half. There aren’t many books I would encourage absolutely everyone to read, but this is one of them.
Factory 19 by Dennis Glover

A cute premise about a commune where everyone pretends it’s 1948. For anyone who knows me, this is my jam. I actually and unironically would love to live there, minus the fanaticism and violence that ultimately bring down the social experiment in the novel.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab
Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen by James Goss

This marks the last attempt to dig up Douglas Adams’ corpse and reanimate it so the BBC can rake in a few extra spondulicks. Every last scrap of paper he ever sneezed on has now become its own novel. Can we leave him alone now please?
Mr. Tot Aĉetas Mil Okulojn de Jean Forge
The Book of Frank by CAConrad
The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips

This was a bizarre novel that I enjoyed but didn’t love until I reached the end. Phillips takes the exact opposite approach from me when it comes to writing historical novels. I’ll just make up any old shit to please myself, but Phillips has done an excruciating amount of research that very few of his readers will even appreciate. I studied Egyptology at uni, so I was delighted by the references to old Egyptologists and Egyptian grammar, but those are just questions of detail. At heart this is about the essential unknowability of history and the insuperable cruelty of social class. Our protagonist spends his whole life delving into the sands of Egyptian history, and yet his own life is a cipher that his contemporaries can’t untangle. It’s an epistolary novel told from many different perspectives, and what makes it so clever is that none of the characters has a full picture of what’s going on — only the reader knows what’s happening, and even then not until the end, and even then not everything. I won’t spoil anything but it’s dark — really dark. I used to have nightmares about this. But at the same time it’s rogueish and funny and certainly a great mystery story. It’s one of those novels that’s a little bit of everything, and it’s one of the few I specifically intend to read again.
Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss

You’ll have to excuse the number of Doctor Who novels in the list as I continue my quest to work my way through all the New Adventures.
Doctor Who: Love and War by Paul Cornell
A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet

Lydia Millet (whose name means “Lydia Birdseed”) has written a high-handed, redundant, and stultifying novel. It has all the charm of piece of ham that’s fallen behind the fridge and its smug “but think of the children” morality leaves a taste in your mouth like a convenience-store cigar. It’s about the dangers of climate change (I already knew about that, thanks) and lays the blame on the middle class for not protesting enough — not politicians, not corporations, not stockholders, not CEOs, not the people who are actually doing the polluting, not even a target as broad and ripe as capitalism in general, but teachers and doctors and artists. This is victim blaming at its obscene worst — like telling a bullied kid that they were asking for it. It’s not only dangerously stupid, but also badly written — at one point God (actual literal God) shows up in a helicopter and shoots all the bad guys. This is the kind of novel that makes you deeply concerned for the mental health of the author. It’s the only book I’ve ever read that made me so angry I wanted to demand my money back, not because I felt cheated of the $16 I paid for the ebook (though I did) but because I didn’t think the author deserved to benefit from my purchase.
You’re Ruining the Dystopia for Everyone! by Frank Conniff
Imaginary Cities by Darran Anderson
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Tiny Alice by Edward Albee
Doctor Who: Transit by Ben Aaronovitch
6am in the Universe by Benjamin Frater
The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov

Last Ringbearer is often touted as a Lord of the Rings fanfic that portrays Mordor as an up-and-coming industrial power that gets mobbed by the pre-industrial nations surrounding it. That’s all on page one. The rest of the novel deals with the author’s exploration of his world and its politics. It’s really more of an espionage thriller than a sword-and-sorcery fantasy novel or an attempt to turn The Lord of the Rings on its head. Yeskov’s Middle Earth is intimidatingly detailed and well worked out, so fans of world-building will like this but its appeal for me was a bit limited.
The Aeneid Book I by Virgil

I was in two minds about how to treat The Aeneid. I’ve been brushing up on my high-school Latin and was determined to read one of the world’s great works of poetry, but it’s twelve books long. I wasn’t sure whether to count each one separately, or sum up all the ones I read this year, or just do them all together when I finish it. In the end I think it works better to treat them individually because a) they are thematically different, b) they each take about a month for me to read so they represent a significant effort, and c) so I can see what else I was reading at the same time. Otherwise it looks like all I’m reading is Doctor Who trash and Lord of the Rings fan fiction, and we all know that would never happen. Cough cough.
The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman

I can remember exactly where I was the first time I opened this book. I was sitting at a bar in Raleigh, where I’d taken a short holiday to go to the 2015 Esperanto summer class. I had the ebook edition and pulled up the first page having no idea what to expect other than maybe something sci-fi. The opening line baffled me unutterably, but by the end of the first paragraph I realised this might be the cleverest and funniest book I’d ever read. My opinion has not changed. When I tragically got to the end of Beauman’s oeuvre in 2018, I promised myself I’d wait a few years before I set out to enjoy them all a second time. I don’t know why but this year the time seemed right to buy a nice first-edition hardcover and read this novel the way it deserved to be read.

Although it did wind up having some speculative elements, they’re not the focus of the novel. The focus is Egon Loeser, a set designer in the 1930s, who is so self-absorbed he doesn’t notice Nazi Germany happening around him. He’s in a setting that by all rights should be about the rise of fascism, but all Loeser wants to do is get laid — the one thing that will never happen because, as his name suggests, he is just awful. We track him from Berlin to Paris to Los Angeles, hot on the heels of a woman who has no interest in him whatever.

As for what it’s about… Untangling a Beauman novel is never an easy task. I think this one is about the way we treat people via the perfect counterexample of Loeser, who is such a prick to everyone that he makes himself miserable. But it’s also about the way we move through the world whether we want to or not — the way we change and the way things change around us. As Beauman writes, the real trick isn’t inventing a teleportation machine, it’s inventing a machine that can keep you rooted to the spot.

Beauman swings from postmodernism to science fiction to murder mystery to slapstick like Tarzan swinging through trees. It’s breathtaking, and an absolute privilege, to behold. File under “Books I Wish I’d Written”. Hell, file under “Books I Wish I Were Even Capable of Writing”.
Doctor Who: The Highest Science by Gareth Roberts
You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey by Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar
The Reason Why the Closet-Man is Never Sad by Russell Edson
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Being There by Jerzy Kosiński
Pikniko ĉe Vojrando de Arkadij kaj Boris Strugackij
The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirähk
Doctor Who: The Pit by Neil Penswick
The Aeneid Book II by Virgil
More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
The Story of Life by Chris (Simpsons Artist)
Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan

I got a question about the Peloponnesian War wrong in a game of Trivial Pursuit. I was so ashamed that I went and bought the biggest book about it I could find, which turned out to be a grave error. The war went for about thirty years and it took as long to read the book. Kagan is an expert and has elsewhere written a lengthy academic work, but I think I would have preferred something targeted more to a popular audience. Still, you can’t fault it for its coverage — it takes apart a huge and long and complicated confluence of events and explains it in a way that’s comprehensible to a modern reader not familiar with the thousands of political alliances that made up ancient Greece. Maybe it’s just one of those things that you can’t cover without getting into the weeds.
Memoirs of a Space Traveler by Stanisław Lem
Concrete Island by J. G. Ballard
Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse by David Mitchell
Song of Spider-Man by Glen Berger

I loved every second of this memoir about the disastrous Spiderman Broadway musical. I hadn’t been familiar with it before reading this, but apparently they planned a hugely complex acrobatic stage show that went wrong when the stagecraft jammed and left actors dangling on wires in the air above the audience. The memoir about it defies belief. Berger is so enthusiastic about a concept that seemed dubious to me from the outset. A musical about Spiderman? With music by U2? Called “Turn Off the Dark”? What the fuck? And then he goes on to express a horror that the result of all his work might turn out to be camp. Ducky, it’s a musical about a man in a spandex bodysuit, it was never not going to be camp. Hell, it’s a Broadway musical, isn’t it? It’s almost camp by definition. The obvious approach would have been to lean into the silliness from the start and just give people a good romp instead of treating the thing like Shakespeare.

Then there’s the show’s director, the much-ballyhooed Julie Taymor. Berger talks about her as a genius, buying into the story of her accomplishment every bit as much as she herself does. It’s a struggle to figure out just what makes her so brilliant, though. Her past credits include the Broadway adaptation of The Lion King, which was a legit success but is still just a Disney story about an annoying kid who grows up to be an annoying adult. Also the Beatles-themed film Across the Universe, which is a pretentious slog. So it’s baffling to find Taymor as this figure who dominates the memoir like the ghost of Judy Garland, convinced of her own genius and raging at anyone who dares to contradict her. She sounds like a monster, and even though Berger loves her he’s also clearly terrified of her.

I can’t recommend Song of Spider-Man enough. It’s one of those real-life stories where you just won’t believe what you’re reading.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

I knew I was going to leave New Orleans soon, so I wanted to re-read my favourite novel in the city it’s about. Knowing the city doesn’t change the way you read Confederacy, but the louche atmosphere, the wacky accents, and feeling of decay suddenly make sense when you’re there. This novel remains as funny as it was the day I first read it. Everyone who loves this novel remembers the moment it first struck them. I might not laugh as helplessly as I did then, but every time I re-read this I appreciate it in new ways.
The Rape of the A.P.E. by Allan Sherman

A personal, eccentric, daffy, and fascinating history of the sexual revolution, brought to you by the man who sang “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”. This one deserved its own post.
Doctor Who: Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans
Doctor Who: White Darkness by David A. McIntee
Real Queer America by Samantha Allen
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
Doctor Who: Lucifer Rising by Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore
The Aeneid Book III by Virgil
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Long Way is a charming story about friendship in outer space. A friend described it as a space opera, which I think is missing the point. Space operas are about bad guys in pointy hats and melodramatic plots (e.g. Star Wars). This is about the pick-n-mix crew of a spaceship and how they all learn to appreciate each other and become friends. There are no real bad guys per se — no-one rubbing their hands together and saying, “Nozink in ze vorld can shtop me now.” It’s endearing and seems to be part of the wave of positivity that people have been leaning into the past few years. This is effortlessly executed and it won me over with its sheer charm and class. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to see more often in science-fiction, which is too often dominated by neckbeards and testosterone.
Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden

I grew up with this one in the air. It was a YA best-seller in Australia in the 90s, so I’d always intended to read it. I’d been told the plot was about what might happen if Australia were invaded by an unnamed foreign power. I was expecting something a bit science-fictiony, but it wound up being a very factual and mercenary novel about teenagers hiding out in the desert and how they survive. Unfortunately there wasn’t anything I really cared about in this and I’m hard-pressed to imagine why it was so popular. Oh well, they can’t all be winners.
Neoreaction a Basilisk by Elizabeth Sandifer
The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko
Landslide by Michael Wolff
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson

Miss Pettigrew is a wonderful novel about female friendship. The recent film adaptation tries to inject some drama in the tale by setting some of the women at odds with each other, which misses the whole point of the story for me. The point is that they all help each other, they’re friends despite their class differences, so making them catty and internecine is perverse. It’s a beautifully guileless and enormously fun novel that isn’t like anything else I’ve read. A few unfortunate glimpses of 1930s racism do marr the novel, but not enough to derail it. Overall it’s a fabulous social comedy and there’s not nearly enough of it.
Studies in the Art of Rat-catching by H. C. Barkley
Space Odyssey by Michael Benson
The Ill-Tempered Clavichord by S. J. Perelman
Skrine by Kathleen Sully
The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

The Kingdoms was a delight — a queer time-travelling historical action/romance that I couldn’t put down. Pulley is better known for some of her other novels which I haven’t read yet, so I get to anticipate the pleasure of reading those when I need something good in my life.
Tinkering by John Clarke
The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban
Death in Brunswick by Boyd Oxlade

Death in Brunswick is an Aussie classic. The movie has the wonderful cast of John Clarke and Sam Neill, but when I was watching it I was struck by what seems to be a sudden change in direction towards the end. The reason for that was a lot clearer when I read the book — there’s a tacked-on happy ending that tried to make the movie more palatable, but made it weaker. The irony is the most famous scenes in the movie are the most outré ones, so they pulled their punches for nothing. The book doesn’t shy away from anything and, despite lacking the comic talents of Clarke and Neill, it winds up being the superior version of the story. It’s dark, it’s funny, and it’s deeply Aussie.
The Aeneid Book IV by Virgil

I’m probably a philistine but I’ll always believe most of the Aeneid is filler — book I just details Aeneas arriving in Carthage, book III is about them dicking around in boats, and book V is the sport section of the newspaper. The truly moving and beautiful books so far have been book II (the fall of Troy) and book IV (Dido and Aeneas). For me book IV will always be where it’s at. You don’t need to be the son of Venus or the queen of Carthage to get something out of this. Virgil puts all the power of his poesy to the task of telling a love story — the conflicted emotions, the heartache, and the passion. When you read something like this, 2,000 years ago feels more like the present day. Aeneas in particular is such a fallible hero. He doesn’t want the task he’s been given, he behaves with utter bastardry to Dido, and he ultimately winds up ignorant and alone, not even aware of the damage he’s caused. His flaws as a protagonist are what make the Aeneid transcendent, in my opinion, because if even a divine prince of Troy can be such a fuckup, then it makes the rest of us feel less bad about it when we fuck up.

This book also contains my favourite line from the poem so far: “cadat ante diem, mediaque inhumatus harena” (may he die before his time and lie unburied in a barren land). The people I’ve wanted to say that to…
Buckaroo Banzai by Earl Mac Rauch
The Complete Chess Course by Fred Reinfeld

At the start of this year I didn’t know much about chess beyond how the pieces move and something vague about wanting to control the centre squares. I enjoyed chess and wanted to learn how to play without embarrassing myself quite so much. Now I know a lot more about chess but I’m not sure how much I still enjoy it. Knowing basic strategy will put you out of the league of all your friends but you’ll still be the worst in a room full of regular players. Getting good competitively becomes a matter of memorising as many chess openings and published games as possible, which sounds like my hell.

While chess is a timeless brainteaser and a fun pastime, it is ultimately just a very complicated Sudoku. I’m not sure it’s worth the time to get really good at it when you could be using that time to do something that nourishes your soul instead. Or maybe I’m only saying that because I’m bitter about my blitz ranking.
Doctor Who: Shadowmind by Christopher Bulis
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heany
Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris
Long Pig by William C. Miller

This was a pleasant surprise. It billed itself as “a fantasy concerning cannibals, courts and other consumers”, which is a big promise to live up to. Part of this takes place on a fictitious island near New Guinea where the locals worship a god called Big Mouth and like to eat the bodies of enemy tribesmen. Part takes place in San Francisco, where a rich woman is accused of murdering a homeless man who tried to steal her purse. It’s the old “but the white people are the real savages” schtick, which would be more yawn-inducing if it weren’t so well done. It’s genuinely funny and the author has a real insight into political and legal processes that give the novel a wicked bite. I didn’t feel like its handling of race was inappropriate or colonialistic, and its depiction of the islanders goes a lot further than the fact that they’re cannibals. There is some great characterisation of the American and Australian characters as rapey, drunk, hypocritical, incompetent, and flat-out stupid. You feel every moment of frustration and rage at them, and Miller’s satire seems especially prescient even though he wrote this twenty years ago. He seems to have anticipated the wave of anomie, conspiracy thinking, and “alternative facts” that have characterised the Trump era of American politics. Miller goes as far as to make Big Mouth Himself a character in the novel, and even though that sounds like a completely bonkers thing to do, it’s just too much fun not to like it.
Doctor Who: Birthright by Nigel Robinson
The Future is Female! edited by Lisa Yaszek

The power of an anthology rests with its editor. I’ve read some collections that fell utterly flat, while others gripped me in a way that made the editor just as significant to me as the author of a good novel. Yaszek has put together a sensational collection of science fiction short stories written by women and backed them up with an insightful introduction and biographical notes. Some of these stories were already familiar to me while others were new discoveries, which made this feel like all the best anthologies do — like revisiting old friends and making new ones.
Living with a Dead Language by Ann Patty
The Aeneid Book V by Virgil
The Weary Blues by Langston Hughes

This was a somewhat late inclusion in the year’s reading inspired by the fact that this book will be leaving copyright in 2022. It’s been on my shelf for ages and I thought this would be a good way to see out the year. Hughes’ poems are laced with gentle humour, fangs, irony, awe, hope, pathos, and of course the rhythms of Harlem blues. They’re not all gems, but even so they all hang together to create a contiguous landscape with certain words in later poems carrying resonances from the way Hughes used them in earlier poems. It reads like the first concept album. I found too many individual favourites to name and I look forward to enjoying them all again.