The A.V. Club’s favorite books of 2021 so far

Two novels in translation and two Rachels (Cusk and Kushner) crack our top 10

By Laura Adamczyk, Danette Chavez, Rien Fertel, Ashley Naftule | July 8, 2021 | 5:00am

Books Lists Rachel Kushner

The A.V. Club’s favorite books of 2021 so far

Graphic: All by Natalie Peeples

Too often it can seem like literary coverage is dominated by scandal, that people don’t want to read books as much as they want to read about writers doing bad things. Whether it’s the parade of former Trump administration officials inking lucrative publishing deals (and then some of those deals being canceled) or a highly anticipated biography being pulled from the shelves after its author’s predatory past comes to light, the first half of 2021 has done nothing to diminish this perception. But (and here’s where we say that the “real” readers are always there reading, appreciating books, loving books, having meaningful conversations about books, etc.) that’s why we’re glad to call attention to the writing itself in our mid-year favorites. As with any such list, these 10 books are as eclectic as our individual tastes. A pair of novels in translation make an appearance here, as do nonfiction and poetry collections that have flown under the radar, and a couple books that don’t come out until later this month (we simply could not wait). And while many of these works focus on what you might call timely subjects like climate change, social media, and birding while Black, all of these books are urgent to us.

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Under A White Sky: The Nature Of The Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

by Elizabeth Kolbert (February 9, Crown)

In her follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert explores humanity’s successes, failures, and shocking follies in trying to push back against the Anthropocene. She takes a trip up the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to witness how engineers keep the invasive silver carp out of the Great Lakes—spoiler alert: by electrifying the river. And she pays a pilgrimage to see the Devils Hole pupfish, a tiny, cerulean swimmer-turned-“Stockholm species” that is dependent on the same beast (us!) that has caused their near extinction. When reading Under A White Sky, it’s difficult to determine what’s more frightening—what we’ve done or what’s to come: bioengineered “super coral” impervious to increasingly warm and acidic seas, a stratosphere scatter-shot with diamond dust to offset greenhouse gases (hence the titular white sky). “Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something,” one environmental activist tells Kolbert. “Sometimes it is the other way around.” [Rien Fertel]

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by Patricia Lockwood (February 16, Riverhead)

When it comes to the internet, the protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This most worries about its encroachment on her thoughts, how the “stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own” makes everyone on social media sound ovinely the same. But even if Twitter weren’t littered with oafs repeating identical meme phrasing or issuing self-righteous warnings not to “normalize” everything, there would still be far too many inputs. “Your attention is holy,” the protagonist tells a class, thinking of a monastery she once visited. It’s not until a family crisis arrives—the protagonist’s sister giving birth to a baby with an incredibly rare genetic disorder—that her scattered awareness narrows. Her experience is, finally, rooted more firmly in the physical world; yet the devotion she shows in giving her “minutes” to the child touches the sublime. [Laura Adamczyk]

by Christine Smallwood (March 2, Hogarth)

Keeping in mind that thing people say about how books teach you how to read them, consider Christine Smallwood ending the first paragraph of her first novel like this: “She wasn’t the plotting type.” She means her protagonist, Dorothy, doesn’t devise or scheme; just behind that, of course, is Smallwood the writer. In The Life Of The Mind, her interest in plot aligns with Ben Marcus’: “.” Here it would all seem overdetermined or even overwrought—a miscarriage as a book-length allegory for a stunted career in academia—but the novel is both dispiriting and breezy, its lungs deflating like a limp balloon then filling to fulsome capacity. It’s seen in the brilliant clarity of Dorothy’s wit and melancholy, and Smallwood’s resistance to broader narrative complications for something truer: Each mundane symbol Dorothy sees—be it a puppet show or a lingering spot of blood in her underwear—is not so different from how we all write ourselves onto the world around us. [Laura Adamczyk]

by Mieko Kawakami (trans. by Sam Bett and David Boyd, March 25, Europa)

Like any other notable stylistic choice (but maybe more than others), writing in the first-person from a child’s point of view has its risks. If the kid is rendered as too naive, they can become cloying; too knowing, and they’re a precocious, insufferable genius. In her second novel translated into English, Mieko Kawakami calibrates the voice of her 14-year-old narrator nearly perfectly. The character—known only as “Eyes,” the name his school bullies give him because of his lazy eye—is thoughtful and searching yet still ingenuous. He suffers the vicious tormenting by his peers while genuinely trying to understand why they take such pleasure in his pain. When a friendship blossoms between him and another bullied classmate, Kawakami fills their probing, sometimes playful conversations with all the insights, banalities, and verbal filler of two real-life sensitive teenagers. In a novel so dark as to seem buried underground, it’s an aching source of light. [Laura Adamczyk]

by Rachel Kushner (April 6, Scribner)

When Rachel Kushner writes, “In a new car, in which everything is plastic and somewhat ugly and works today but will break tomorrow, there’s no thrill to function,” she’s bemoaning not just a bygone golden age of automobile manufacturing, but that individuals from any era should care so little about their work or art that they would allow all elegance to be drained from its execution. You could flip randomly to any page in The Hard Crowd and find this principle on display—both in Kushner’s subjects and in the sentences themselves, which she unleashes with the sting and flair of a cracking whip. Like Denis Johnson or Clarice Lispector, two of her favorites, Kushner both prizes and has panache. The result is a book that, despite including 20 years of writing, on art, film, literature, and prison abolition, is a tighter, more cohesive statement than most collections written contemporaneously. [Laura Adamczyk]

by J. Drew Lanham (April 20, Hub City Press)

In 2013, J. Drew Lanham struck a nerve with “Nine Rules For The Black Birder,” an essay that cleverly delineated the plight of Black naturalists (1. “Be prepared to be confused with the other black birder.” 3. “Don’t bird in a hoodie. Ever.” 5. “Black birds—any black birds—are your birds.”) In Sparrow Envy, Lanham continues to map the intersection between birding and Blackness in lyrical short prose and poems like “No Murder Of Crows”: “They were silent as coal, / headed to roost, I assumed, / a congregation I refused to call a murder / because profiling ain’t what I do.” He birds “to escape for a few hours in other breathing beings’ lives. To envy who they are.” But stalking birds, awakens fears of being stalked: “thinking there might be some way to be where I am in my Black skin and not wonder if I’m being trailed, tailed, watched, surveilled, sized up to be brought down.” If only one could live like the grasshopper sparrow, he writes, “concerned with nothing else but being themselves.” [Rien Fertel]

by Rachel Cusk (May 4, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Rachel Cusk’s latest novel is the author at her most Cuskian: caustic yet comic, confessional yet distant, fragmented yet whole. Like her much-praised Outline trilogy, The Second Place tackles art and love, work and independence, youth and fame, the cruel ways we treat each other and especially ourselves. The story is bewilderingly simple (and simply bewildering): A writer invites a famous artist to stay in her secluded guesthouse—nothing happens, everything happens. It’s a short, breezy read perfect for enjoying with toes tucked under folds of warm, summer sand, but thoughtful enough to be saved and savored when winter returns. Buy a copy for yourself and another for an ex-lover. But, as Cusk writes, “Be careful what you ask people to endure.” [Rien Fertel]

by Ashley C. Ford (June 1, Flatiron)

In her memoir, Somebody’s Daughter, Ashley C. Ford makes her own extraordinary life eminently relatable. The writer, podcaster, and PROFILE By BuzzFeed News host made several media-focused superlatives lists by the time she was 30, but that’s not what makes this such an engrossing read. As Ford reflects on her upbringing in Indiana, the mother who raised her, and the father who was incarcerated for much of her life, she radiates heartache—but even more palpable is her sense of hope. Ford shows she hasn’t been diminished by any of her trauma, nor has she leaned into that old chestnut that pain inherently builds character. What’s most remarkable is the compassion and insight Ford shows in the people around her; even in a context where she’s free to go on about herself, she demonstrates the same abiding curiosity (and warm, witty prose) that’s made her one of the best interviewers around. [Danette Chavez]

by Pedro Mairal (July 20, Bloomsbury)

A frustrated Argentine novelist crosses the border to Montevideo to collect a bunch of cash to smuggle back home, cheat on his wife, and inadvertently learn the meaning behind “Man makes plans while God laughs.” Translated by Jennifer Croft, Mairal’s short and sharply written novel is a mocking send-up of male midlife crises. Trapped in a relationship that feels like “a two-headed monster,” Mairal’s protagonist views marriage as a slow suffocation. What keeps the book from being a high-brow “Take my wife, please!” is Mairal’s ruthless treatment of his narrator, who goes through a series of well-deserved Daffy Duck-esque tribulations that rob him of his dignity. It helps that Mairal can both craft exquisite lines of prose and also write killer bits, like when his schmuck of a protagonist explains how he uses superhero actors to figure out the right age gap in dating: “You can’t go out with someone if there’s a difference of more than two Batmans.” [Ashley Naftule]

by Patrick Wyman (July 20, Twelve Books)

Taking a cue from “how did we get here?” cinematic storytelling, Patrick Wyman’s book begins toward the end of his 40-year window of history with a vivid retelling of the bloody Sack of Rome. The Verge explores the technological, social, and economic advancements that transformed Europe from a backwater into a world power capable of exploiting and ravaging both the New World and its neighbors in Africa and Asia. Using the lives of 10 people (ranging from historical heavyweights like Columbus and Martin Luther to lesser-known movers and shakers like mercenary Götz von Berlichingen and wool merchant John Heritage), Wyman traces the sudden advancements and convergences that led to the Sack and set the table for capitalism’s future. Wyman leavens the density of his subject matter with a clear, easy to digest prose style, memorable anecdotes (including a scene where a cardinal escapes certain doom by sneaking away from a mob inside a bucket), and a knack for rendering historical giants with a level of detail that brings them down to earth. [Ashley Naftule]

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