ReD’s Favorite Books of 2021

Photo by Nanna Sine Munnecke

These are our favorite books of 2021. Not all of them were published last year, but they all speak to the uncertain times we are living in and offer some kind of solace or guidance on how to navigate our ever-changing social worlds. They also speak to the human condition at a time when so much of our lives is becoming depersonalized, commodified, or isolated.

We hope you enjoy and take comfort in them as much as we did (Special thanks to David Kearford, Millie Arora, Brendan Muha, Charlie Strong, Gabriel Coren, Alexander Eve, Filip Lau, Katy Osborn, Nanna Sine Munnecke, Emilie Kirstine Heide, and Lara Casciola).

·       Deeply human and powerfully empathetic, Popisho, by Leone Ross, is a vividly surreal journey through a Caribbean-inspired parallel world where magic is part of everyday life. Characters grapple with very familiar issues in totally unique circumstances – providing a wonderful vantage-point for reflecting on some of the fundamental dynamics of human and societal behaviour – class struggle, gender dynamics, the stigma of addiction. Reading the book can feel like fieldwork – everything is surreal and the reader is not always sure what is going on – but they will come to realize they are looking at things in a new way.

·      In Thin Places: Essays from In Between, Jordan Kisner tells the everyday stories that often get overlooked. With journalistic detail and a deep emphasis on putting the human experience front and center, she covers rich topics from religion to ethics in experimental medicines to finding meaning in everyday work. Reading it provides a lesson for how we can all look at the world with more empathy.

·       In The Employees, a novel and modern work of sci-fi, the Danish author Olga Ravn explores – in only 136 pages no less – what it means to be human and how our work shapes our identities, languages and relationship. She does so in something called the Six-Thousand spaceship, where human and humane-likes are out searching for a new home planet. 

·       On the heels of H is for Hawk – science historian Helen MacDonald’s 2020 memoir about grief, belonging, and falconry — comes Vesper Flights. The volume spans over forty essays, in which MacDonald meditates on ways that ecological change echoes in other registers of contemporary life: political, personal, spiritual.  Migrating from Brexit and biodiversity, to British landscape management and literature (and back again!), MacDonald’s exquisite little lines of flight are anchored, as ever, in her imagistic memories of childhood in the English countryside and her lifelong passion for birds. 

·       Harold McGee is a culinary writer who helped introduce the world to gastronomical art as science. In Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells, he gravitates from taste to smell in this biogeochemical compendium of the universe’s fragrances. A kind of natural history, albeit one approached through the language of chemical science and the art of human olfaction, McGee begins with the experience of his ‘first grouse,” following his nose from the stars to earth, from animals to plants, from land to water, and finally to the created smells of human-made scents.  Packed with curiosity and creativity, this journey is perfect for our present pandemic-induced anosmia.

·       In the Land of the Cyclops: Essays, a collection of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essays translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, dazzles and disturbs.  A modernist, anti-human reckoning with modernism and humanism, Knausgaard reflects upon the visual and literary artworks and artists that have moved him most.  His forays here sensitively repose perennial questions about experience and existence, nature and art, thinking and being.  Incisive as ever, here again is a true auteur of the word.

·       Danish author Iben Mondrup’s novel Tabita cleverly chronicles the life of a family where the dehumanization of its children leaves them to fight for themselves and each other. The book, based on interviews with Greenlandic women, leaves a raw and unfiltered family drama with roots in a very important part of Danish history 

·       In Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman dishes out sage advice on how to be more productive and manage our busy calendars during these crazy times by drawing on insights from ancient philosophy, social psychology and other disciplines.

·       Tim Harford’s The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics draws upon notable examples—such as Florence Nightingale’s campaign to improve the sanitary conditions of army hospitals during the Crimean War—to illustrate how statistics can help us make sense of world and explain it to others. The book cautions that the clarity offered by statistical methods can be abused by ideologues and those seeking to prove a point, while suggesting how these risks can be avoided. 

·       In The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life, John Le Carré recounts stories from a lifetime in the orbit of the British secret service. The great spy novelist was once an agent himself and uses this memoir to reveal details and candid reflections from his time as a schoolboy, agent, and writer. Lacking the violence and glamour of a Bond film, Le Carré’s book is an homage to the quietly efficient, and often quite humorous, bureaucratic agents who keep society running. 

·       A few years old, but one that grows better with age, as its thesis becomes more and more obviously true – Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies is a quick and chilling read that examines the relationship between online and IRL (“in real life”) culture wars, and in particular the movement of transgression as a tool and ethos from the political left to the right. 

·       Kristina M. Lyons’ Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics digs deep into human-soil relations in this fecund work of cross-disciplinary ethnography. Based on her fieldwork in Colombia, Lyons demonstrates the circular—rather than oppositional—relationship between growth and decay. Moreover, she makes eye-opening (and compelling) social, political, and epistemological claims about our deracinated stance towards what lies beneath our feet: dirt.  

·       The late David Graeber and David Wengrow draw on recent work in archeology and forgotten insights from anthropology in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity,  to construct a new history of humanity that moves beyond the false opposition between a Rousseauian state of Edenic beginnings on the one hand and a Hobbesian vision of all against all on the other. The result is a historical and future-oriented vision of humankind that is much more politically savvy—and weird—than we have come to take for granted. 

·       Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, can be read as a complement to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s eye-opening book about octopus cognition, Other Minds. In this installment, he turns his philosopher-biologist gaze to other, more simple forms of aquatic life to build the case for a gradualist, diffuse conception of consciousness in the animal kingdom.  Godfrey-Smith forces us to look differently—and more empathetically—upon the animal life with whom we share the world.  

·       The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters by Priya Parker was published before the pandemic, but it was very applicable reading for 2021, just as gatherings were picking back up after our long COVID-induced hibernation. Parker unpacks why gatherings of every variety, from weddings and funerals to global conflict resolution summits and newsroom meetings, are often just as disappointing as their absence, and offers a manifesto of sorts for how we can pull them out of their rut. 

·       Part personal perspective, part environmental history, Alaskan Bjorn Dihle’s A Shape in the Dark: Living and Dying with Brown Bears is an exploration of bear-human interspecies sociality, taking a deeper look at humans by looking at them as part of another species’ world.  The book presents an Alaskan wilderness guide’s relationship to Alaskan brown bears, as well as a fascinating history and culture of bears in the US. In a similar vein, Owls of the Eastern Ice, by Jonathan C. Slaght, chronicles the absolutely riveting adventures of a conservationist and field scientist in remote Eastern Russia.

·       Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart captures our pandemic era, along with the stress of social isolation, with gusto, while Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann tells the story of a group of people suffering from tuberculosis and are 'trapped' in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps. How do they evolve as individuals and as a group being ill together?