My Year in Books, 2021

+ some thoughts on recovering a love of reading in your postschool life

I’m delighted to report that I read a smattering of books in 2021! After a long season of reading exclusively for school, I slowly started reintroducing books, inch by inch, into morning devotions and before bed.

Here’s how that smattering breaks down this year:

3 fiction
3 nonfiction
5 personal development/spiritual formation

I liked all the books I read this year but certainly had some favorites. Here they are, from each category!

Fiction: Jack by Marilynne Robinson

I found this in perfect condition in a lending library in my neighborhood. Our corner of suburbia has a truly extensive amount of lending libraries, but I haven’t found anything as untouched or up my literary alley before. Serendipity! I’m new to Marilynne Robinson, but was very intrigued after learning about her from a few of my housemates who have read her most popular work, Gilead. Jack is a continuation of the series that Gilead is part of; I learned that it doesn’t matter which order you read the books in, and just went for it and read Jack first.

And it was gorgeous. The plot was long and winding like a nighttime stroll, the characters as lovely and flawed as the real people we encounter in daily life. Robinson’s interweaving of wonder, love, and shame throughout the story was particularly cathartic. I loved going into this story completely blind, so I won’t say any more about it, but I will recommend it. I plan to read the rest of the series in 2022 and am so looking forward to it!

Nonfiction: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I have another favorite in the nonfiction category that has a full-fledged review forthcoming, but since Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was published in 2007 and has been reviewed many a time since, I’ll talk about it here. A friend of mine who wrote her senior thesis on redemption in Kingsolver’s writing has been recommending this book to me for years, and I finally picked it up in a used bookshop in Catskill this summer.

I adored this book. Creative nonfiction is truly at its best when it takes the reader along for a personal transformation of some sort, and Kingsolver did this with intentionality, humor, and a very satisfying amount of research into the food industry. The work is quite educational, but Kingsolver is not an oracle or a lecturer as she writes – she learns as she goes throughout the year of eating seasonally, documented by the month. I loved it all: I loved the recipes included throughout, and I loved how her whole family participated in the project together.

Personal Development/Spiritual Formation: The Gift of Being Yourself, by David Benner

I did judge the book by its cover, because this is an exceptionally good book cover. The contents of the inside, I’m happy to report, were just as lovely and well-designed. The Gift of Being Yourself is second in a spiritual formation trilogy, in between Surrender to Love and Desiring God’s Will. It was a gentle and compassionate read – an emphasis and re-emphasis on how the Christian life allows freedom to be oneself, individuality as a gift from God, and how when we grow close to Christ, the more truly ourselves we’ll be. This is a read I wish I’d known about years ago.

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I’m still en route, I think, to reading well again. Reading eleven books this year feels like a huge accomplishment, and I think it’s because relearning to enjoy it feels like a big deal to me.

Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Her words haunt me a little – not in the sense of agonizing over an hour badly spent or a string of days that feel off, but I pause over them when I consider seasons of life that I’ve just tried to muscle my way through, sacrificing all of the things good, true, and beautiful along the way to “just get through it” (hi, pandemic grad school!) But it’s paradoxical, since stripping the things that cultivate goodness from life in a hard season doesn’t pay off. I believe I’m buying myself more time by doing that, but instead, I’m making a hard season into a wasteland.

Reading for joy or personal growth is one of the first things to go in hard seasons, but I think those are seasons when I need to press into delight the most.

This post originally appeared on my Substack blog, which you can sign up for here!