10 Best Reading from 2021
These ten books, which I read in 2021, capture something essential from a year of a global pandemic, climate crisis and social distancing.
This year has been strange to say the least. As the pandemic has made it difficult to see people, there´s been more time from reading and listening to literature.
My reading — and therefore recommendations — have been influenced by a Covid-era online book club on climate change and the up-coming move to work at Johns Hopkins University and live in Baltimore, the United States. Even when many of these books are not published this year, I feel they speak loudly about the relevant issues of our time.
Here are 10 books I read this year, which I would recommend for very different reasons.
Evan Osnos: Wildland — The Making of America´s Fury
A investigative and personal story by a Pulitzer-winning journalist on the American dream fighting for its survival in three highly different American cities — Chicago on decades of growing divisions, Clarksburg on dealing with the sense of abandonment and Greenwich on the effects of extraordinary accumulation of wealth. Osnos is brilliant in blending his years living in highly different American cities with a critical analysis of a country and many of its people in a state of division. “As I traveled between Clarksburg and Chicago in that year of election, I was sometimes struck that, for all their differences, Black Chicagoans and white Appalachians had come to share a sensation that was calcifying in America’s political culture — a feeling of being trapped by an undertow of economics and history, of being ill-served by institutions, of being estranged from a political machinery that was refined, above all, to serve itself.”
Fernando Pessoa: Book of Disquiet
“Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary”, the Portuguese poet writes in this exploration on the senselessness of our world through the eyes of his alter ego, accountant Bernardo Soares. Pessoa´s posthumously published collection of unfinished texts feels very fit to these social media times where we are struggling both with holding on to a sense of self and trying to interpret other people doing exactly the same. In our book club we had a lengthy discussion whether the book actually filled with hope or despair. I lean on hope. “And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.”
Martha C. Nussbaum: Citadels of Pride
Professor Nussbaum is probably the living thinker who has influenced me the most as a philosopher of emotions. Her work on the capabilities approach is essential in how I see a good city and how merely providing opportunities is not sufficient without understanding the diverse obstacles people face in realising them into functionalities. In her latest book she looks at the thinking behind sexual harassment and the conditions enabling it especially in hierarchical, meritocratic environments like sports, classical music and the judicial system. As Nussbaum states, harassment and exploitation are based on seeing the other person not as a full person but as a thing, a tool for one´s own desires. As a life-long feminist, Nussbaum is also vocal in defending the need for a fair process even when emotions run high.
Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Beautiful Struggle
“No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.” A coming-of-age story of a black young man in Baltimore is a memoir of one of America´s most interesting public intellectuals on race and racism. Coates writes with the passion familiar from his later essays and novels. He makes fundamental remarks on the impact of parenting, on the constant threat of violence, on the liberating impact of cultural expression, on the importance of adults who give you a second chance— both by setting limits and giving opportunities. In many ways, the book spoke to me about the importance of youth work and education without painting an overly rosy picture of the inequality of the conditions many minorities grow up in. “I did not know then that this is what life is — just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.”
Juha Kauppinen: Monimuotoisuus (in Finnish)
This was the second book we read for our climate change book club. Kauppinen takes a critical yet affectionate take on Finnish nature and the importance of biodiversity. The book is an alarming exploration on what is happening to Finnish nature and why biodiversity requires the same amount of attention as climate change. We were all quite shaken by the way the book highlights how we are sold a myth of Finland as a country with forests untouched by man.
Eula Biss: Having and Being Had
I keep savoring this collection of short essays as I do not want it to end. I read only a page or two every night. I picked it up randomly from a Californian book store this summer. Biss´ takes on capitalism as the value system she was brought into are both personal, sharp, at times comical, mostly critical of oneself and relatable. Like this:”The piano arrives with the scent of another home. This scent is not unpleasant. In fact, it smells of middle class. And that is what the piano announces, once positioned in our dining room. Dada da dum — middle class! Let the lessons begin.”
Stacey Abrams: Lead from the Outside
Stacey Abrams has been the first woman or the first person of color in many places. She is often mentioned as the grassroots movement leader whose organization is largely to thank for the higher voter turnout in Georgia´s elections — and she is currently running to be the next governor of her state. Abrams is practical, bold, critical yet hopeful. Like all good memoirs of sorts, she is critical of herself as well. “When we refuse to name our obstacles, we can never find a way around them. Worse, we accept their inevitability, believing we deserve what we get.”
Jenny Offill: Weather
We see small and often trivial first world anxieties and uncertainties blended up with frightening science-backed doomsday climate change scenarios through the eyes of librarian Lizzie and somehow we feel less alone. It´s a big confusing mess for everyone else too. “Then one day I have to run to catch a bus. I am so out of breath when I get there that I know in a flash all my preparations for the apocalypse are doomed. I will die early and ignobly.”
Kate Raworth: Doughnut Economics
Kate Raworth makes me wish I would have decided to study economics. She takes economic theory and uses it as a tool for social and environmental justice. Her idea of a doughnut as a metaphor for sustainable life is easy to grasp: we have to fit our lifestyles inside a doughnut with social boundaries (reasonable living conditions for everyone) forming its inner boundaries and ecological/planetary boundaries (biodiversity and climate change etc) forming its outer boundaries. Raworth is convincing in stating that we should not accept the idea that we somehow need to choose between these two.
Jennifer Morton: Moving Up Without Losing Your Way
Professor Jennifer Morton was a guest in one of my favorite podcasts — Dialogues with Richard Reeves. I listened to her and Reeves talk about how social class plays out in an academic setting and stopped cycling for a moment to put an order in for her book. She makes a very convincing argument that we need to understand that the so called strivers (people who come from underrepresented backgrounds into a university) have to often make tremendous sacrifices socially. I feel this book should be read by everyone teaching in a university or handling its admission policy. Morton points out that strivers easily end up in-between as they don´t quite fit anymore to their earlier community but are clearly outsiders in their new community.
