The Best Books I Read in 2021
My reading reviews are getting scattered — last years roundup appeared solely on my email newsletter. Might as well return to Medium this time for more SEO and lasting power.
This year the categories are: Speculative Fiction, Self Development, Nonfiction, and Narrative Fiction.
My favorite books from this year were:
- Qualityland by Marc Uwe Kling
- The Overstory by Richard Powers
- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden
Speculative Fiction
Escaping Exodus by Nicky Drayden — Earth is gone and humanity lives inside world-sized space-whale beasts that they hollow out and keep barely alive in a strict caste system ruled by matriarchy until the newest leader says ‘but what if we lived in harmony with the beast?’ Truly mind-bending world-building that covers many topics in novel ways: classism, racism, queerdom, polyamory, patriarchy, indigenous wisdom, etc
Death’s End by Ciuxin Liu — the conclusion to the famous Three Body Problem trilogy (the first Chinese scifi to get translated to English), each book of which poses a new complex problem as a result of the last books solution to its problem. (and all 3 appeared on my best books lists!)
Intergalactic game theory and hard science fiction at its most imaginative — I can’t recall the last trilogy that unfolded its world across so many new axes from start to finish as this one (literally and metaphorically, #nospoilers, teehee).
Qualityland by Marc Uwe Kling is the most realistic and hilarious dystopian novel I have ever read. It’s A Brave New World for our times, where:
- The America analogue rebrands itself as Qualityland to produce products labeled ‘Made in Qualityland’ (which was chosen over Equalityland)
- an Amazon analogue delivers products by drone before we order them, (who auto-record unboxing videos) because their big data knows what we want better than we do
- A Trump analogue delivers personalized ads to rural workers promising whatever the algorithm says they want most, mostly employment and no foreigners
- While his android opponent shares the provably best solution to every problem but is shouted down by the happily ignorant, and businessmen as stakeholders in the status quo
- Identity thieves stole everyone’s faces and fingerprints, so we kiss our iPads to saliva verify our identities
- Citizens are ranked from 2–99 (because you always need something to lose or gain) based on job and wealth etc — the higher levels auto obfuscate photos taken of them and unlock better hotels, etc
- People’s last names are the jobs of their parents, like Peter Jobless and Melissa Team-Leader, which helps the algorithms predict life paths
- Facebook analogue tells you the best person on earth to date, scientifically, and it changes over time (someone gets a promotion and is told to dump their current partner as a result, for instance)
- Lovers sign consent waiver forms before having sex, and nobody reads the long terms of service
- Self driving cars won’t enter poor neighborhoods as breaches of contract
The plot follows a Level 9 android scrapper who is delivered a pink dolphin vibrator and tries unsuccessfully to return it, with all the repercussions that entails for such a society.
Too real, fam. Whenever I put the book down and returned to the Facebook/Amazon/Trump world, I honestly felt like I hadn’t left Qualityland.
The Skinner by Neal Asher — hardboiled violent biopunk scifi on a planet where an alien virus aggressively adapt your body away from humanity because humans don’t last long here. The plot follows the hunting of the first human on the planet who is no longer recognizable as human (see him on the cover there?)
A fun imaginative adventure romp, and not much more.
Wool by Hugh Howey — some of the most engrossing dystopian fiction out there, with great drama, tension, and twists throughout. Not much else to say without spoilers!
Exhalation and Other Stories by Ted Chiang — Silicon Valley’s favorite scifi thought experiment guy is at it again, in fine form.
Not as mind bending as his earlier anthology, but still fun and thought provoking. The ones that stick with me are the Arabic time travel gate story, and the self aware Tamagotchi pets story.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson — Hard scifi with the best starting sentence ever: “One day, the moon exploded”. And then what?!
Looks at what humanity would actually do in order to survive the moon crashing into the Earth, with some light genetic engineering at the end.
Narrative Fiction
The Overstory by Richard Powers — An absolute tour de force of storytelling, Pillars of the Earth style, where the author explores several unrelated human interests that end up converging over their differing relationships to trees.
Sounds boring, huh? Anything but! I learned so much about trees and ecological causes and cried for the characters, wow wow wow!
Hawaii by James Michener — This is the kind of book you find left over in hotel room libraries — old and huge. I’ll be honest — I didn’t finish it. It’s huge!
But the first story, at least, around the ancient history of Native Hawaiians and how they first got to the islands, is incredible! I learned so much from that chapter alone, and it’s all based in fact, too, despite James being a haole.
Tales From The Night Rainbow by Pali Jae Lee and Koko Willis — this is less of a book and more of a fever dream, an oral history of ancient Native Hawaiians in their first arrival to the islands. It’s hard to find print copies, so here is a pdf link of a part of it.
I enjoyed delving deeper into the mythology of the area myself — but if you’ve never been to Hawaii, perhaps there are better sources out there.
Nonfiction
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer —I enjoyed how the Native American author compares, contrasts, and interlinks her ancestral knowledge of nature with the scientific knowledge of her botanist profession.
There’s all sorts of fun facts in there, from the fact that English has a relatively low percentage of verbs as compared to the author’s Potawatomi, where many of our nouns like ‘forest’ are verbs, ascribing more animus to such nouns, or the peer-reviewed studies finding that the titular sweetgrass flourishes more when harvested smartly by humans than alone, to the Three Sisters crops of corn, beans, and squash that have a synergistic effect when planted near one another, as opposed to the monocrops Europeans would plant in their place.
Self Development
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant — Collection of Naval’s tweets and writing in a more digestable form. The man is smart — and I took his aphorisms about time and money and relationships to heart.
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi — This book is bracing and yet irrefutable. A story of one black mans upbringing and also the academic history of blackness in America. Powerful, difficult, necessary. We should read this in school.
The Polyamory Breakup Book by Kathy Labriola — This book is a great read for any couple, monogamous or polyamorous. It details the seven canoncial reasons why couples break up — and only 3 of them are due to polyamorous reasons.
It then has a series of scary anecdotes about couples that broke up, which gives you great nightmare fuel to steer your own couple away from. Invaluable!
From a Native Daughter by Haunani Kay Trask — I don’t think this is a well written or argued book, but it’s a good one to read to get at the heart of the Hawaiian Sovereignty movement, and their beliefs.
The author is tentpole of the movement who recently passed away, but sadly this book is more polemics and anecdotes that solutions or coherent criticism, in my opinion.
That aside, I learned important Hawaiian facts any Mainlander should know, and that is valuable by itself.
Want more book recommendations, more often?
