2021 media highlights
I read fewer books, listened to fewer podcasts, and watched fewer movies than I wanted to in 2021. I doomscroll too much and when I’m not doomscrolling I play entirely too much Two Dots.
Oh well. I’m still here and so is almost everyone I adore. Which is all that matters. I’m taking a break from goals for 2022 – my only aim is to cultivate humility. Truly.
Here’s what stood out in 2021 (past years: 2020, 2019, 2018).
Comforting Stuff
I knew 2021 was going to be tough for a lot of reasons. These helped me get through some rough patches.
Wintering (book, Katherine May) – A book of seasonal meditations on winter and its parallels to the wintry periods of our life. If you are feeling a general ambiance of chilly sadness, pick this up.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (book, C.S. Lewis) – One of my childhood favorites that I came back to re-read for the first time in ages. I’m glad I re-read it, and I’m even more glad it still moves me as much as it did when I was a kid.
The Inner Life of Cats (book, Thomas McNamee) – My cat Clem died early in 2021 and the grief I carried leading up to his death was unlike anything I had ever experienced. This sweet book about cats (with many stories about the author’s own cat) was very therapeutic.
Memoirs
The Diary of a Bookseller (book, Shaun Bythell) – The ups and downs (and weirdos) of running a secondhand bookstore in Scotland. It also made me realize how much I love diary format books, which led to this question on Ask MetaFilter.
The Barbizon: the Hotel That Set Women Free (book, Paulina Bren) – Can you have a memoir of a building? Because that’s kinda what this was. The Barbizon Hotel was a hotel where lots of young professional women stayed in New York back before it was normal for young women to travel freely and stay wherever they want. I found out while having dinner with my in-laws that one of their friends (at the dinner!) had stayed at the Barbizon.
A New Kind of Country (book, Dorothy Gilman) – One of the AskMe book recommendations I got for “diary-style” books. I wasn’t familiar with Gilman’s other work, but basically it’s her memoir of retiring to the coast of Nova Scotia. I loved the description of windy nights!
An Onion in My Pocket (book, Deborah Madison) – Most people know Deborah Madison from her vegetarian cookbooks. I’ve never really cooked from Deborah Madison’s cookbooks, even though I have stuck to a mostly vegetarian diet for most of my life. But after reading her memoir of going from cooking for a Zen monastery to opening a restaurant, I feel like I’m a bit more familiar with her legacy.
When Women Were Birds (book, Terry Tempest Williams) – Whenever I need deep catharsis by way of crying in a fetal position, I reach for Terry Tempest Williams. I think it helps if you’ve already read Refuge since there are a lot of references to the women in her family (thanks to my friend Sam for sending me Refuge many years ago).
Climate Change
Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe (book, Mario Alejandro Ariza) – I don’t know why this book hasn’t gotten more press. The only reason I found it is because we spent a ton of time in Miami on a trip to visit my in-laws in south Florida, and all I could think of the vast enormous new construction everywhere was “how much of this is going to be under water in 20 years?” So I started looking for books on Miami and climate change and found this. It’s totally engrossing, thanks in large part to Ariza’s perspective as a millennial first-generation Floridian. It made me understand the completely surreal world of south Florida’s culture, urban planning, and real estate much better.
“Living at the End of Our World” (podcast episode, Know Your Enemy) – I’ve talked about Know Your Enemy before, which is easily one of the best leftist podcasts around. This was a very different episode than what they normally tackle, but I loved it because the hosts and their guests talked out loud about things related to climate change, that I often only process privately (stuff like – grappling with how to communicate to children what’s coming, what we’d trade about what’s better now in order to have a livable future, what older people whose existential crisis centered on the Cold War nuclear arms race don’t understand about climate change, leftist aversion to deep emotion as an organizing strategy, etc).
How we spend our days
Laziness Does Not Exist (book, Devon Price) – My friend Ruth recommended this, and it was hands down the best book I read in 2021. I want you to read it as well. If you need a book to help you understand and talk back to some of your deeply seated internalized capitalism, this is the one. I came away with a lot more compassion for myself and some concrete ways of understanding the ways in which all of late stage capitalism depends on gaslighting everyone into buying into the myth of laziness. I rarely re-read books, but I loved this so much I’m thinking about reading it again pretty soon.
The Wisdom of Stability (book, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove) – I picked this book up a few years ago during a Quaker conference, and packed it with me to read at Pendle Hill (a Quaker retreat center). The author is a pastor who writes (from a very faith-based perspective) about what it means to stay put, even though our culture valorizes hypermobility.
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (book, Mason Currey) – I mostly read non-fiction, and love books with very short essays (mostly because I go through long stretches where the only reading I manage to do is five minutes before bed before conking out). Currey’s book profiles various writers and artists and composers. There’s a lot of “Famous White Guy would have his wife prepare him lunch every day, he’d go for a walk and then come back and work for two hours before having friends over for cocktails” but if you can get past those, there are a lot of gems in this book (and Currey put out a sequel featuring all women, which is great!). The thing I remember most from this book was about Marina Abramović’s ritual while she was performing The Artist is Present – that she peed four times before she began each sitting. Perhaps the most relatable thing I’ve read in a long, long time.
CHANI (app, Chani Nicholas + collaborators) – Close friends know that I’m very into astrology. This app is like an extension of Chani Nicholas’s book You Were Born For This. Normally I am not a “yearly subscription to an app” kinda person, but I make an exception for CHANI. I find Chani Nicholas’s voice for the weekly readings to be so soothing I often listen to them multiple times a week on my commute for the calming effect.
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