The Best Books I Read In 2021
The Best Books I Read In 2021
Every year, like a total geek, I keep a record of every book I read. Here are my five favourites from this year.
For the third year, I made an effort to read more books and kept a record of what I did manage to get through on my Instagram Stories as a highlight (which you can see here). These five were the books I enjoyed most this year.
1. Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
This magisterial, enraging account of the Sackler family’s role in the American opioid epidemic is a real hubristic American epic.
I’ll read anything by Patrick Radden Keefe (his history of The Troubles, Say Nothing, was one of my favourite books of 2020), and in his expert hands this sorry tale is compulsive stuff. No surprise it just won the 2021 Baillie Gifford Non-Fiction Prize. I couldn’t put it down.
More here.
2. The Abstainer by Ian McGuire
If you’ve watched the incredible Colin Farrell and Jack McConnell-starring adaptation of The North Water, McGuire’s previous novel, you’ll have an inkling of what to expect with this one. Despite following a similar template (flawed male lead, relentlessly grimy period setting, a darker-than-pitch tone) I enjoyed The Abstainer almost as much.
3. The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
I picked this one up on a whim as I was looking for something that might help contextualise the situation in Afghanistan, but it ended up being one of the books I enjoyed most this year.
In making this journey and writing this book, Stewart is following in legendary footsteps (think Robert Byron and Eric Newby) but he pulls it off, capturing in crisp, evocative prose a sympathetic, three-dimensional view of a society on the cusp of real change. Plus, his relationship with Babur the dog made me cry.
It’s difficult to write anything about Nobber without using words like ‘hallucinatory’, ‘kaleidoscopic’ and ‘quixotic’, as a glance at any review will testify. Still, I enjoyed this riotous (sorry) and weird novel about the inhabitants of the eponymous plague-ridden 13th century Irish town as much as anything else I read this year.
5. This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson
This immersive Victorian-era ship-set doorstop about Darwin and Fitzroy’s questing voyages around the world might have been custom-created for me by some fiendish algorithm.
Like all the best novels, I couldn’t put it down and it made me look at the world slightly anew. Yep, I liked it.
More here.
Plus! This weekend I have 25% off my own book Looking Sideways Vol. 1! Acclaimed by Carve, Huck, Wavelength, Metro, the Telegraph, Sidetracked Magazine and Whitelines among others, Looking Sideways Vol. 1 is now into its second print run and is available to order via my website with free shipping globally, in case you were wondering what to buy for that that surf, skate, snow or Looking Sideways podcast-loving person in your life. Click here.
