How fucked up were these last two years? I often couldn't read, that's my personal measure of how fucked up. But of course I did read, even if I managed far fewer books than in normal years. And waddaya know, as it turns out I read some damned good, even some great works. Here are my two years' best books, listed in no particular order. As always, this is based on my reading, which proceeds according to its own whims and illogic, not on publication year, although as I scan the titles I see that most of them were in fact new. Fiction, which is mostly what I read, followed by nonfiction.
Fiction
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
Luz at Midnight by Marisol Cortez
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
A Burning by Meghar Majumdar
Luster by Raven Leilani
The Five Wounds by Kristen Valdez Quade
The Trees by Percival Everett
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Dear Miss Metropolitan by Carolyn Ferrell
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin
The Other Black Girl by Dalila Zakiya Harris
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Heaven, My Home by Attica Locke
Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Nonfiction
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Sparrow Envy by Drew J. Lanham
On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
and in a category all its own:
How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings by Sarah Cooper
