Volume 1, No. 41: My Favorite Reads of 2021, Nonfiction Edition
Yet another rule-breaking edition.
Greetings, bookish friends! Today I’ve got another special End-of-2021 newsletter: my favorite nonfiction reads of 2021! Once again, this was not an easy list to make.
But first: cookies!
Some notes on the list:
It includes favorite books I read in 2021, not favorite books that were published in 2021.
I limited myself to 40 books, which might sound like a lot…but I’m on track to read 400 books this year. So it’s not that many, all things considered.
A lot of these books didn’t make it into the newsletter. I may write about them in the future, but even if I don’t, know that I love every book on this list with my whole heart.
I decided to organize by moods and themes, rather than genres. It was a lot more fun. I hope it helps you find some great reads you might have missed!
You can browse through all these books via this handy list on Bookshop.
Clicking on a title will bring you to Bookshop. Clicking on linked text in the description will bring you to my review.
Books marked with an asterisk are ones I loved on audio.
As with my fiction list, this is a long one; you’ll have to click through to read the whole thing. Enjoy!
My Favorite Reads of 2021: Nonfiction
Disability & Chronic Illness
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey: A beautiful meditation on paying attention, slowness, looking closely, chronic illness, solitude, and snails.
Knot Body by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch: This is a series of writings about disability and chronic illness, about pain and friendship and transness, about the ways racial, cultural, and gender identities intersect and define how people experience disability. Bechelany-Lynch uses poetry, letters, and fragmented essays, and all of these pieces work together to create something propulsive and still. The book refuses to adhere to conventions of genre. It wanders. It’s academic one moment and deeply personal the next. There’s something about the mix of forms that made it feel like I was reading it in real time, like I was receiving the words as Bechelany-Lynch was writing them.
*Haben by Haben Girma: I love a focused memoir! Here Girma focuses almost entirely on her education, professional career, and journey as a student, lawyer, and activist. She also writes about her life as a Deafblind woman, both the ableism she’s faced, and the joy she’s found in disability community and as an advocate. She writes with such openness and curiosity and it is such a gift to get to witness. She’s also super funny and I cackled quite a bit.
*Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Brilliant, breathtaking essays about queer and trans disabled activists of color, disability justice, art, access, community care. It went directly onto my reread shelf.
Kimiko Does Cancer by Kimiko Tobimatsu and Keet Geniza: A short but impactful graphic memoir about a queer biracial woman navigating breast cancer. So many mainstream cancer narratives are about “battles” and “overcoming” and that’s obviously not the lived experience of many people. Tobimatsu tells a different story about how illness changes a person physically and emotionally, about stigma and shame, about advocating for yourself, and about how sexuality, gender and race affect how illness is perceived/treated.
There Plant Eyes by M. Leona Godin: A history of blindness + so much more. History, philosophy, art and writing, pop culture, music, classics, neuroscience, access, disability culture….this book is endlessly fascinating and wonderful.
Crip Kinship by Shayda Kafai: This book is all about the disability justice performance group Sins Invalid, but it’s also about activism, sex, what it means to live in community, virtual spaces, care webs, the media, and so much more.
Disability Visibility edited by Alice Wong: So many essays by so many disabled writers, thinkers, artists, and activists! So many ideas, so many different experiences, so many ways of communicating, loving, fighting, understanding, being in the world.
Undefinable and Perfect
*Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi: Letters to friends and lovers and family about writing and pain and taking up space and Blackness and queerness and transness and living as a nonhuman in the human world. Transcendent, practical, loud. So many stunning sentences.
The Natural Mother of the Child by Krys Malcolm Belc: How do I quantify how much I love this book? It’s about queer partnership and trans parenthood, the weirdness of bodies, language and siblings and silence, transformation. Structurally breathtaking.
White Magic by Elissa Washuta: Essays, but with the momentum of a novel. Or some other kind of unnamed work. Place, ritual, language, lineage. Is it possible to change a story by telling it?
Dear Memory by Victoria Chang: Letters are such a powerful vehicle for discovery. Chang writes to her mother, her grandparents, to silence and memory, to teachers and lovers. The letters, along with photos and documents and poem collages, make a beautiful and complicated map of grief, family history, becoming a writer.
Madder by Marco Wilkinson: How many stories can one book hold? Weeds, seeds, the absence of a father, messy family stories, queer joy, seeking, travel, gardens.
History is Still Happening
*The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer: A comprehensive and complex history of Indigenous life in the 20th and 21st centuries. Treuer gives plenty of time to the atrocities committed by the government, the many policies that have harmed and continue to harm Indigenous people, but he also gives plenty of time to Indigenous activism, and the many ways Indigenous people have shaped America, and are continuing to thrive. The balance is what makes this book so good; there is no single story here.
*Medicore by Ijeoma Oluo: White male supremacy has been destroying the US since the US was founded on the premise of maintaining white male power at all costs. Seriously, you need to read this one.
*The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio: This is partially a memoir about Villavicencio’s experience as an undocumented immigrant, and her relationship with her parents. It's also about other undocumented immigrants, and their stories. It doesn’t read like journalism—not because it's not well researched and thoughtful and insightful, but because Villavicencio puts herself into the story of every person she talks to in this book. As in: “this is also me, this is also my story, this affects me, I can't look away.” She refuses to separate herself from the people she writes about. It makes the book so much more immediate and powerful.
Between Certain Death and a Possible Future edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore: Beautiful essays by queer writers about coming of age during the AIDS epidemic.
Brilliant Short Reads
A History of Scars by Laura Lee: Food, queerness, mental illness, rock climbing. So much writing so deeply grounded in the physical world: bodies, mountains, spices.
Death Threat by Vivek Shraya: After receiving transphobic hate mail online, Shraya decided to write a graphic memoir about it. It is surreal and upsetting, but it’s also joyful at times. She doesn’t reclaim the vile, hateful mail—she rejects it and transforms it. It’s one of the most interesting books I’ve read in a while about what it actually means to make art.
Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan: Being queer and Black in Homer, Alaska. Wildlife, loneliness, racism, photography, art, wilderness, stark beauty, sly humor. A book-length essay, and a brilliant one.
I’m Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya: Vivek Shraya again! She’s amazing. Here she explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, power, fear, shame, race. She brilliantly uses the second person to examine her experiences with men. The book builds on itself in a remarkable way for such a short work. You can feel Shraya working up to something, building complexity, building a narrative that keeps twisting and spinning.
Broke My Brain (In a Good Way)
Girlhood by Melissa Febos: I’m not sure I can adequately review this one until I read it again. Hit me in the heart, the gut, the synapses.
Red Rock Baby Candy by Shira Spector: What is even happening on each one of these glorious pages? An explosion of art, emotion, story, conflict, memory.
Memoirs Plus
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel: Excerise, and our culture’s obsession with it. More than that, a moving journey through the ordinary intimate moments of Bechdel’s life.
I Came All This Way to Meet You by Jami Attenberg: Being a writer isn’t glamorous. People mess up in the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties. Arrival is a myth. Friendship rocks!
*Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner: Beautiful writing about food and grief.
*Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu: Non-linear perfection. I reviewed it in my very first newsletter! I knew it was going on the Best Of list then, and I was right.
Pass With Care by Cooper Lee Bombardier: Essays about about transness, masculinity, queer communities, work. Bombardier writes about various times in his life, jumping around a lot, and it gives the collection a sense of messiness and movement. Many of these essays are about the messiness of transition, the ability to hold many truths and identities within a body, both the easing into self and the pain of not being at ease in self.
Poetry I Can’t Wait to Reread
Obit by Victoria Chang: Obituaries as poems. Absolutely brilliant.
The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus: Translation, infinitely examined.
Calling A Wolf A Wolf by Kaveh Akbar: The line breaks, though. Still thinking about them, months later.
The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser: So many languages in one book of poems.
The Year of Blue Water by Yanyi: A sparse collection of linked prose poems. The book is a journey, a record of striving and seeking. Yanyi writes about transition and gender and uncertainty. It’s rigorous and playful at the same time.
Water I Won’t Touch by Kayleb Rae Candrilli: A love letter to bodies and places and trans joy.
Gave Me Hope
*My Broken Language by Quiara Alegria Hudes: An exuberant memoir about becoming an artist, falling in love with words, the languages that live inside our bodies, North Philly, music, seeking, and the women of Hudes’s big extended Puerto Rican family.
Our Work is Everywhere by Syan Rose: A beautiful collection of interviews and conservations and with queer and trans artists, healers, writers, activists. The art is so intricate and expansive. It’s stunning to look at it.
*Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman: Friendship matters! It’s really important! It’s with going to couples therapy for! This book is full of practical wisdom, and it’s also a balm.
Special Topics in Being A Human by S. Bear Bergman and Saul Freedman-Lawson: The coziest, kindest, queerest, gentlest, and most practical book of advice.
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay: Eat it, grow it, praise it, love it, compost it, look at it, touch it. This book is a song.
Indigo by Ellen Bass: Lush and gorgeous poems about parenthood, grief, queerness, marriage, domesticity, aging, illness, chickens.
That’s it for this year’s lists for me. One more regular newsletter is coming at you next Wednesday, and then I’ll close out the year with a special cookie edition next Friday. Catch you then!