2021 - A Year in Books

Jan 2, 2022

Introduction
Non-fiction
Fiction
Stats For Nerds

Introduction

The earth has completed another lap of the sun, and it's time for my 2021 reading round-up.

My goal, as always, was to read a book a week, across a wide range of subjects and a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. The year started off with another UK lockdown, and I continued last years pace by reading 27 books from January to March. However, a combination of the easing of restrictions (and the subsequent rejuvenation of my social life), becoming busier and busier with work and taking on some hefty books, I finished on a total of 68 books this year (32,930 pages).

My reading strategy was much the same as last year, I've had a fiction and a non-fiction book on the go at any one time. I tend only to read books with over a 3.9 rating on Goodreads. What's the point in reading bad books!

I've decided to keep the fans happy, so here are my top 10 books from 2021 split into 5 non-fiction and 5 fiction, in no particular order and with some of my favourite quotes sprinkled in...

Non-fiction

Stillness Is the Key: An Ancient Strategy for Modern Life - Ryan Holiday

I've read most of Ryan Holiday's philosophy books, but this is by far my favourite. Stillness Is the Key takes ancient wisdom on the art of stillness from some of history's greatest thinkers (Confucius, Seneca, etc.) and describes succinctly how we can (and should) use it to counteract overstimulation of modern life. As a man who loves silence, solitude and consideration, this really resonated with me, and Holiday's style of writing means that every second sentence is quotable.

"'All of humanity’s problems,' Blaise Pascal said in 1654, 'stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.'"

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

"'Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.'"

"It was Cicero who said that to study philosophy is to learn how to die."

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know - Adam Grant

Think Again is a book with a simple but profound message: be willing to accept when you're wrong. Grant covers the reasons why we get mired in our views and opinions and the strategies we can use to 'rethink' them. He does this on a personal and a cultural level, and explains ways to help others to 'think again' on apt topics such as vaccination.

I particularly enjoyed this book because the unwillingness to rethink is pervasive across daily life. Everything that we do and the way we do it should be open for debate, from what we have for breakfast, to our goals and motivations, to our political leanings, to the organisation of society.

When have you changed your mind this year?

"'Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.' - George Bernard Shaw"

"The purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs."

"Requiring proof is an enemy of progress."

"It’s a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn’t want to hear."

With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial - Kathryn Mannix

Talking about and thinking about death is uncomfortable and even taboo, even though it's something we all deal with throughout (and at the end of) our lives and is a key part of what makes life worth living. Dr. Kathryn Mannix beautifully draws together stories on death from her job as a palliative care nurse. This book was emotional to read, but the message is one of acceptance and that understanding and meeting death gently can have a profound impact on all those affected by the end of a life.

"There are only two days with fewer than twenty-four hours in each lifetime, sitting like bookends astride our lives: one is celebrated every year, yet it is the other that makes us see living as precious."

"Instead of dying in a dear and familiar room with people we love around us, we now die in ambulances and emergency rooms and intensive care units, our loved ones separated from us by the machinery of life preservation."

"Reclaiming the language of illness and dying enables us to have simple, unambiguous conversations about death."

"It’s a truth rarely acknowledged that as we live longer thanks to modern medicine, it is our years of old age that are extended, not our years of youth and vigour."

This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor - Adam Kay

A devastating, heartbreaking and (at times) hilarious account of Adam Kay's time as a junior doctor in the NHS. He manages to combine humour with a shocking indictment of the current state of the NHS in a way that is distinctly British.

"How the other half live. In antenatal clinic, an extremely posh patient attends for a routine appointment. All is well with her extremely posh fetus. Her extremely posh eight-year-old asks her a question about the economy (!), and before she answers she asks her extremely posh five-year-old, ‘Do you know what the economy is, darling?’, ‘Yes, Mummy. It’s the part of the plane that’s terrible.’ You can see how revolutions start."

"Today crossed the line from everyday patient idiocy to me checking around the room for hidden cameras. After a lengthy discussion with a patient’s husband about how absolutely no condoms fit him, I establish he’s pulling them right down over his balls."

"I finish consenting a couple for caesarean section. ‘Any questions at all?’ I ask the room. ‘Yes,’ chips in their six-year-old. ‘Do you think Jesus was black?’"

The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts us all at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World - David Robert Grimes

The Irrational Ape is a brilliantly written book that focuses on using critical thinking and the scientific method to conquer the biases, heuristics and flawed logic that evolution has endowed us with, and that are exploited by the modern world, resulting in misinformation, ignorance and mistrust. It's one of those paradigm shifting books that serves as a reminder to always question the assumptions of an argument, that data can be presented to suit that argument and that has developed my understanding why people believe things that are evidently false.

"‘Forming your world-view by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot’."

"‘He, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave.’"

"‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’."

"Ultimately, whether we prosper or perish comes down to whether we choose to learn from our mistakes or succumb to them."

Honourable mentions:

Fiction

Note: My fiction reading this year was dominated by re-reading Harry Potter and reading A Song of Ice and Fire, with those 12 books clocking in around 10,000 pages in total, so I didn't read quite as widely as in previous years.

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary is an incredible book. It's a gripping dual-narrative story about a guy who wakes up from a coma alone on a spaceship, but it also contains philosophical and scientific considerations of the aspects of Earth and humanity that we take for granted but may not be used by other intelligent life, such as how our eyes convert light into a 3D image of our surroundings, and how our bodies are majoratively water.

"Oh thank God. I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern."

"My students all have eyes and they were still amazed when I told them “x-rays,” “microwaves,” “Wi-Fi,” and “purple” were all just wavelengths of light."

"She stood and meandered around the room. 'For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it … it was all about food. 'Even the Roman Empire. Everyone knows about the emperors, the armies, and the conquests. But what the Romans really invented was a very efficient system of acquiring farmland and transportation of food and water.'"

The Stand - Stephen King

The Stand is a mammoth of a book, the complete and uncut edition comes in at close to 1152 pages, but the story is incredibly well crafted and multi-layered. It follows several characters through an outbreak of a deadly virus (ring any bells?) who's lives become intertwined in a fight between good and evil. There's also a shorter, 800 page original.

"Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long."

The Last Command - Timothy Zahn

This series is a must-read for any Star Wars fans. The first book picks up chronologically after Return of the Jedi and takes Luke, Leia and Han's story to new levels against Admiral Thrawn (a character unique to the books). I loved it because Zahn goes into far more detail on the universe and technology than the films ever did. I've chosen the last book in the series as it was my favourite, but they'd need to be read in order.

Prodigal Son - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz

The 6th book in the Orphan X series, Prodigal Son continues Evan Smoak's character arc from distant and isolated killer to a man grappling with the pull of family and friends. As always, the book is exceptionally paced.

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude book cover

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that was difficult to read but has grown on me after I finished it. It chronicles 100 years (as the title suggests) of a fictional town in Colombia through foundation, revolution and imperialism. I found it difficult because the protagonists, the Buendia family, are not easy to connect with, but instead serve as a conduit for the history of Latin America. It's nonsensical (Márquez was one of the first proponents of magical realism) and fantastical but this gives the book deeper meaning... in hindsight.

"Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love."

"The indolence of the people was in contrast to the voracity of oblivion."

Honourable mentions: