2021: A Year of Hard-Won Clarity

As I write this, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, is poised for release in a few short weeks. On my desk is the postcard of a school board candidate who promises to uphold diversity and openness in our district, even as members of our state board of education resign under pressure for supporting an anti-racism resolution. The governor of our state is eyeing his re-election, carefully maneuvering around the issue of how America's racial history is taught in classrooms. And in collection development, we are asking ourselves if carrying books about both sides of this issue is really supporting civic engagement, or instead works to support historically unfair systems. And if so, where does our responsibility lie? And yet, of course, collection development does not operate in a vacuum, but in a complicated context of administrators, board members, frontline staff, key stakeholders, community partners, and local and state legislators. They may not agree, but they are all very clear about where they stand.

For us, at the center of this vortex, that clarity is both enviable and exhausting. Yet can you remember a time when it felt so very important to be on the front lines of collection development and to do it well? Me either. As I prepared to moderate a panel for Library Journal’s Fall Summit entitled “The Future of Collections,” one of the panelists asked the others, “How will history judge us?” That question hung in the air; I have been in collection development a long time, and in the book business even longer, but I have never been so very conscious of the historic nature of a single year as I was this one.

2021 has been an utterly and unquestionably fabulous year for well-written, important, and thought-provoking books: I do not envy anyone on an awards committee this year. But it has been so much more: a year of quiet revolution, a year when identity, isolation, climate change, representation, and history were written about and read about through a hard-won lens by readers whose entire value systems have been hammered, refined, and clarified. Wherever those readers are on the political map, they have faced the unimaginable, and it shaped what they read and why they read it. Here are the books and trends that emerged, and why they both appeal and matter to our readers.

What Just Happened? Attempts at Pandemic Perspective

My hat is off to anyone who can read about a pandemic while surviving a pandemic, but 2021 gave readers just enough distance to attempt to try and regain their footing. Lawrence Wright and Michael Lewis, both longtime go-to authors for nonfiction readers seeking to make sense of, well, just about anything, came through with The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid and The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, respectively. Adam Tooze wrote, if a little prematurely, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy (Seriously? Do we really know yet?), and Emma Goldberg followed young doctors just beginning their careers in Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic. I couldn’t help thinking of first-year librarians as I read it. And Niall Ferguson brought the long lens of history to the pandemic and similar disasters in Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.

If I could get every library director to read one book about the effects of the pandemic, it would be Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler. If you’re looking for next steps, you won’t find them, but you will come away with more sophisticated understanding of the nuances of public health and where libraries might fit as a public entity.

Identity and Inclusion

Novels and nonfiction by Black authors and about the Black experience in America abounded this year. There are more than there is room to mention here; the titles below resonated with themes of identity and inclusion that emerged in the protracted pandemic of 2021. If you missed the chance to promote these to your readers, you need to stop right now and turn around and fix that, because these are truly special. 

Revival Season by Monica West was one of those wonderful novels that you read and thought you knew where the author was going only to be delighted and captivated to find out that you didn’t have a clue. And that’s all I’ll say, except that West’s writing is as powerful and important as her protagonist’s talents as she comes of age. 

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris was certainly one you couldn’t miss, since Oprah spotted it early and included it in her book club, and rightly so. As these characters emerge from a cataclysmic time of history, Harris manages a deft presentation of the most contemporary feeling novels of the year, his historical setting notwithstanding.

Ramadan Ramsey by Louis Edwards gets my vote for Best Under the Radar Novel of 2021. Edwards brings to life an engaging 12-year-old protagonist who embarks on a quest to find the Syrian father he’s never met. Ramadan joins a list of unforgettable characters we got to meet this year, like Miriam in Revival Season above, or Ray Carney, in Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (which gets my vote for Best On the Radar Novel of 2021). Whitehead has promised to consider writing another novel with Ray Carney in it, and we can only hope. It has been a long time since I really mourned finishing a book and being parted from a character, and that happened with both Ramadan and Ray.

Two novels that flew off the shelves on strong word of mouth from enthusiastic readers (and both would be amazing in conversation with one another in your library or community book discussions) are The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris and Black Girls Must Die Exhausted by Jayne Allen. Harris experiments with dashes of magical realism, while Allen’s narrative is matter of fact in relaying her protagonist’s trauma. Both resonated strongly with readers.

Outstanding nonfiction with a particular emphasis on identity and place included Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner. Turner writes about herself and two childhood friends and the different paths each took as they grew up in the South Side of Chicago. History fans rejoiced to see Annette Gordon-Reed return with On Juneteenth; like Turner, Gordon-Reed is writing about the place in which she grew up, in her case, Texas. In both cases, place and identity are inextricably linked, and in both cases, the authors tease apart what it meant to be both there and away.

Identity and Confusion

If there is a theme that is uniquely 2021, I think it is this one. So many novels dealt with isolation, loss, and the resulting confusion about identity. Mrs. March by Virginia Feito so masterfully deals with these themes that it is hard to believe it’s a debut novel. For Mrs. March, losing touch with reality is the same as losing her identity. They are inseparable, and in separating them, she loses herself; in the telling, Feito captures us.

My favorite novel of the year—hands down—was Lauren Groff’s Matrix, a historical novel whose protagonist is banished to a nunnery by Eleanor of Aquitaine, only to triumph as a brilliant visionary and theologian. Marie is based on a real person, and Groff renders Marie’s identity crisis wrenchingly relatable, as only Lauren Groff can do. From a person on the fringes of the queen’s court to almost complete erasure as the head of a nunnery where she neither wants to be nor is wanted by the inhabitants (as Groff seems to imply), if Marie can figure out who she is in the dark dankness of a medieval nunnery, so can we in a world that has looked pretty dark and plagued itself.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri caught my eye early on this year. Lahiri’s narrator gives the reader only glimpses of the city in which she wanders. The reader never really feels as though they understand the identity of the narrator completely, and that’s exactly the point. It perfectly catches the dazed emergence of “re-entry” as we came back to deserted offices, drove in rush-hour-less commutes and shopped in deserted grocery stores. Who are we in the absence of others? Brilliantly timed, this one.

Taking this isolation and identity crisis to a whole new level is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. The Artificial Friend, Klara, convinces us that hanging out with an A.I. without any real identity will surely make us question ours. How’s that for a one-sentence synopsis of a great work of art? But substitute our reliance on social media during the pandemic for the near future of A.I. in this novel, and well, there you have it.

What if Something Happens to Mom?

I watched, perplexed, as Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall blew the holds lists out of the water. We knew Moriarty was popular and had ordered accordingly, but there was something about this one that caused it to really take off. My theory? I think it is the vacuum created by the absence of the mother in the novel. (Now, frankly, if I had to live with the Delaneys, I might have taken off voluntarily, but hey, that’s just me.)

Mothers and books about families are always of interest to readers, but this year, there was an intensity underlying these titles that I think was related to both the involuntary togetherness and the threat of loss that hung over families this year with the pandemic. And again, identity—and identity issues—begin at home.

Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge has been a favorite with readers and book discussion groups. Like Sweetness of Water, it is set during Reconstruction, so the themes of creating identity and personhood on the heels of great tragedy and loss are similar, although in this novel, the mother and daughter are in different circumstances. That mother, though! Greenidge based her on the first female doctor in New York; Libertie must contend with her mother’s redoubtable achievements as she struggles to find her own way.

Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia also touches on the themes of loss, separation, and isolation, between women, and between mothers and daughters. It also is a novel of incredible resilience, of surviving—not perfectly, and certainly not unscathed. I think, that too, makes it relatable to many readers for whom survival, and their place in their family’s story, had new relevance.

Climate Change, or It’s Not All About Us

I saved this category for last, because I thought it was such a hopeful note that this year, when we were still staggering to our feet, dazed and a little amazed that we had, at least for now, survived—literally, economically, spiritually—that books about climate change could be such strong contenders for readers’ attention in 2021. I wonder, if decades from now, the Lawrence Wrights and the Michael Lewises of the day will look back and identify the pandemic as the time when many of us, collectively, figured out that we were mortal: that we would not last forever, and neither would the planet if we carried on, unchanged. People quit jobs and never went back, got divorced, adopted children, (and cats and dogs). Do we feel polarized because a new clarity about what we value is an artifact of the pandemic? I can’t help wondering if all the books that got welcomed into the world in 2021 about climate change are a sign that perhaps people are beginning to have clarity, too, about our collective legacy. Here’s a list, in no particular order, for your discernment, and that of your readers.

Bewilderment: A Novel by Richard Powers

Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson

Appleseed: A Novel by Matt Bell

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest by Suzanne Simard

Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change by Thor Hanson

Thanks for reading, friends, and steady on. 

Wendy Bartlett, Cuyahoga County Library, OH