2021: My Year in Books

The covers of every book I read this yearm, arranged in a grid pattern

 

 Hi! What is your pandemic coping strategy? Apparently, mine involves piping a constant stream of audiobooks into my ears at every moment I’m not working or actively conversing with my family. 

Cooking? Audiobooks.

Dishes? Audiobooks.

Laundry? Audiobooks.

You get the picture. 

I guess that’s how I made it through 78 books this year (on top of the reading I do for research, etc.). Looking back over the list, I see too many amazing reads to make just one book post (as I’ve done in previous years), so this time I’m going to break up my top picks into a few posts that I’ll publish over the next couple of days.

But before that, here’s the whole list. See if you can guess which ones were my favorites.

And please let me know what you read and loved this year. I’m always looking for the next thing!

The List

(In the order I read them)

  1. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, by C. L. R. James
  2. The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently, by Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine
  3. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, by bell hooks
  4. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
  5. The metanarrative of Blindness: A re-reading of 20th Century Anglophone Writing, by David Bolt
  6. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
  7. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott
  8. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, by bell hooks
  9. Religion is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the 21st Century, edited by Grace Yukich
  10. What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, by Sarah Hendren
  11. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, by Sasha Costanza-Chock
  12. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories for the 21st Century, edited by Alice Wong
  13. Dawn (Xenogenesis #1), by Octavia E. Butler
  14. Adulthood Rites (Xenogenesis #2), by Octavia E. Butler
  15. Imago (Xenogenesis #3), by Octavia E. Butler
  16. How the University Works: Higher Education in the Low-Wage Nation, by Marc Bousquet
  17. The Instruction Myth: Why Higher Education is Hard to Change and How to Change It, by John Tagg
  18. Understanding and Preventing Faculty-on-Faculty Bullying: A Psycho-Social Organizational Approach, by Darla J. Twale
  19. The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the 21st Century, by George E. Walker
  20. The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible, by Yael Avrahami
  21. Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi
  22. Blood in my Eye, by George L. Jackson
  23. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
  24. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, by Adrienne Maree Brown
  25. Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism, by Annette Yoshiko Reed
  26. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and how WE Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee
  27. Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky #1), by Rebecca Roanhorse
  28. Feminist, Queer, Crip, by Alison Kafer
  29. Piranesi, by Susanna Clark
  30. Decolonial Pedagogy: Examining Sites of Resistance, Resurgence, and Renewal, by Njoki N. Wane
  31. Music in Ancient Greece and Rome, by John G. Landels
  32. The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family, by Sophie Bjork-James
  33. Down, Girl! The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate Manne
  34. The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, by Alicia Garza
  35. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in this Crisis, by Dean Spade
  36. Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr
  37. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017, by Rashid Khalidi
  38. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
  39. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s, by Elizabeth Hinton
  40. The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, by Daniel Greene
  41. Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything, by William Germano
  42. The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
  43. All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1), by Martha Wells
  44. Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2), by Martha Wells
  45. Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries #3), by Martha Wells
  46. Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries #4), by Martha Wells
  47. Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries #5), by Martha Wells
  48. Their Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, by M. Leona Godin
  49. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, by Kevin M. Kruse
  50. You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and our Polluted Media Landscape, by Bryan M. Milner and Whitney Phillips
  51. No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education, by Leigh Patel
  52. The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade #1) by Seth Dickinson
  53. Where do we go from here” Chaos or Community, by Martin Luther King, Jr.
  54. Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch
  55. Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from my Daughter’s School, by Courtney E. Martin
  56. Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World, by Michael Edwards
  57. The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education, by Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch
  58. Tell the Machine Goodnight, by Katie Williams
  59. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1), by Becky Chambers
  60. A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2), by Becky Chambers
  61. Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers #3), by Becky Chambers
  62. The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4), by Becky Chambers
  63. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison
  64. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, by Charlene Carruthers
  65. We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, by Mariame Kaba
  66. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, by Robin D G. Kelly
  67. Bullshit Jobs: A theory, by David Graeber
  68. Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America, by John McWhorter
  69. Liquid Scripture: The Bible in a Digital World, by Jeffrey Siker
  70. Christitainment: Selling Jesus Through Popular Culture, by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe
  71. Evangelicals, Incorporated: Books and the business of Religion in America, by Daniel Vaca
  72. A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops obsolete, by Gio Maher
  73. Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the pursuit of Freedom, by Derecka Purnell
  74. Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt
  75. The Bright Ages, by Matt Gabriele and David M. Perry
  76. The 9.9%: The new Aristocracy that is Entrenching Inequality and Warping our Culture, by Matthew Stewart
  77. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, by Harsha Walia
  78. Bambi: A Life in the woods, by Felix Salten

2 thoughts on “2021: My Year in Books

    1. Ha! I think it is largely a record of my compulsions. I suppose I could have worse compulsions, because reading is truly the best! I’ll look forward to seeing your list

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