Top Five Books of 2021

CarltonC: A beautiful literary love letter to, and exploration of the works of, a fellow political essayist. Solnit takes the reader on a journey to discover her joy in reading George Orwell’s essay about planting roses, and why this is not trivial, but core to both Orwell’s pursuit of truth saying and the reader’s political being.

CarltonC: This wonderful book includes a bookshop, indigenous Americans, a death, a haunting, a baneful book, the coronavirus pandemic, the George Floyd murder and subsequent demonstrations. So much story, and for me unusual content, but I felt relaxed being enchanted by a master storyteller. It starts with Tookie’s crime, followed by ten years imprisonment, which are briefly passed over because they are not the story, and whose waste might be redeemed by Tookie’s engagement with books. The story is what happens next, the whole thing, books and people, everything interconnected.

CarltonC: History brilliantly recorded in the making, with the immediacy and urgency of journalism, which you don’t encounter in academic history books.

CarltonC: Unable to attend the exhibition at the British Museum, I treated myself to the hardback catalogue and it is an excellent and enlightening book about Thomas Becket’s life, death and martyrdom.

CarltonC: Warm, humorous, but not entirely rose-tinted, stories and recollections of the joys and hardships of life in rural Gloucestershire just after the First World War. This beautifully written memoir published in 1959 contains lyrical prose describing the experiences of a poor rural childhood with fresh eyed innocence and beguiling charm. I read the Slightly Foxed edition and three other memoirs published by Slightly Foxed feature in my top reads of the year, so an independent publisher well worth exploring.