I’m going to close out the year with 61 books read, compared to my average of 100. Part of that smaller figure is due to the fact that I’m reading more books for adults and fewer for children and teens, so they take longer to read. But the reason is mostly that I just didn’t read as much because of the pandemic and the election.

In the early part of the year, I dedicated a not insignificant amount of time to volunteering in the Democratic primary. When the pandemic and subsequent shutdown hit, I figured I’d get in a lot more reading time. The time was there, but my ability to read was not. I found it difficult to maintain the kind of focus that sustained reading requires; my mind was almost always elsewhere. I know many of you are feeling this keenly too.

Still, I did manage to read a few really great books. All but one are nonfiction, and none of them were written for kids and teens. Here they are, in no particular order.

 

A Life on Our Planet by David Attenborough

Only partially an autobiography, Attenborough calls this his “witness statement and a vision for the future.” He writes about the dramatic loss of biodiversity on our planet as observed over the course of his long life, and then looks to the future, to the points of no return and what our continued unwillingness to make big changes will mean for the future of humanity and the rest of life on Earth. It’s a devastating account.

This was the most emotional book I read this year; it frequently made me tear up over the colossal scale of the tragedy and how little hope there seems to be for our future. But Attenborough dedicates a lot of the latter part of the book toward solutions. His tone here is serious but hopeful, encouraging readers to share in that hope while also taking action to ensure that hopeful future comes to pass.

 

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger

Junger’s short book provides his explanation for why so many white colonists in America willingly abandoned their Western society and culture and went to live with Native American tribes – but there are no records of the reverse ever happening. He weaves this question together with the fact that many American soldiers returning from war have PTSD not only because of the extreme violence they witnessed and participated in, but because of the struggle of leaving behind a communal society (soldiers in war) and trying to reintegrate into an extreme individualist one (modern American society at peace). Certainly he is not arguing that war is good – but the more communal cultures of both the armed forces and Native American tribes exert an inexorable pull on humans. It’s a fascinating book that provides a lot to think about.

 

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Harari has written an ambitious book about the history of humankind, from 100,000 years ago to the present. Among the most interesting things for me personally were these two bits: there were half a dozen or more different human species that lived at the same time as homo sapiens (not just the Neanderthals as most of us think); and the agricultural revolution may have been ultimately good for 21st century humans, but for most of its duration it actually caused a decrease in the quality of life for most people (not to mention animals).

This isn’t my highest rated book of the year, but it’s the one I think about and talk about the most. It’s also the one that made me decide to eat a more plant-based diet, a decision that was reinforced when I read A Life On Our Planet later in the year.

 

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

This modern classic of nonfiction writing is just the kind of nonfiction I love, a mix of history and science that’s fascinating from beginning to end. It tracks the rise of human civilizations all over the world, elegantly and convincingly arguing that geographical and environmental factors shaped humanity (and all its differences) much more than did any innate qualities of race or DNA. Along with Tribe and Sapiens, these three books all share the common theme of why humans are the way we are – an endlessly fascinating topic that I’ve really dug into this year.

 

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang

My favorite fiction book of the year is also one that made me realize I liked short stories. Every single story is good, in part because Chiang really thinks through his ideas, carefully creating worlds and characters that follow the set of fictional rules he’s established for his SF premises. But they also say a lot about humanity without diving too far into the “literary” stereotypes where plot is often sacrificed. These are SF stories that revel in their SF-ness. My favorite story now is not one I mentioned in my original review. It’s called The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, and it’s about truth, memory, and how they intertwine, a topic I come back to often in my own ruminations. I asked my husband to read it, and we had a long and interesting discussion about it afterward.