Non-Fiction reads of 2021

Vaguely broken down by category, but quite a few of these books could be in more than one.

 

Read for my "Chicago books" book club:

Chicago: City on the Make, by Nelson Algren

Campaign! the 1983 Election that Rocked Chicago, by Peter Nolan

American Warsaw: the rise, fall, and rebirth of Polish Chicago, by Dominick Pacyga

Other Chicago-related books

The Great Chicago Fire, edited by Paul M. Angle

Disposing of Modernity: the archaelogy of garbage and consumerism during Chicago's

    1893 World's Fair, by Rebecca S. Graff

The Jewel of the Gold Coast: Mrs. Potter Palmer's Chicago, by Sally Sexton Kalmbach

A Shopper's Paradise: how the ladies of Chicago claimed power and pleasure in the new

    downtown, by Emily Remus

Chicago's Great Fire: the destruction and resurrection of an iconic American city, by

    Carl Smith

 

Books on books:

 

Seven Kinds of People You find in Bookshops, by Shaun Bythell 

The Afterlife of "Little Women", by Beverly Lyon Clark

The Bookseller of Florence: the story of the manuscripts that illuminated the 

    Renaissance, by Ross King (way longer that it needed to be)

Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller, by Nadia Wassef

The Gilded Page: secret lives of medieval manuscripts, by Mary Wellesley

Britain:

These Ruins are Inhabited, by Muriel Beadle

The Very Best of British, by Nicholas Courtney

Terms & Conditions: Life in girls' boarding schools: 1939-1979, by Ysenda Maxtone

        Graham

Lions and Shadows: an education in the Twenties, by Christopher Isherwood

What Matters in Jane Austen: Twenty crucial puzzles solved, by John Mullan

C. F. A. Voysey: Architect, designer, individualist, by Anne Stewart O'Donnell

Behind Closed Doors: at home in Georgian England, by Amanda Vickery

Race:

Fire in the Hole: the Spirit Work of Fi-Yi-Yi and Mandingo Warriors, by Fi-Yi-Yi

The Color of Love: a story of a mixed-race Jewish girl, by Marra B. Gad

All that She Carried: the journey of Ashley's sack, a Black family keepsake, by Tiya Miles 

Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, by

    Monica L. Miller

Caste: the origins of our discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson

Asia:

The Sakura Obsession: the incredible story of the plant hunter who saved Japan's cherry

    blossoms, by Naoko Abe

Winter Pasture: one woman's journey with China's Kazakh herders, by Li Juan

African Samurai: the true story of Yasuke, a legendary black warrior in feudal Japan, 

       by Thomas Lockley & Geoffrey Girard

The Spirit of Japanese Poetry, by Yone Noguchi 

 

Art/architecture/design/fashion: 

 

Sisters in Art: the biography of Margaret, Esther, and Helen Bruton, by Wendy Van Wyck        Good 

Marion Mahony and Millikin Place, by Paul Kruty & Paul E. Sprague

Dandies, by James Laver

Brolliology: a history of the umbrella in life and literature, by Marion Rankine 

Patch Work: a life amongst clothes, by Claire Wilcox

The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, love and art in Venice, by Judith Mackrell

Portrait of Dr. Gachet: the story of a Van Gogh masterpiece, by Cynthia Saltzman 

Memoirs/biographies/diaries

Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence: the diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti & Gregorio Dati,         (edited by) Gene Brucker

Dante and the Early Astronomer: Science, adventure, and a Victorian woman who opened 

    the heavens, by Tracy Daugherty

'Dangerous Work': Diary of an Arctic Adventure, by Arthur Conan Doyle

Fillets of Plaice, by Gerald Durrell

Still Alive: a Holocaust girlhood remembered, by Ruth Kluger

Lear's Italy: in the footsteps of Edward Lear, by Michael Montgomery

Fred in Love, by Felice Picano

Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, by Joe Queenan

Memories: from Moscow to the Black Sea, by Teffi

 

Jews/Judaism:

 

Plunder: a memoir of family property and Nazi treasure, by Menachem Kaiser 

Letters to Camondo, by Edmund de Waal  

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, by Edward Kritzler

Jews and Shoes, (edited by) Edna Nahshon

Other:

Elderhood: redefining aging, transforming medicine, reimagining life, by Louise Aronson

An Atlas of Extinct Countries, by Gideon Defoe

The Writing of the Gods: the race to decode the Rosetta Stone, by Edward Dolnick

The Ring of Truth and other myths of sex and jewelry, by Wendy Doniger 

Dante and the Early Astronomers, by M. A. Orr

Books read in 2021 - Fiction

Read for my Italian book club:

 

Il Treno Dei Bambini, by Viola Ardone 

La Misura del Tempo, by Gianrico Carofiglio 

Cara Pace, by Lisa Ginzburg 

Vita, by Melania Mazzucco 

I Colibri, by Sandro Veronesi 

 

For my "Chicago books" book club:

 

Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, by Hamlin Garland 

Death on the Homefront, by Frances McNamara 

Into the Beautiful North, by Luis Urrea 

 

Mysteries, ghosts, and the like:

 

The Poisoned Chocolates Case, by Anthony Berkeley

Buffet for Unwelcome Guests, by Christianna Brand 

The Charing Cross Mystery, by J. S. Fletcher 

Woman in the Dark, by Dashiell Hammett 

The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, by Patricia Highsmith 

The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance, by M. R. James 

Transient Desires, by Donna Leon

Pretty Monsters, by Kelly Link 

Sisters of Sorcery, edited by Seon Manley and Gogo Lewis 

Widdershins: first book of ghost stories, by Oliver Onions 

The Day of the Owl, by Leonard Sciascia 

Tears of the Giraffe, by Alexander McCall Smith 

Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing, by Marla Szymiczkowa 

No Happy Ending, by Paco Ignaicio Taibo II 

The HIdden Palace, by Helene Wecker

The City of Mist, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon 

Body and Soul Food, by Abby Collette 

Tales of the South Carolina Low Country, by Nancy Rhyne 

 

Some British humour:

 

A Breath of French Air, by H. E. Bates 

Holy Deadlock, by A. P. Herbert 

The Eliza Stories, by Barry Main 

Portuguese Irregular Verbs, by Alexander McCall Smith 

Leave it to Psmith, by P. G. Wodehouse 

 

New (for me) books from favorite authors:

 

A Single Rose, by Muriel Barbery (not up to her usual standard, I'm afraid) 

French Rhapsody and The Portrait, by Antoine Laurain 

The Magician, by Colm Tóibín 

The Vicar of Bullhampton, Ralph the Heir, Castle Richmond, and The Three Clerks, by Anthony Trollope

 

 and a variety of others:

 

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, by Alina Bronsky

God's Mountain, by Erri De Luca

The Vietri Project, by Nicola DeRobertis-Theye

Lady into Fox, by David Garnett

In a Dark Wood Wandering, by Hella S. Haasse

The Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga

The Slaughterman's Daughter, by Yaniv Iczkovits

The Europeans, by Henry James

Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman 

The Cat who saved Books, by Sosuke Natsukawa

Yours Cheerfully, by A. J. Pearce 

Bride of the Sea, by Eman Quotah

Lamberto Lamberto Lamberto, by Gianni Rodari 

The Liar's Dictionary, by Eley Williams

The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams 

NON-Fiction read in 2020

It was a year of "one thing leads to another", one book to another.

A good example:  I took an online course about Ashkenazi cooking, which led to cookbooks and memoirs, and why let it be all about Ashkenzim, so books on Sephardic cooking and Sephardic history, etc., etc.

 

Matzoh Ball Gumbo: culinary tales of the Jewish south, by Marcie Cohen Ferris

A Drizzle of Honey: the lives and recipes of Spain's secret Jews, by David M. Gitlitz and Linda     Kay Davidson 

Heretics or Daughters of Israel? the Crypto-Jewish women of Castile, by Renée Levine                Melamed 

Family Papers: a Sephardic journey through the Twentieth-century, by Sarah Abrevaya Stein

The Cooking Gene: a journey through African-American culinary history in the old South, by     Michael Twitty 

The Cooking of the Jews of Greece, by Nicholas Stavroulakis 

 

Donna Rifkind's biography of Salka Viertel, The Sun and her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, led me to Viertel's own memoir, The Kindness of Strangers.

 

A lot of books on race in America, several for my "Chicago books" book club:

 

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, by Eve L.            Ewing

A Few Red Drops: the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, by Claire Hartfield

Another Way Home: the tangled roots of race in one Chicago family, by Ronne Hartfield 

    neighborhood, by Carlo Rotella

A Most Beautiful Thing: the true story of America's first all-Black high school rowing team,       by Arshay Cooper

Say I'm Dead: a family memoir of Races, secrets, and love, by E. Dolores Johnson

Fire Shut up in my Bones, by Charles M. Blow (and I am SO SO SO looking forward to the opera at Lyric in the spring!)

Italy, of course:

Dark Water: Art, Disaster, and Redemption in Florence, by Robert Clark

The Politics of Washing: real life in Venice, by Polly Coles

Rawdon Brown and the Anglo-Venetian relationship, edited by Ralph A. Griffiths and John E.     Law

Two Cities, by Cynthia Zarin

and the two works by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa mentioned in my previous post.

Some memoirs:

Confessions of a Bookseller, by Shaun Bythell

The White Road: Journey into an obsession, by Edmund De Waal

Moab is my Washpot, by Stephen Fry

Making the Mummies Dance: inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, by Thomas Hoving

Crossing: a transgender memoir, by Derdre N. McCloskey

Talking to Myself, by Studs Terkel

Night, by Elie Wiesel

St. Trinian's Story, by Kaye Webb

Literary women in interwar England:

The Mutual Admiration Society: how Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford circle remade the         world for women, by Mo Moulton (a good book, but a ridiculously over-the-top subtitle)

Square Haunting: five writers in London between the wars, by Francesca Wade 

Frauds:

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou (though the jury is     literally, still out as I write this)

The Baker who Pretended to be King of Portugal, by Ruth MacKay

And some odds and ends:

Renaissance Invention: Stradanus' Nova Reperta, by Lia Markey (exhibition catalog)

The Ghost: a cultural history, by Susan Owens

Daemon Voices: on stories and storytelling, by Philip Pullman

Gilgamesh: the life of a poem, by Michael Schmidt

A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet, by E. J. White

Books read in 2020

Better late than never.

FICTION

Havelok the Dane and Gawain and the Green Knight were both read for a class on food in literature.

 

My book club , which focuses on books about Chicago and by Chicago authors, read Carol Anshaw's Right After the Weather, Willa Cather's Song of the Lark, and Sara Paretsky's Deadlock.

 

For my Italian class:  L'Arminuta, by Donatella Di PIetrantonio; La Vita bugiarda degli adulti, by Elena Ferrante; La mennulara, by Simonetta Agnello Hornby; Isola di Neve, by Valentina d'Urbano

 

I took a class about Giuseppe di Lampedusa. In class we read Steven Price's fictional biography, Lampedusa, and, of course, The Leopard (a re-read for me), but I also re-read The Professor and the Siren, as well as (for the first time) two non-fiction works by Lampedusa: Places of my Infancy: a memory, and Letters from London and Europe (1925-30) 

 

Due to the pandemic, theatre stopped in March.   But Court Theatre did a lot of online "deep dives" into plays they had intended to produce.  So I read Wole Soyinka's The Bacchae of Euripides: a communion rite and Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt.

 

Probably also due to the pandemic, I did a slew of very light reading - humor, mysteries, etc. 

So:

This Undesirable Residence, by Miles Burton 

Give up the Ghost, by Margaret Erskine

Unpunished: a mystery, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Leavenworth Case: a lawyer's story, by Anna Katharine Green

The Second Man, by Edward Grierson 

Israel Rank: the Autobiography of  a Criminal, by Roy Horniman (this is the book on which "Kind Hearts and Coronets" was based)

The Plain Man, by Julian Symons

Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers (a re-read) 

Rear Window and four short novels, by Cornell Woolrich

Hunting Season and The Safety Net, by Andrea Camilleri 

Puppies, by Maurizio de Giovanni (one of the Bastards of Pizzofalcone series) 

Raffles, by E.W. Hornung 

Venice Noir, an anthology edited by Maxim Jakubowski 

The Thief of Venice, by Jane Langton 

Trace Elements, by Donna Leon 

Black Betty, by Walter Mosley 

Murder at the Frankfurt Book Fair, by Hubert Monteilhet 

The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes,by Jamyang Norbu 

Revenge: Short Stories by Women Writers, edited by Kate Saunders

The Lacquer Screen, by Robert van Gulik 

The Womansleuth Anthology, edited by Irene Zahava 

 

P.G. Wodehouse amused me with Ring for Jeeves, Ukridge, Tales of St. Austin's, The Small Bachelor, and Meet Mr. Mulliner.

Other humor included Craig Brown's The Marsh Marlowe Letters, and Alexander McCall Smith's  The Geometry of Holding Hands and The Promise of Ankles.

 

I found some excellent new (to me) authors this year. I binged a bit on French author Antoine Laurain, reading first The President's Hat, followed by The Red Notebook and The Reader's Room. 

Two excellent collections of short stories were Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones, and  The Bus Driver who wanted to be God, by Etgar Keret. 

 

I also returned to old friends, such as Anthony Trollope (He Knew he was Right, The Belton Estate, Lady Anna), Wilkie Collins (No Name), Sharyn McCrumb (a re-read of Ghost Riders), and Edith Wharton (The World Over).

 

Other fiction reading included:

Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, ending the story of Thomas Cromwell

Emily Danforth's Plain Bad Heroines (longer than it should have been!)

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Babylon Revisited 

Arthur Phillips' The Egyptologist

Nancy Springer's Fair Peril

Paul Theroux's The Greenest Island

Lisa Wingate's The Book of Lost Friends

E.H. Young's Miss Mole

 

I think I'll do a separate post for the non-fiction, and then get to 2021!