My Most Anticipated Reads for 2021
The most exciting thing about a New Year — is a whole lot of new releases and books I’ve been meaning to read. Here are the Top 5 I’m keen to get into in 2021.
Most are eagerly anticipated 2021 releases and for those who have followed my Diversity goals, you’ll have to forgive the selection of an actual White, Male American author (you’ll see why).
Update Log:
January 2021- post published.
May 2021 — getting through most of these!
The Soul of a Woman — Isabel Allende (Chile — Published March 2021)
I admit — I was twenty years late to the Allende party… Last year I popped my cherry with ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’; and from there I was hooked, devouring another four of her novels including her most famous; ‘House of the Spirits’.
For this upcoming release; I know nothing except that it’s a memoir of sorts; described by her publisher as a “passionate and inspiring meditation on what it means to be a woman”. Usually, blurbs like this would have me running for the hills — however knowing Allende’s past, and her rise to fame in an era of late 1960s feminism — this will be Rebel Girl with a South American kick.
Plus, it’s only 192 pages, so if it’s really terrible — it will be short-lived.
Completed: March, 2021
Verdict: Allende’s feminist musings were always going to strike a chord, and her own upbringing makes you understand why she’s such a passionate writer. But at just under 200 pages, I feel a bit short-changed. None of her observations were new, and her own references to personal life were with just the lightest touch. I feel as though this was pushed out after a few weeks of COVID isolation.
3 stars
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Klara and the Sun — by Kazuo Ishiguro (Japan, Published March 2021)
I tend to avoid Nobel prize-winning authors, however, Ishiguro is an exception (a Booker Prize-winning exception — who didn’t love Remains of the Day).
In his forthcoming book, the story also seems one right up my alley; telling the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with “outstanding observational qualities”….
The publisher says that this is a “thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?”
Watch this space — in the meantime, I’ve just bought ‘When we were Orphans” to get some of his backlist read.
Completed : March, 2021
Verdict: Oooh. I think readers are going to be split on this one. As expected; a semi-dystopic novel told through the eyes of a robot type person is always going to be a bit cold and stilted. But this is what I found so unusual about this book. There were also so many narrative arcs (the sickness, a sister, the future, the father, the friend, the mother) that I couldn’t apply any stereotype while reading and had to hang on for an oddly unique ride.
4 stars
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Crossroads: A Novel — by Jonathan Franzen (USA, Published October 2021)
It has to take something special for me to put a white American male on my TBR; but.. OMG A NEW JONATHAN FRANZEN BOOK!!!!!! Not much is out there, not even a cover image… so here’s what I’ve been able to found and… spoiler… THIS IS THE FIRST IN A TRILOGY — Swoon
“It’s December 23, 1971, and the Hildebrandt family is at a crossroads. The patriarch, Russ, the associate pastor of a suburban Chicago church, is poised to break free of a marriage he finds joyless — unless his brilliant and unstable wife, Marion, breaks free of it first. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college afire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high school class, has veered into the era’s counterculture, while their younger brother Perry, fed up with selling pot to support his drug habit, has firmly resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate.”
Completed : TBC, Verdict: TBC
Watch this space
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The Committed— by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnamese/American, Published March 2021)
Nguyen’s debut The Sympathizer was not only one of the best of recent Pulitzer winners; it felt like the next generation of post Vietnam War literature.
In this book, we follow “the Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts and prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing.”
What could be more gripping than that!?
Ocean Vuong, another amazing best selling Vietnamese-American author (must read: “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”) — seems to have snaggled and advanced copy and his review is just glowing:
“This follow-up to his seminal The Sympathizer is Nguyen at his most ambitious and bold. Fierce in tone, capacious, witty, sharp, and deeply researched, The Committed marks, not just a sequel to its groundbreaking predecessor, but a sum total accumulation of a life devoted to Vietnamese American history and scholarship. This novel, like all daring novels, is a Trojan Horse, whose hidden power is a treatise of global futurity in the aftermath of colonial conquest. It asks questions central both to Vietnamese everywhere — and to our very species: How do we live in the wake of seismic loss and betrayal? And, perhaps even more critically, How do we laugh?”
Completed : May, 2021
Verdict: I have to admit that while I really loved the concept of this book; it was a hard and complex read where you really had to pay attention to every word. I find post-Vietnam War narratives compelling, and this France / Algerian angle of the coloniser / colonised was different to most of the anti American ones I’ve read. I loved Nguyen’s previous tale ‘The Sympahtizer’ and while I am very glad to have read this; I’d recommend it to hard-core fans only.
3 stars
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Luster — by Raven Leilani (American, Published August 2020)
One of last year’s releases that I never got to — this has had about 5 billion amazing reviews — and Obama even included it on his ‘Best of 2020’ list. Several of my closest reading buddies have also share this as being on their Best of for 2020…. so no brainer.
“Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties―sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She is also haltingly, fitfully giving heat and air to the art that simmers inside her. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage―with rules.”
Put simply, a young woman, trying to make sense of her life (haven’t we all been there).
Completed : May, 2021
Verdict: I still need a chance to debrief on this one! On first glance, thought it was going to be along the lines of ‘It’s Such a Fun Age’…. Oooh boy, I was wrong. Compelling like a train wreck…. But still trying to work out The Point. A strange and uncomfortable telling of a relationship of a black girl and a family she comes to be involved in through an online hook-up with the father. Still wrapping my head around it.
4.5 Stars
