A list from a list (highly idiosyncratic — in which self decides which kind of writing she’s going to spend most of 2021 doing)
BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIR
- A Promised Land, by Barack Obama – “A reminder that the 44th president is one of the best writers ever to serve in that office”
- Stranger in the Shogun’s City, by Amy Stanley – “The everyday struggles of an obscure woman in Tokyo in the first half of the 19th century”
- Kiss Myself Goodbye, by Ferdinand Mount – “The hilarious tale of a . . . pathologically inventive aunt in raffish, upper-class Britain either side of the second world war”
HISTORY
- A House in the Mountains, by Caroline Moorhead – “Weaving deep research into a compelling narrative . . . about four women fighting with the partisans in northern Italy in 1943”
- Alaric the Goth, by Douglas Bain – “Colorful portrait of the city and empire in the fifth century”
FICTION
- The Slaughterman’s Daughter, by Yaniv Iczkovits – “Late 19th century picaresque about a Jewish mother in the Pale of Settlement who sets out to retrieve her wayward brother-in-law in Minsk”
- Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart – “Coming of age in Glasgow in the 1980s”
- Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar – “Part autobiographical tale about growing up as a Pakistani-American through the age of 9/11 and then Donald Trump”
- Burnt Sugar, by Avni Doshi – Opens with “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.”
CULTURE AND IDEAS
- Leo Tolstoy, by Andrei Zorin – “Weaves together his times, his writing, his faith and his political activism”
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
- Apollo’s Arrow, by Nicholas Christakis – “the history of plagues”
BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS
- No Rules Rules, by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer – “The boss of Netflix and his co-author explain how he arrived”
Kanlaon 