Novel Reading in 2021

Following my annual practice, I have listed here my “novel” reading for 2021. This is a way of documenting what I get through in a year’s worth of reading on the commute to work, in the evenings after work, and while travelling outside of my “normal” academic reading—albeit there was, again, no such international travel throughout the year. My use of the term “novel” reading is loosely adopted, as you will see from the list to include fiction and then really important non-fiction work I get excited to read in my spare time. My highlight this year was completing a good cross-section of material by Arnold Bennett, Poet of the Potteries. His short story ‘The Death of Simon Fuge’ in The Grim Smile of The Five Towns recalls the landscape produced under capitalism in the Potteries of Stoke-on-Trent as a ‘rolling desert’ of ‘broken pots and cinders’:

Great furnaces gleamed red in the twilight, and their fires were reflected in horrible black canals; processions of heavy vapour drifted in all directions across the sky, over what acres of men and miserable brown architecture! The air was alive with the most extraordinary, weird, gigantic sounds. I do not think the Five Towns will ever be described: Dante lived too soon.

It is a passage that has echoes of Marx’s own depictions of the social hell of capitalism, inclusive of his focus on the experiences of pulmonary disease among the potters, diminution of stature, and scrofula as the vampire thirst of capital seeks the blood of living labour in the city.

1. Antonio di Benedetto, Zama [1956], trans. Esther Allen (New York Review of Books, 2016).
2. São Bernardo, Graciliano Ramos [1934], trans. Padma Viswanathan (New York Review of Books, 2019).
3. Kathleen Alcalá, Spirits of the Ordinary: A Tale of Casas Grandes (Harvest, 1997).
4. Ali Cobby Eckermann, Ruby Moonlight (Magabala Books, 2012).
5. Yuri Herrera, The Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, trans. Lisa Dillman (And Other Stories, 2020).
6. Patrick White, Voss [1957] (Knopf, 2012).
7. Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land, The Timeless Land Trilogy: Volume 1 [1941] (Harper Collins, 2013).
8. Stephen Gapps, The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the Early Colony, 1788-1817 (NewSouth Books, 2018).
9. Tara June Winch, The Yield (Hamish Hamilton, 2019).
10. Charles Bowden, Sonata: Unnatural History of America Series, Volume 6, Foreword Alfredo Corchado (University of Texas Press, 2020).
11. Kenneth Cook, Wake in Fright [1961] (Text Classics, 2012).
12. Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (Verso, 2019).
13. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007).
14. Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns [1902] (Penguin, 2001).
15. Arnold Bennett, Clayhanger [1910] (Vintage, 2017).
16. Arnold Bennett, The Card [1911] (Penguin, 2016).
17. Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale [1908] (Penguin, 2007).
18. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City [1973] (Vintage, 2016).
19. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (Vintage, 1994) [re-read].
20. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse [1995] (Vintage, 2002) [re-read].
21. Eric Richards, The Leviathan of Wealth: The Sutherland Fortune in the Industrial Revolution (Routledge, 1973).
22. Cormac McCarthy, Suttree [1979] (Picador, 2010).
23. Brett Christophers, Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? (Verso, 2020).
24. Doreen Massey and Alejandrina Catalano, Capital and Land: Landownership by Capital in Great Britain (Edward Arnold, 1978).
25. Andrew Brooks, Inferno (Rosa Press, 2021).
26. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (Orbit Books, 2020).
27. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism [1950], trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press, 2000).
28. Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove [1985] (Pan Books, 2011).