Now that Christmas is over, I can safely reveal which books I loved the most during this past year without ruining any gift surprises. Reading is always an escape for me, and in 2021 this escape was especially welcome. I found myself using books as a way to explore other realities in a way that was both unintentional and also much needed. Of the 106 books I’ve read so far in 2021, here are the five I most loved, books that I think you might enjoy if you need a new reality for a few precious hours or days at a time.

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

“[D]eath and time are both illusions because we and every stone are made of the same ever-shifting particles. If we live, it’s only because some distant galaxy lent us its dust for a while.” – Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

This is the book I’ve most recommended on Twitter threads this year because reading The Thirty Names of Night was such an immersive experience. This gorgeous book slides lyrically between locations (Syria, New York and Michigan), time periods, and genders as it explores themes of identity and belonging as a trans boy seeks answers about the fire that killed his mother and about a Syrian artist who disappeared. Joukhadar’s language is stunningly poetic, the characters are rich and compelling, and the action of the story is well-paced. I was a little hesitant about finishing this book because I’d loved it so much that I wasn’t sure that the ending could live up to the rest of the book. Reader, it did. If you want to get lost in a beautiful book, The Thirty Names of Night is my top recommendation for the year.

“[H]ow a person is supposed to know what they love to do by how time blurs when they’re doing it.” – Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon by Grace Lin

My six-year-old son also loves getting lost in a good book. And while we enjoyed Beyond the Bright Sea by Lauren Wolk and the Vanderbeekers series by Karina Yan Glaser very much, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon is the perfect book for him right now, which makes it one of the most enjoyable books for me, too, because (when he isn’t bouncing back and forth on the bed) he’ll lean in close to me and put his hand across my wrist as I hold the book, an intimacy that’s already becoming rare.

He’s been obsessed with the Marvel character Shang-Chi since he found a Lego set at the toy store earlier this year and that led to a general fascination with China. This book, which my cousin picked out for him, details a journey by a young girl to find and consult with the Old Man in the Moon. The story arc and characters are strong, and it’s also filled with short renditions of Chinese myths. Some of my favorite moments so far are when we found the story of a goldfish trying to reach the top of a waterfall to become a dragon (a story that he’d had emblazoned on a shirt he wore for years) and the moment he told me the critical detail about why a dragon’s eyes weren’t painted in—something he’d learned from a series he’d been reading on his own.

The illustrations are beautiful, the print is mercifully large and the quality of the paper lends a tactile pleasure to reading this book. If your kids are as curious about the world as my little guy, particularly China or mythology, I highly recommend Where the Mountain Meets the Moon.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

My own interests in Asia tend more toward Japan and Zen Buddhism and I am a longtime fan of Ruth Ozeki regarding both. So when I found myself in a fiction drought toward the end of November, my husband mercifully and lovingly laid this tome on my bedside table to tide me over until Christmas.

Ozeki’s books are getting more and more mystical and I’m very much enjoying following her on this journey. At first The Book of Form and Emptiness broke my heart, reading the story of a family of three trying very hard to make it by when the father dies terribly may not have been my first best choice while my husband was healing from an injury during a pandemic, but maybe I needed that cry. I also needed the fantastic way Ozeki wove the different points of view together, from an adolescent boy trying to mourn to his mother who’s doing her best to cope to the voices of the books themselves, everyone had a different contribution to this story and every word contributed to the delicate balance of this wonder-filled book.

“‘Let me tell you something about poetry, young schoolboy. Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem.’ He sighed. ‘In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems there would be no poems.'” – Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness

The Book of Form and Emptiness delves into grief, hoarding, mental illness, and the process of healing torn books and I’ll gladly read it all over again the next time I need a reminder that suffering is only part of the story.

Appleseed by Matt Bell

I don’t always read the right books at the right times (or do I?), having read Station Eleven in the weeks immediately preceding the pandemic’s early days in Seattle and Matt Bell’s In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods while pregnant, so you might want to find your own right time to read this post-apocalyptic delight. But I do think you should read it. I liked it enough to buy out the copies at my local independent bookstore (in hardcover) and send it to the people I most wanted to read it. Like The Book of Form and Emptiness, Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, and The Thirty Names of Night, Appleseed weaves several stories together to create one greater whole. In this case it’s the story of a fawn who helped bring apples to homesteads across the U.S., a man who is fighting to wrest the country from a company controlled by his ex during a global climate disaster, and a creature who is exploring the icy surface of what used to be this country many years after the culmination of that climate disaster. The luscious characterizations and world-building recalled the best of Ursula K. LeGuin and the fully imagined ramifications made me look hard at dangers percolating in the world right now, politically and scientifically.

I wish I could share a particular quote from the book, because Bell’s sentences are so well constructed, but I was so wrapped up in the plot that I failed to underline a thing.

Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I already wrote about Undrowned here, but it’s the perfect real-world counterpart to Appleseed and the focus on the radical power of love and the importance of caring for ourselves and our environment is a good step forward into the future, whatever it may bring. Read it for yourself, read it for the ones you love and the ones you don’t. This book can only enrich your life and your relationship to humanity as a whole.

“What are the boundaries that we choose and do not choose? What are the distances we need and what are the walls that will isolate and destroy us? How can we discern the differences between generative boundaries and destructive borders? Are we ready to move towards nourishing forms of adaptation?” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned

I’m hopeful for 2022, not because I have any idea what will happen next, but because hope is my coping mechanism and because I’m sure (at the very least) I will find new books to love. What did you most love reading in 2021 or what’s on your list for 2022? Please share recs in the comments and help me build my birthday list. In the meantime, I’ll be over here shoving books at my shelves during an end of year cleanout, hoping I don’t actually have to let go of any of them.

The idea that a book is brought to life by its reader is not new. A writer pours all of the details and plot that they can into a work and then the reader comes along and makes it their own by keying into the things that matter to them and ignoring the things that don’t. This conversation and co-creation between writer and reader feels like magic when we allow ourselves to surrender to it. Yesterday, though, Ruth Ozeki took me beyond that magic to make me feel as though A Tale for the Time Being was not only written for me, but was being written for me as I read it. I wanted to go back and re-read it immediately to see if it changed. I also wanted to have you read it immediately to see if it was a completely different book for you. It probably isn’t (not really) but it’s very much worth a read either way. I’m going to delve into where the magic came from for me. Just go buy the book if you want to avoid my spoilers.

Metafiction Toys with Reality

A Tale for the Time Being is two books in one. The first is the diary of a teenage girl living in Tokyo in the nearish past. The second is the story of a writer, Ruth, living on an island on the west coast of Canada actively avoiding writing her next book, a memoir about her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s. Now if you look up metafiction, you’ll see that the form of authorial insertion is often used as parody. Yes, if you’re talking about Kundera. It’s also used as a tool to “explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art.” This is more what you see with writers like Paul Auster and it often feels like a stilted lecture. Weird, but stilted.

Ozeki, on the other hand, brings a rich humanity to metafiction that allowed me to bring my whole being to the book and not just my intellect. I’ve loved two other books by Ozeki before and I can’t recall her ever using herself as a character before, but she did it brilliantly here and it was just the right effect for this book. Part of the reason it worked so well is that she engaged my emotions first. Granted, it was the emotion of annoyance as I met an angsty Japanese teenager, Nao, who I though was being glib about metaphors as she called herself a “time being.” I pushed past that (thank God) and kept reading. Ruth’s story drew me in more easily because it is, at this point in my life, easier to engage emotionally with a writer who should be writing her masterworks but isn’t always. Ruth finds Nao’s diary and some other papers washed up on a beach in Canada and begins reading.

Through the relationship of these two stories, A Tale for the Time Being effortlessly whisked me through major events like the Fukushima meltdown, 9/11, suicide, and what it was like to be a kamikaze pilot in World War II, hitting each from a deeply human angle. Because Nao is a Japanese girl who was living in America but then moved back to Japan we also get a Japanese perspective on these events and more which was incredibly interesting and humanizing. There’s also lots of Buddhism. In gentle, washing waves that stretched my thinking and made me feel at home. The metaphor that had initially seemed pat expanded gloriously and this book wrapped around me and made me think deeply.

How This Book Wrote Itself for Me

At first it was easy to gloss over the details that were personal to me. Nao’s great-grandmother, Jiko, is 104, wise and dying. This year I lost my Djiedo at 104. Like Ruth, I’m a writer living in the Pacific Northwest (and most days I’d rather be on an island). She’s married to an artist (as am I). They’re both trying to find their place in the world—worried about being too isolated, too in the mix of things, not making enough work or the right work. Ruth had some complicated health stuff with her mom, something I’m navigating this past month (and for the last 30 years). Nao is a complicated, unhappy teen-aged girl (as I once was). And Jiku, a pacifist Buddhist nun, has to navigate her son going off to become a kamikaze pilot in World War II while I’ve worried about sending my son to war ever since I first heard myself sing “Taps” after “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” in a night of misguided lullabies (that I couldn’t seem to stop repeating for as many years as he still let me sing to him).

This is the spoiler part. There is a moment when Ruth opens Nao’s diary and finds that what was once written is now blank. That was the switch that flipped for my tired, busy brain and made me think that maybe it was no coincidence that I picked up this book, the copy of A Tale for the Time Being that I was holding, this week, a terribly busy week near the end of a terribly busy eight months in which I find myself writing book reviews at 5am and all that Buddhist balance I’ve been craving isn’t something I’ve even been able to look for. As Nao sat with Jiko practicing zazen meditation, I felt myself breathe. And it was everything.

I don’t know that this book will write itself for you the way that it did for me, but I hope you do have that experience of magic someday. Either way, Ozeki’s writing is fantastic, always.

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One of the things I was most afraid of in coming to India was replicating the colonial experience. This frightened me because I despise the exploitation of other peoples and cultures and I thought with my oh-so-white skin and complete lack of skill with local languages and norms that I could not avoid being seen as one of those colonizers who expects to be treated as more and better. It also frightened me because I thought I might grow to like it.

As a result, and as I’ve mentioned before, I steered away from bringing along books written from the British perspective (although I’ve read many before). Except one. I brought along Booker Prize winning Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala even though the prize, the cover imagery, and the jacket description all suggested it was England-approved. But the book was thin and I read so few prize-winning books (usually by choice) and I thought I’d muddle through whatever elitist whatnot the book might offer.

I’m so glad I was wrong.

Two Perspectives on India

Although there is one storyline in this book about a bored British housewife, Olivia, in 1923 India, it’s complemented perfectly by the story of Olivia’s step-granddaughter who visits a very different India in the 1970s to uncover the story of how and why Olivia ran away with an Indian royal.

Olivia’s story is actually a tale about a woman who’s questioning all the British convention she encounters as a newlywed who is first encountering British India. She doesn’t like the British society and she’s not afraid to act according to her own ideals. As much as I sometimes questioned her judgment—running off to spend all day nearly every day with a married Indian Nawab (I think this is a prince) without (and without telling) her husband—I admired her spirit—refusing to summer in Shimla just because that’s what the British ladies were expected to do.

As Olivia’s story unfolds, so does that of her granddaughter and here is where Jhabvala displays real mastery, because the two women experience many similar events at similar points in the narrative (from festivals to intrusions of unwanted guests and more) which could become quite cloying. Instead, because Jhabvala has made these stories just different enough, the intersections feel mystical and preordained and as I was reading the book I kept wondering if these two generations would fall into the same trap.

India in Real Life

My own perspective on India is much closer to Olivia’s granddaughter, in part because the India she encounters is much closer to the one I see during the day—the bustling emerging economy that’s making its own rules along the way, the street markets and roaming cows, the people who look as though they can repair anything (many things which an American would throw away), and the people who live in any spare space of traffic median they can find.

“For the first time I understood—I felt—the Hindu fear of pollution. I went home and bathed rigorously, rinsing myself over and over again. I was afraid. Pollution—infection—seemed everywhere; those flies could easily have carried it from her to me.” – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I refuse to judge the country based on traffic that scares me and mounds of garbage swept to the side of the street. It is different, but it should be different, because there’d be no point in traveling all this way if it was the same. I will not drink the water or eat the street food, but there are over a billion people here who are making the country what they want it to be. Don’t we all have some level of pollution or other problem we want to fix?

But that is not all of India. As an American tourist in Jaipur, I am staying in a hotel that used to be the residence of the prime minister of Jaipur where I swim in a large pool overlooked by peacocks and where an enormous staff is employed to cater to any need I might have and then disappear. Olivia’s set, though likely not Olivia herself, would have been at their most comfortable here behind the walls that separate us from the city.

Last night we dined with a local family in their palace in the old town of Jaipur. They are relatives (distant I think) of the Maharajah and their ancestors moved into the home in the 1760s. Nestled deep inside one of the pink blocks of market stalls and small shops, this home with three luscious courtyards houses several brothers and their families along with five dogs and a tortoise. They live behind walls and glass thick enough to block out the market noise in rooms beautiful in their simplicity that are decorated with family artifacts like pictures of the Maharajah and the Mountbattens as well as the skins and heads of leopards and tigers (decor it seemed as though our gracious hosts would not have chosen for themselves, but here family artifacts and history matter).

Today we’ll go into the jungle at Rathambore to hunt tigers with our cameras. I didn’t bring any more books about tiger hunting, so I’ll be reading a spiritual text in preparation for our visit to Varanasi or maybe a detective novel set in Mumbai.

How India is Changing Me

“She began to write to Marcia, but Marcia was in Paris and it was impossible to explain anything from here to there.” – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

I’m not sure I’m doing a good job of conveying my experiences, partly because I’m still so far inside of them and things change every day, but I’ll try.

In Heat and Dust, Jhabvala writes, “India changes people,” and I’ve been reflecting on what that means for me. I am aware here of never feeling like I belong anywhere. I don’t know the streets well enough to wander then, and even if I did I’d be an object of curiosity. And the luxurious expat lifestyle (as much as I’m enjoying it) makes this democratic, do-it-yourself girl deeply uncomfortable.

Most of all I feel conspicuous. There are moments I’ve been able to own that feeling of being watched and to embrace what it means to be on display (including the long saunter to the pool where I take a brief swim and then lay and do nothing but be seen). But being in India is making me more and more conscious of how uncomfortable I am being seen whether as an object of curiosity or as a woman. I’m uncomfortable even writing about it here because of everything it implies. Now that India has helped me pinpoint some of the sources that discomfort, I can start to investigate what it all means.

And then there is the spiritual awakening aspect of India. I did not come here for a religious experience, though there are certainly years in my life that would have been my goal. Somerset Maugham wrote of his characters once that he was “a deeply religious man who doesn’t believe in God” and that’s been the case with me for a long time. I flirt with Buddhist philosophy, cross myself like a good little Catholic to ward off the evil eye, and am most at peace when I am subsumed by the power of sitting beneath a large sky in front of a vast ocean.

So when I walk into a temple or a mosque or a gurudwara and feel the immense energies of the places and of the people worshipping in them, I pay attention. I don’t know what is happening and I don’t plan on going home and beginning to worship Vishnu, but I am soaking up the Hindu idea that all gods are one and that we make of them what we individually need. I am attracted to the Sikh vision of equality. I’m even beginning to like the call of the muezzin who wakes us around 4:45 am because of the sincere love of faith embodied in his voice.

I can even feel India affecting my syntax and my gestures. As a mimic—a skill I think I developed to mask the feeling of not fitting in in the many places I’ve traveled—I’m very aware of these things (and have been fighting the change of syntax in this essay), but no amount of energy will allow me to resist those changes.

The one thing I am sure of is that I am not a colonial. At least not yet. So I’ll enjoy yet another sumptuous breakfast buffet where I can eat foods from all corners of the globe while the waiter brings me extra special treats. I’ll relish cool swims in pristine pools. But I will not stop wondering about the social cost of creating a service class or the environmental toll of this kind of tourism on a state with little water. The wheel of the world keeps spinning, but I am not yet ready to accept that “other” or “privileged” is a station I must embrace.

I’m grateful to you for reading along with me as I experience India through books and the windows of a tour bus. I never know when I’ll have access to internet again, so I’m posting these as I go. Sharing the journey with you in this form helps me better understand my days and nights, so thank you.

For other perspectives on what I read while in India, read my experiences of The Death of Vishnu and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.