Books, 2021

The year's reading, more or less in the order I read it. Thirty-one books, which is fewer than last year, when I had nowhere to go, and more than the year before, when I did.

• Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier. A second wife in a great house where the first one is everywhere. I read it in January, under a blanket, which is how it wants to be read.
• A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles. A count sentenced to spend the rest of his life inside a Moscow hotel, who makes a whole world of it. It seemed the right book for a year of rooms, and it was one of the kindest things I read.
• The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler. A reread. I've stopped counting. It gets sadder every time, and I think the book is staying the same.
• Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro. I wrote about it in March. I haven't lent my copy to anyone, because I keep meaning to reread the last chapter and then not doing it.
• The Searcher, Tana French. A retired Chicago detective buys a falling-down house in the west of Ireland and a local kid won't leave him alone. Jonah wrote in the spring to recommend it, and I passed it on to my mother the day I finished.
• Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir. Read on the plane to Duluth in June, which was a mistake, because I laughed out loud twice and the man beside me changed seats.
• Razorblade Tears, S. A. Cosby. Two fathers, both out of prison, both of whose sons have been murdered. Violent and angry and very tender, sometimes in one sentence.
• Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead. A furniture salesman in 1960s Harlem who is only a little bit crooked, and keeps trying to stay that way. I'd follow him anywhere.
• The Man Who Died Twice, Richard Osman. The club again. Just as good, and I was glad of them again by October.
• The Sentence, Louise Erdrich. A ghost haunts a small bookstore in Minneapolis through the worst year of the city's recent memory. It's about grief and books and Minnesota, and I read it in two nights and then called my mother.

The other twenty-one were mysteries I'll forget by spring, a stack of tabletop rulebooks I read for work and pleasure in roughly equal parts, and one very long biography I didn't finish and won't name, out of respect for its author and my own pride.

What should I read in 2022?