Best Reads of 2021: Part One, Fiction and Memoir

I am never current with my reading lists, since I read so many older (and occasionally out of print) novels.  2021 was no exception, as I caught up with authors I'd read ages ago and others whom wanted to re-visit or re-evaluate.

In this post, I'll cover my five favorite fiction reads (well, four fiction and one wonderful memoir) and in the next, I will list my five favorite history and non-fiction reads.  Two of the novels were published in 2020, and the other two are...way older.  

So, here goes:

1. PARAKEET by Marie Louise Bertino (Macmillan, 2020.)  This novel is a triumph of comic style.  The trope of the unwilling bride and dull groom takes on unexpected new life.  Before the wedding, the heroine meets her dead nasty, granny in the form of a parakeet who tells her to find her brother.  Naturally, she must...and finds herself in the bargain.   

2.  ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES by Rivka Galchen.(Macmillan, 2020) My kind of novel, for sure-- funny and heartbreaking. A New York psychoanalyst becomes convinced that his wife has been replaced by a simalcrum: well-behaved, but not the real thing.  (A dash of Kafka, always welcome.)  Few novels have captured a troubled marriage quite so precisely. 

3. THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD by Agatha Christie.  As a younger person, I'd rejected Christie as cozy fluff and settled for the many movie/TV adaptations.  But after listening to one of those useful podcasts, I tackled this "Poirot" mystery, and came away an Agatha convert. Her voice pitch perfect, and every character is a stand-out.  I listened to this in audio: because of Christie's reliance on dialogue, these mysteries are perfect for audio.

4. A CAB AT THE DOOR by V.S. Pritchett. I'm a huge fan of V.S. Pritchett's highly original short fiction, and this year, got around to his childhood memoir.  It reads like a novel with a Dickensian patchwork of towns, schools, and up-and-down fortunes.  Forced to leave school by his domineering (and erratic) father, Pritchett dives into the "trades" -- and his writing.  

5.  CRIME AND PUNISHMENT by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (translation: Constance Garnett.)  I first read this novel in college in a course on Russian Literature, and I admired it then in a college-girl way. I wanted to return to it with fresh  and (considerably) older eyes, and in the translation that Virginia Woolf had admired. So much I'd missed the first time--so I've decided to reread the other Russians that I read too early in life. More on this later.