Titles in bold were my favorites of the year and titles in italics were rereads. My slowest reading year since 2019 on account of grad school and doing other stuff in my life like writing mediocre comedy and genuinely bad other stuff.
Fiction
ARX-Han, Incel: A Novel - It kind of is what it sounds like, but also it isn't. Podcast interview with the author. As the name implies, it was uncomfortable read at a lot of points, but I think it worth it and the narrator - Anon - was one of the more memorable characters I've seen this.
Ayad Akhtar, The Who and The What - This and the other Ayad Akhtar work are plays, not prose. I've read before and got back to them because Akhtar was staging a new play that I really wanted to watch (alas, I did not because I decided to go to graduate school), but regardless, Akhtar is probably living writer.
Ayad Akhtar, Junk - This is a play about high-yield bonds, so strong rec if anyone from current workplace is reading this. Akhtar makes a really interesting argument here, positing that the pivot of the US economy from manufacturing to services (or as people would say, neoliberalism) and the opening up of opportunities in America to those are not just white Protestant men were intertwined.
Bandi, The Accusation
Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle
Andrew Boryga, Victim
Graham Greene, The Quiet American
Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation - My new go-to book recommendation whenever someone asks.
Tanuja Desai Hidier, Born Confused - I feel like I read an Indian-American YA book every year, and every year I am disappointed. This one of the OG ones, and I actually liked it? Maybe it's because of New York/New Jersey setting, maybe it's because it's very pro-brown boy, but it worked for me.
Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Great recommendation if you ever need to convince a Desi dad to read a novel.
Lisa Ko, The Leavers
Lisa Ko, Memory Piece
Nella Larsen, Passing
Gautam Malkani, Londonstani - A simultaneously really stupid and smart book, which is one of the best explorations I've see on Asian masculinity the West (though, to be fair, that is one of the lowest bars). This, along with a few other novels, will likely cause me to make the mistake of going to random boroughs in outer London when I'm visiting in January.
Sarah Thankam Mathews, All This Could Be Different
John Okada, No-No Boy
Sheena Patel, I'm A Fan - This is a novel about a British woman who is a having an affair with an emotionally distant artist, with the women proceeding to lose herself by stalking him and his wife on Instagram. Anyway, it's well-written and tackles some interesting topics in contemporary society, but what intrigues me the most was that January 6 inspired Patel to write it.
Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends - Liked this a lot more than Normal People!
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Sanjana Sathian, Gold Diggers - Reread this for a book club, and my thoughts didn't change on the second go-around. The prose style is way overboard for heist story, and the plot and characters are pretty whatever, but Sathian does an incredible job of what it was like to grow up in Indian ethnoburb during the 2000s. It's comparable in that way to Didi, even if I thought that was overall a stronger work.
Akhil Sharma, A Life of Adventure and Delight
Zadie Smith, The Fraud
Zadie Smith, Grand Union
Tony Tulathimutte, Private Citizens
Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection - Kind of like seeing your worst thoughts being acted on page. Was inspired to read it when I was coping and seething about some rejection from a girl on Hinge and found an article he wrote.
Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao - I complain a lot that art made by Asian-Americans has a bad and annoying tendency to be overly focused on a) complaining about our parents or b) complaining about white people. Even if this wasn't one of my favorites - I think it tried to do a little bit too much - I have to give props to Vara for at least writing a good diasporic story which was about something else.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle - S/o to Simran for giving this to me at a DB Christmas thing six or seven years ago. You were right that I would like it.
Adelle Waldman, The Love Lives of Nathaniel P.
Esther Yi, Y/N - Has a line comparing a K-Pop idol's penis to winter that I have not forgotten.
Nonfiction
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, What Are Children For?
Robert Caro, The Power Broker - I've been circling around this one for years, and I got to say, it is everything that people say it is. Long, well-written, very informative, and probably would've blown my mind if I hadn't read a couple dozen urban history books before it. It's maybe the best nonfiction book I've ever read? Very cool when something lives up to the hype.
Joya Chatterji, Shadows at Noon
Kyle Chayka, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
Steven Conn, The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is―and Isn’t
Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765 - This and the aforementioned Chatterji book work well as an intro to South Asian history fwiw.
Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror - About the wave of anarchist terror in the last 19th to early 20th centuries. Hits different in a post-Luigi world.
John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
Samuel Goldman, After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division
Patrick Radden Keefe, The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream - Love Radden Keefe's writing so much. If you, like me, have wasted too much of your time over the past two months doomscrolling through post-election takes, I think this actually goes to explain why people were kind of mad about how the immigration situation has gone over the past few years. It's not about the 2020s - this is a book about Fujianese asylum seekers and people smuggling in 1990s NYC which was published in 2009 - but the parallels between the situation then and now are hard to ignore.
Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism
Becky Nicolaides, The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles after 1945
Joe Nocera and Bethany McClain, The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind - It's weird how little we've reckoned with the choices made during the pandemic? In hindsight, I do wonder a lot if the lockdowns were really worth it.
Lauren Oyler, No Judgment: Essays
Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
Mason Williams, City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia, and the Making of Modern New York
Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
