Photo from nypl.org
As of October 5, late fees no longer apply! As Tony Marx, president of the NYPL says, fines do not necessarily ensure book returns. “But, unfortunately, fines are quite effective at preventing our most vulnerable communities from using our branches, services, and books. … As New York grapples with the inequities laid bare by the pandemic, it is all the more urgent that we ensure the public library is open and freely available to all.”
That means we all get to start again, tabula rasa, at the library. (Some replacement fees still apply.)
My 2021 reading list
And speaking of books, here is my 2021 reading list (not counting short books of poetry I read and re-read by U.S.poet laureates, Joy Harjo and Billy Collins):
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
[A biography about Mother Cabrini. I can’t find the title. Whoops.]
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro
The Unwanted Gaze: The Destruction of Privacy in America by Jeffrey Rozen
The Women of the Bible Speak by Shannon Bream
Let’s Talk about Hard Things by Anna Sale
Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon
O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
Not Under 40 by Willa Cather
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
The Interpreter by A.J. Sidransky
The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
It’s Up to the Women by Eleanor Roosevelt
What do all of these books mean?
I look at this list like an astrologer reading star charts. There is a lot going on here, especially when I compare it to my 2020 reading list.
I started 2021 reading about adolescent male angst, specifically the angst of 20th-century boys living in Manhattan. Catcher’s Holden Caulfield is an old fictional friend I visit every so often. Jim Carroll was a new one for me, a real person, who thought of himself highly. I live in his Inwood neighborhood and have become friendly with one of Carroll’s old classmates. According to Carroll’s classmate, Carroll’s account of drugs and teen romance was “full of “sh**.”
Mexican Gothic was fun. I read it electronically with Alison Stewart’s Get Lit book club on NPR. All I had to do was check out the novel through the NYPL app.
Mother Cabrini was a biography I bought in the bookstore of the Cabrini shrine on Fort Washington Boulevard. I can’t remember the title. I liked the subject, but the writing was so-so.
Catch 22 was just funny, an illustration of the confounding bureaucratic world we live in. What would Heller have written about Yasarian if he were stuck in pandemic land instead of Europe in World War II?
My favorites include Let’s Talk about Hard Things, for practical purposes. I checked out an audio copy from the NYPL app and listened to it one afternoon. I successfully applied Sale’s advice the next day.
I loved O Pioneers! for its literary beauty and for its coming into my hands at the right time. Although I had read this book years ago, I fell in love with it during 2021 because I found a copy of it in the Jackson, Wyoming, airport. I finished it en flight. During my journey, I could envision the characters living in landscapes similar to those below my plane.
My other two favorites were Hamnet and the Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell. Such page-turners that made me cry!
Drums of Autumn, from the Outlander series, was my least favorite so far, repetitive and tiresome, although I will love the characters, Claire and Jaime, forever and ever and ever.