The Best (and Worst) Books I Read in 2021

Like last year, the title says it all. Of the 39 books I read in 2021, here are the few that stand out as particularly good, bad or otherwise noteworthy:

A State of Fear - Laura Dodsworth

The full history of Britain’s COVID catastrophe is still being written, but for a rough first draft you could do a lot worse than this effort from Laura Dodsworth. Our government is incompetent and hypocritical, but you already knew that. What I learned from A State of Fear is that things are even worse than I realised.

When it comes to COVID this is an astute work of investigative journalism. But the most interesting thing about A State of Fear is that large parts of it could have been written even if the pandemic had never happened. What’s really at stake is not public health but a set of fundamental questions about the type of society we want to live in. Are we free citizens of a democracy who can be trusted to make our own decisions - and our own mistakes - or does a bureaucrat know best? Are we mature adults with responsibility over our own lives, or are we dangerous children who need to be subtly but continually “nudged” in the correct direction by a cadre of anointed technocrats? Dodsworth shines a light on the Whitehall faction whose job description is to manipulate the unwashed masses using every trick in the “behavioural psychology” playbook. It’s not a conspiracy - they’re open about it. And it’s been going on since long before COVID. We should be talking about this a lot more than we are.

A State of Fear isn’t necessarily the “best” book I read last year, but it’s definitely the one I’ve thought about the most since putting it down. Reading it felt like an act of self-defense. (Dodsworth also has a Substack which you should definitely follow.)

Red Famine - Anne Applebaum

When I read this book in December I had no idea that Ukraine would be all over the news two months later, but here we are.

Have you heard of the Holodomor - the deliberate campaign of hunger that Stalin waged upon Ukraine in the 1930s, in which Soviet forces confiscated food, shut down supply chains, blocked roads, and sat back while millions starved to death, all part of a targeted effort to crush Ukraine’s language, identity, and nascent nationalist movement? I’d heard of it, but not much more, and after reading Red Famine I’m embarrassed by little I used to know about this atrocity that took place on Europe’s doorstep within living memory.

I’d ask why this mass murder isn’t more famous, but there’s a chapter about that too. For example, did you know that the definition of “genocide” in international law is narrower in scope than what the original creator of the term intended, and this is mainly because the Soviet Union used its position of influence at the Nuremberg Trials and the foundation of the U.N. to avoid culpability for its crimes? Or that news of the Ukrainian famine was suppressed at the time not only by the Soviet propaganda machine but by the New York Times, who won a Pulitzer for their parroting of Russian lies? There are some lessons in here for the modern era, but I doubt we’ll learn them. In any case, Red Famine is an excellent work of history and I’m glad I read it - especially given recent headlines.

Woke Inc: Inside the Social Justice Scam - Vivek Ramaswamy

As you may have noticed, corporations have been falling all over themselves lately to proclaim their support for the trendy politics of social justice - which might be okay if these weren’t the same corporations that are destroying the planet, undermining democracy, exploiting the third world, and paying peanuts to their workers while their executives rake in the billions. It’s all a smokescreen (wokescreen?) and it’s time we started calling them out on their insincerity. That’s the basic thesis of Vivek Ramaswamy’s very timely new book Woke Inc.

I suppose putting “woke” in your title is a great way to repel people who aren’t already inclined to agree with you, but Ramaswamy is no mere culture warrior; he’s a second-generation immigrant who until recently ran a successful pharmaceutical start-up, so he knows better than most what capitalism has to offer when it’s done right. He’s also trained in law, and Woke Inc is full of practical suggestions for how we can rein in corporate power and make the world a little more closely aligned with the values that the plutocratic class is only pretending to believe in. Essential reading.

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Some honourable mentions:

• Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt, a memoir of his time as a junior doctor in the NHS, was a fun, light read that’s equal parts hilarious and depressing. It made me laugh, it made me cringe, and it filled me with deep concern about the state of our beleaguered healthcare system. And he was writing before COVID!¹

• I hate audiobooks, but someone told me that a) Matthew McConaughey’s new memoir Greenlights is excellent, and b) it’s even better in audio, since McConaughey’s dramatic chops make for some entertaining narration. They were right on both counts.

• After reading Edmund Morris’s The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, I think that “Teddy” (to use a name he hated) might be not only my favourite American president but my favourite figure in all of history. What a legend - and what a great read.

• Two other biographies I enjoyed a lot last year were Andrew Roberts's Churchill and Ron Chernow’s Grant. My only problem is that in the last few years I’ve read biographies of Napoleon, Churchill, Grant, Roosevelt, Washington, Nelson and Hitler, which means I really need to tackle a biography of someone who wasn’t a white male Western military leader. Any suggestions?

And finally, here are some books that didn’t impress me so much:

• Conspiracy theories aside, Klaus Schwab’s The Great Reset was a moronic mess of corporate buzzwords that says nothing insightful and reads like the work of a hungover undergraduate who’s padding the wordcount while hoping the professor won’t realise he hasn’t done the reading. I’d tell you to ignore it, except Schwab is chairman of the World Economic Forum and thus a man of considerable power and influence, so his apparent inability to produce an intelligent thought is really quite troubling.

• Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, a novel about humans colonising the Red Planet, is popular among sci-fi fans, but I’m not sure why, because I thought it was six hundred tedious pages of nothing. A waste of time. (I wrote a longer review here.)

That wraps it up. Here’s to a book-filled 2022 🥂

1. Brits around the same age as me might remember Adam Kay as one half of the comedy band Amateur Transplants, whose song London Underground was a viral hit circa 2005.