What We Read, and Loved, This Past Year

Dear friends, it’s been a beautiful year.

I hope you’re having a wonderful Christmas celebration and are anticipating the Epiphany festivities with their attendant revelation of ever more happiness, creativity, and human flourishing.

As we do at the end of every year, we’d like to share with you some of the writing that has brought us joy. My to-read list is already overflowing, but after seeing these recommendations from our Dappled Things editors, it’s about to grow even more.

Bernardo Aparicio

Among the highlights of my reading year were Phil Klay's powerful first novel Missionaries, Evelyn Waugh's hilarious and haunting Sword of Honor trilogy, and Neil Postman's alarmingly prophetic Amusing Ourselves to Death. Above all, however, it was a thrill to finally read Dante's Purgatorio (having read the Inferno three times already) and Katy Carl's As Earth Without Water (a novel I had been dearly hoping to see published since reading a first chapter more than a decade ago).

Having attended secular institutions through graduate school, I'm afraid I had placed too much stock on the trope that Dante's epic gets boring after the Inferno. Though I intended to read the full work sooner or later, I kept putting it off year after year. How wrong I was to do so! The truth is that despite the poem's many virtues, I have always felt that Dante's character in the Inferno remains too much of a tourist. One senses, whatever the poet may say to the contrary, that there is never any true danger that Hell may be his final destination. Purgatory, however, is another matter. Not only does there seem to be more at stake both for Dante and the reader, but as suffering is leavened with hope, there is a greater sense of expectation and movement in the narrative until the long-awaited encounter with Beatrice in the final cantos. It was a delightful surprise.

As for Katy's novel, I have to admit that I can't possibly be fully objective about a book written by a longtime friend and collaborator, but I can say the following without hesitation: based on the chunks I had read before, I expected the book to be good—I never dreamed it would be this good. As a writer myself, I felt almost intimidated by the richness of Katy's prose and her profound insight into the yearnings and struggles of her characters. As Earth Without Water is as sure a sign as any that, as I've said elsewhere, we may be entering into a new Golden Age of Catholic fiction.

Katy Carl

In a year of magical reading, a remarkable standout for me has been Kirstin Valdez Quade’s debut novel The Five Wounds, which together with Klay’s Missionaries and Beha’s Index of Self-Destructive Acts proves that the tradition of the serious Catholic novel is alive and well in American letters, though not always in the form of what Beha characterizes as “the ‘Roman’ novel” directly concerned with intra-Church matters in the manner of J. F. Powers or Rumer Godden. Rather, it follows passions, deaths, and little resurrections in the intergenerational dynamics of a family of New Mexico Catholics with variously conflicted, and quite realistically rendered, relationships to the Faith and to each other. I also took great delight in Dante’s Indiana, Randy Boyagoda’s comic follow-up to Original Prin, which even more than the original is marked by a carnival atmosphere (as it literally plays out in a theme park reminiscent of, yet wildly different from, the setting of Saunders’ now-classic “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”). Finally, before my word count is spent, get excited for two brilliant new titles by Dr. Joshua Hren, both due out early next year: Infinite Regress (a novel, Angelico Press) and Contemplative Realism (nonfiction, Benedict XVI Institute). I have had a sneak peek and can confirm both are well worth looking forward to!

Ann Thomas

I was struck by Casie Dodd's recent Dappled Things blog post Will the Real Catholic Writers Please Stand Up:" It can be tiresome to keep seeing the usual lists rattled off, almost like the price of admission to a Catholic literary club—a quasi-exclusiveness that inevitably leaves me fearing I’m about to be left out somehow again for not knowing the right answers." It is a sentiment I can relate to, and what’s led me to regard Joshua Hren's How to Read and Write Like a Catholic as an act of generosity. One needn’t feel there is any price of admission, but if you do, please be assured that Hren has paid it for you, and not limited the scope of this book to the usual lists.

Terence Sweeney

My book of the year—Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows—was originally published in 1922. These poems, which helped begin the Harlem Renaissance, were reprinted in 2021 by Angelico Press and features an excellent introduction by James Matthew Wilson. Written 20 years before his conversion to Catholicism, it features a restlessness, nostalgia, and attention to the beauty of things that foreshadowed his later conversion. This is McKay at his poetic best, especially his searing poems on American racism. One of the great collections of American poetry, it deserves it restoration as a classic in the Black literary canon and its induction into the Catholic literary canon.

Andrew Calis

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a sensitive exploration into loneliness. A man with some sort of amnesia is trapped in a labyrinth and trying to make sense of his surroundings by documenting his life via journals. Occasionally, other figures enter his life but he is still filled with a desire to know more -- about himself, his world, others, truth. I've been recommending it to all of my friends, with mostly good results.

Patrick Callahan

Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a story about a great many things that are or were dear to me over the years: lost manuscripts of Greek antiquity, the local library, stewardship of the environment, loneliness, unlikely fortitude, and love. For 2021, it is ostensibly an “escape” read into imagined history as well as science fiction. We are all drawn to such reads occasionally. Doerr, while not denying this desire and its particular good, twists the knife at how we warp this to extricate ourselves from responsibility with timely questions about guilt, mercy, and reconciliation with ourselves and all Creation.

Barbara Gonzalez

As Earth without Water really is my favorite fiction piece this year. I really felt it captured something about our generation and how it views achievement and adulthood, gently showing how that vision is limited, without becoming a harsh rebuke.

Uprooted by Gracy Olmstead was my favorite in nonfiction this year. Part memoir, part journalism, it also questions some of the goals that our generation has been taught to pursue, and ponders whether we have been taught to achieve and stand out to the detriment of belonging to a community.

Rosemary Callenberg

Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind, by Grace Olmstead. Place and rootedness are themes I find myself returning to often, and this book is one of the best I've read in that vein. Olmstead writes with such love for her native Idaho, while avoiding a blind idealization of it and its past. She writes about the impact of modern "progress" on human rootedness and connectedness--to each other, to the environment, and to home--without sentimentality. I read this early in the year and still find myself thinking about it and bringing it up in conversation, which to me is always a clear sign of a good book.

Caroline Morris

My favorite books that I read this year were The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer.

These books were not published this year but this was the first time I read both of them and they deeply impacted me after reading them. Both novels, whether they be explicitly religious or not, have a profound sense of the joy, beauty, and worth of human life. They celebrate the gift of existence and ultimately encouraged me to live with a heart oriented toward joy and optimism. Pieces like this are quite difficult to find in today's culture and are incredibly valuable.

Rhonda Ortiz

Having already contributed my two cents to Catholic World Report’s annual "Best Books” post, I hesitate to repeat myself—but I will. I highly recommend Fr. Steven Siniari's Big in Heaven, a collection of short stories about life in an inner-city Orthodox parish. Stephanie Landsem’s In a Far-Off Land not only made me cry (I’m not a crier), but it interested me from the point of craft. The story fits equally into three genres—Prodigal Son retelling, romance, and murder mystery—and juggling each genre’s conventions alongside the story’s timeline would have required a great deal of finesse. My hat is off to Landsem and her editors at Tyndale for pulling it off. And of course, I cannot forget Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s stellar Brother Wolf, Chrism Press’ first full-length release. Working with Eleanor as one of its editors was a pleasure.

I can list other titles—Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry for a meditative fictional memoir, and To Treasure an Heiress by Roseanna M. White for a fun romp involving pirate treasure and a Wodehousian romantic male lead. Of particular interest to Dappled Things readers, however, is Maya Sinha’s forthcoming debut, The City Mother, also from Chrism Press. Mary Eberstadt says it better than I can:

With The City Mother, Maya Sinha adds an electric new entry to the distinguished ledger of Catholic fiction. Hip and stylish, yet pulsing with mystic energy, her tale of a precarious young family illuminates the unseen operations of grace and evil in a secular age. Sinha’s hypnotic storytelling marks a thrilling literary debut.

Maya Sinha is a lawyer, a former reporter, and a humor writer for The Saturday Evening Post. Her humor especially shines in The City Mother, which I appreciate. (To quote Elizabeth Bennet, I dearly love a laugh.) The story’s compelling psychological drama and smart narrative will appeal to a wide range of literary readers. Official release date: February 1st.