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the mission of the podcast about anime i do with @prophet-goddess is to encourage you read a book instead of watching anime. i think i made the above post about the best games of the past year because i was mad (again) that someone put nier on their list, and it's basically an anime (derogatory), so instead of playing nier or any of the video games i recommended, read one of these:

• 2021 – the best novel i read last year and one of the best novels i've ever read, Pity the Beast by Robin McLean is astonishing, hilarious, and harrowing all at once. it’s about survival: how we survive both other people and the unfeeling pitilessness of the natural world. it’s about what the difference between the two is. and it’s full to the brim with simply unbelievable sentences.

• 2020 – i’m still mourning the queen. no, not that one. Hilary Mantel died this year and we are all poorer for it. i would argue A Place of Greater Safety is her greatest historical novel, but The Mirror and the Light is the last novel in her monumental trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell, and it is remarkable. it nearly made me cry! a book about a grumpy old asshole! from england!

• 2019 – i read so many books in 2019. i played a lot fewer video games, too. it was a good year. ironic then that the highlight of one of my most successful years in terms of reading was a book that is largely about failure. The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell begins with the “discovery” of Victoria falls by David Livingstone, and ends in the speculative near-future, following three generations of characters (some fictional, some less so) as they run up against the limitations of themselves and their circumstances.

• 2018 – i mentioned the sentences of Pity the Beast, but as far as deranged turns of phrase go, nothing can top Milkman by Anna Burns. set in Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles, it’s a study of how language, and in turn, our ways of conceptualizing the world, are distorted by extreme strife and paranoia. it is also without a doubt the funniest book on this list. i drove a number of my friends insane by insisting on reading long passages to them aloud.

• 2017 – as you might have guessed, i have a soft spot for historical fiction, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise how much i loved Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, a devastating and beautiful story of the Korean diaspora throughout the 20th century.

• 2016 – come to think of it, it’s very weird there haven’t been any really gay books on this list so far. time to fix that with Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn, about a cast of very different women trying to survive the modern colonialism of international capital. it reminded me, in fact, of There Will Be Blood, in all the best ways.

• 2015 – it drags in the middle and is not as technically brilliant as the other works on this list, but The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson is noteworthy for being one of the few novels i’ve read about empire that looks seriously not only at the large-scale damage inflicted by conquering nations, but also the way it destroys those within it – including those who seek, even with the best intentions, to undermine it from inside.

• 2014 – ok, this one involves a bit of rules lawyering. the last of the Neopolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante was published this year, and the four books essentially constitute a single 1600 page novel, so you could argue it for this year. but if we’re going with a single book issued in 2014, it has to be The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. everything by Waters is excellent, but this might be her best: a meditation on different kinds of courage, and the little moments that teach us to be brave.

• 2013 – this one is so hard! two of the best books of the decade came out this year. i adore Nicola Griffith’s Hild and can’t wait for the sequel next year, but in terms of the impact it had on me i think the nod has to go to Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. you might think the groundhog-day-style premise sounds gimmicky: whenever the main character Ursula dies (quite often), time rewinds and she enters life again as a newborn in 1910 england. but what we get is an astonishing story about circumstance, and how small things can drastically change the trajectory of a life.

• 2012 – this one isn’t as difficult. after you’ve read Life After Life, read The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck.

• 2011 – i disqualified Elena Ferrante from 2014, but she here she will not be denied. My Brilliant Friend begins the Neopolitan Novels, and it remains one of the strongest, introducing the remarkable characters whose lives will unfold in the decades, and three novels, that follow it.