A Year in Reading: Aatif Rashid
The first book I finished this year was Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which made the argument that technology and social media were eating away at our attention. The book had a powerful critique of capitalism’s obsession with efficiency and productivity and called for us to reengage with the local and the natural world. It was in retrospect a very ironic choice given the year that was to come, which would be dominated by COVID and an election cycle that seemed to last forever—but that only makes Odell’s advice all the more important.
The two best novels I read this year were ‘s and ’s On the surface, the two books are very different: is five hundred pages of stream-of-consciousness following a French Croatian spy as he travels to Rome on a train in the 1990s and thinks about his past, his role in the is the final book of the Cromwell trilogy, written in a more traditional close third person rich with historical detail and following Thomas Cromwell as he reaches to the peak of his powers before abruptly falling. Despite the stylistic and content differences, both books touch on something deeply human—through the level of detail, their astute political commentary, and their respective characters’ depth and complexity, they get at that ineffable thing we look for in novels, the powerful and very human vision of a complicated and often incomprehensible world.
