A Year in Reading: Arif Anwar

I’m on track to have finished a book a week in 2021, which I’m happy with given that so much of my time is spoken for by family, work, and writing. I don’t like stuffing 100-plus books into a year like passengers in a rush hour subway car, leaving me unable to savor, reflect upon, or even mourn a memorable read. I am selective in what I read, sometimes strategic— a “selfish reader” who “consume[s] literature for the sustenance of my own writing,” as Anthony Veasna So put it last year. 

I’ve been writing my second novel for a year and a half now, starting in May 2020, the peak of the pandemic lockdowns when time was crushed into a colorless smear of minutes, hours, and days. A deadline of Dec. 31st and an approximate word count of 170,000 (it’s gonna be a big one) were my guiding stars in that grey mire, and Scrivener’s daily word count meter my sextant. Day after day after day I woke up, taught classes, hit my daily word count, and went to bed until I woke up on the day of my deadline, finally finished. The completed manuscript stood at nearly 700 pages.

In January 2021, I started the second draft with the objectively insane deadline of mid-May (which I met). Thankfully, I find second drafts (also shitty like my first) to be often easier. I’m currently on the third draft. Some of the books below contributed to the research I needed for this novel. Some I read for pleasure. 

I read in both Bangla and English, and although I read some excellent books in Bangla this year, only the English books are included in this list. I also read other books in 2021 that I enjoyed, including by , by , ’s , and by . I was fortunate to read an ARC of s , which should garner attention with its themes of transnational uprisings and individual responsibility when it’s published in February 2022. In between books, I read manga by and . I watched a lot of TV, but only and stood out. As for movies, I watched very few but on Netflix