The A.V. Club’s 15 favorite books of 2021

Should the end of the year leave you with the feeling that time is slipping by too quickly, consider this little observation, delivered from one character to another in one of our favorite books this year: “‘Your transience is so great that you do not exist.’” What’s a single life within the life of the entire planet? the interlocutor seems to say. Or, in our case, a single year within infinite time? We don’t know. We didn’t make the calendar; we merely schedule our best-of lists at the end of it. But wouldn’t you know it, within the so-transient-it-barely-exists span of 2021, like so many years past, there were a lot of good books.

There were books filled with nuns! Writers! Artists! Future prime ministers! We hope you like novels, because we’ve got a bunch of them: We’ve got an internet novel, a climate change novel, and even, god help us, a pandemic novel. (It’s good, we promise.) As always, these are contributing writers’ and staff members’ personal favorites, not ranked or chosen by consensus. Click on through and read on to see what they are—the time will go faster than you think.

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

(New York Review Books)In the winter of 1960, before Jewish assimilation in America is a settled issue, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, father of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arrives at the fictional Corbin University in Upstate New York to interview for a professorship. Ruben Blum, the school’s first and only Jewish professor, has been tasked with sizing him up and showing him around. Netanyahu brings with him his wife and three terrible boys: the smoldering Jonathan; Iddo, of ambiguous age but still in diapers; and Benjamin Netanyahu himself. The Netanyahus are uncouth, lusty, loud, and violent. They break prized television consoles, devour gingerbread houses, seduce daughters, and flee naked into the night. And yet their foils, the upstanding Blums, with their gentile affectations, their quiet resentments and longings for straighter noses, come off no better. An uncommon combination of erudite and slapstick, this is Cohen’s best book yet. [Erin Somers]