A year’s discoveries
Gorgeous inside and out: my top pick for the year!
Why do we make lists? Now that the season of ‘Top 10s’ is well upon us, I thought I’d put myself through the exercise of rounding up 2021’s favourite discoveries – not so much to rank as to remember what an otherwise scattershot year has brought. 2021 has been personally exhausting for all sorts of reasons, but some of these lodestones have kept me thinking/being/doing the things that give me greatest joy and satisfaction. Others have simply made me laugh, which is a gift in itself in these times!
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Nonfiction: I’m still midway through Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass, but it’s easily already my favourite read in 2021. It would also be my single top pick on this list, if I had to forgo all the other categories. For anyone who’s grown up in a too-ordered city like Singapore, and tried to navigate its many out-of-bounds zones, Hayes’ genre-crossing exploration of the oppressive history of walls and boundaries is a revelation – and a delight. The best part? Hayes is also a brilliant artist, and has illustrated this delicious book with some mind-blowing woodcuts (see above). Needless to say, this book was a birthday gift from C, which made it extra special.
(Books which would have made the cut in any other year: Amanda Montell’s Cultish, Molly Ball’s Pelosi, and Tim Harper’s Underground Asia, which I reviewed here).
Podcasts: Is there anyone who hasn’t heard AWARE’s Saga, the gripping account of a watershed moment in Singapore civil society (with a star-studded production team including the writer Balli Kaur Jaswal, filmmaker Jasmine Ng, soundtrack by [.gif], etc)? It’s an important telling, not to mention a riveting audio-drama, and I’d urge you to binge all the episodes before Christmas. That said, I also want to give a shout-out to T42, a gloriously irreverent send-up of millennial life by Joel Tan and Kishan K Singh, which has lightened many a humdrum drive.
(Some will know that I once unwisely swore off podcasts altogether, but the weekly late-night trips between C’s place and mine, with my Spotify piped into the car’s audio, have since made for a comforting ritual – while allowing me to keep my eyes on the road. Count me a convert.)
Newsletters: This year, I discovered the peregrinating writer/photographer Craig Mod through his fantastic essay on Japan’s vanishing kissaten, put my email down for his weekly newsletter Ridgeline, and never looked back. The specific series that’s made it to this list, though, is Tiny Barber, Post Office, a pop-up newsletter that he’s been sending out daily since Nov 15, based on his (ongoing!) 500+km walk across Japan. As someone who once helped put together Asymptote’s fortnightly newsletters, I fully appreciate the toil it takes to keep a reader hooked, especially since we’re all loathe to spend more time than we need to on our inboxes. The TB,PO dispatches, I’ve found, are perfect for a short bus ride, and just enough to sate my wanderlust.
(Also heartily recommend: Ruby Thiagarajan’s Tote Bag Library, Ethos Books’ weekly letters, and for those interested in migration/displacement issues especially, the Forced Migration Current Awareness mailer.)
Films: Nothing in 2021 quite topped my 2020 favourite (Parasite), but the film that made me laugh (and think) the hardest this year was I Care A Lot – available on Netflix – which Rotten Tomatoes quite accurately describes as 'a searing swipe at late-stage capitalism’. It’s a heist comedy flick (think ‘Baby Driver’) that made me contemplate my mortality and the state of the world: make of that what you will. Also, Rosamund Pike played the ice-cold, whip-smart protagonist to a T.
(I have a soft spot for the new Bond, but it wasn’t Skyfall… And Shang-Chi would probably have topped the list, if not for the orientalised village and its furry inhabitants, which were my least favourite parts of the movie).
Theatre: Two pieces of Singaporean theatre caught my attention this year. I’ve raved elsewhere about New World’s End, the first permanent installation by OH! Open House which is hard to beat for its brilliant set design, meticulous research and the sheer immersiveness of the experience. Kudos to the team for capturing the many layers of the storied neighbourhood that is Jalan Besar. Another favourite was Sim Yan Ying’s Where Are You?, first staged in New York and brought to Singapore by Wild Rice, for its finely-tuned emotional sensitivity and impact. (Yes, of course I cried.)
And, finally –
Poetry: This is probably the hardest category, which is also why I’ve left it to the last. This year, I’ve had the privilege of reading and reviewing a good number of collections, both for the Asian Books Blog and elsewhere. Standouts include Lila Matsumoto’s Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water, Cynthia Miller’s Honorifics and Lisabelle Tay’s Pilgrim. But the most refreshing voice overall, I think, was Daryl Lim’s in Anything But Human – and a quick glance at his author page suggests I’m not the only one to think so. I also wanted to give a shoutout to MD Sharif’s second book, Stranger to My World, which follows from his earlier, Singapore Book Award-winning memoir with fragments of prose and poetry recording his harrowing COVID-19 experiences. Read it.
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There. I’m going to hit ‘publish’ before I have the chance to regret any of these choices – though I can already feel a wave of indecision coming on. I guess there’ll always be another year to change my mind! Happy 2022, and here’s to more discoveries.