2021年的最后一天，来接受天堂君的灵魂拷问：今年你读了多少本书？
每年年末，《纽约时报》都会评选这一年的最佳书籍，而这些年度好书榜也是全世界公认最权威的、影响力最大的书单。
这些书单都是最好的英语学习资源哦~今天，就来跟天堂君一起看看，2021年有哪些书被评为年度好书吧！
《我们曾经多么美丽》
How Beautiful We Were
继2016年的处女作《看啊，追梦者》（Behold the Dreamers）之后，作者马布（Imbolo Mbue）气势磅礴而又令人隐隐悲伤的第二部小说终于出版了。
《我们曾经多么美丽》将故事背景设定于1980年，在一个虚构的非洲村庄科萨瓦（Kosawa），一家美国石油公司的代表来到这里会见当地人，由于钻井和管道造成的环境破坏，村里的孩子正在死去。
作者十分巧妙，以一个长大后成为革命者的女孩图拉（Thula）的家庭为视角，讲述了一个关于权力与腐败的故事，一边是利益至上的思想和阴魂不散的殖民主义；另一边是社区决心坚守祖传土地，年轻女子愿意为了人民的自由牺牲一切。当两股力量相碰时会发生什么呢？书里自有答案。
We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made— and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price.
Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
brazen (adj.) obvious, without any attempt to be hidden 毫不隐瞒的，明目张胆的 e.g. He told me a brazen lie.
他恬不知耻地向我撒谎。
《亲密》 Intimacies
这部小说天堂君要重磅推荐！因为讲的正是一名翻译的故事。
主角是一位未透露姓名的海牙法庭口译员，她的任务是密切关注战犯的声音和故事，只有她才能与他们交流；与此同时，她陷入了与一个男人的动荡纠葛之中，他的婚姻可能彻底结束，也可能不会结束。作者用流畅、简洁的散文体，优雅地打破了语法惯例，反映了这本书对亲密关系之间痛苦边界的关注——尤其是真诚与强迫之间的边界。
A novel from the author of A Separation, an electrifying story about a woman caught between many truths. An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the International Court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home. She’s drawn into simmering personal dramas: her lover, Adriaan, is separated from his wife but still entangled in his marriage. A woman of quiet passion, she confronts power, love, and violence, both in her personal intimacies and in her work at the Court. She is soon pushed to the precipice, where betrayal and heartbreak threaten to overwhelm her, forcing her to decide what she wants from her life. electrifying (v.) 使极为兴奋；使激动不已；使震惊
e.g. The world was electrified by his courage and resistance.
世人为他的勇气和反抗精神震惊不已。
(v.) 使电气化；使通电
e.g. The west-coast line was electrified as long ago as 1974.
西海岸铁路线早在1974年就实现了电气化。
《W·E·B·杜·波依斯的情歌》 The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
The 2020 National Book Award–nominated poet makes her fiction debut with this magisterial epic— an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer— that chronicles the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era.
The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans— the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers— Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.
magisterial (adj.) 有绝对权威的；威严的；傲慢的 e.g. Jenkins’s magisterial biography of Gladstone
詹金斯著述的格拉德斯通的权威传记
tumultuous (adj.) 吵闹的，喧哗的；骚乱的，混乱的 e.g. The former president appeared to tumultuous applause and a standing ovation.
前总统出场时，人们起立鼓掌，欢呼声经久不息。
《没有人聊起这个》 No One Is Talking About This
As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms “the portal,” where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats– from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness– begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal’s void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. “Are we in hell?” the people of the portal ask themselves. “Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?”
Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.
precariousness (n.) 不稳定
avalanche (n.) 雪崩；大量；突然到来的一大批 e.g. We were swamped by an avalanche of letters/phone calls/complaints.
大批的来信／电话／投诉让我们疲于应付。
《当我们不再理解世界》 When We Cease to Understand the World
Labatut expertly stitches together the stories of the 20th century’s greatest thinkers to explore both the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs: their immense gains for society as well as their steep human costs.
Using extraordinary, epoch-defining moments from the history of science, Benjamin Labatut plunges us into exhilarating territory between fact and fiction, progress and destruction, genius and madness.
《哥本哈根三部曲——童年；青春；依赖》 The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency
Called “a masterpiece” by The Guardian, this courageous and honest trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing, explores themes of family, sex, motherhood, abortion, addiction, and being an artist. This single-volume hardcover contains all three volumes of her memoirs.
Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969–1971) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child’s single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.
Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today’s discussions around feminism.
gaslighting 煤气灯效应 同义词还有：PUA (pick-up artist) pertinent (adj.) 有关的；直接相关的 a pertinent question/remark 切中要害的问题／评论
《词语的传承——对美国奴隶制历史的反思》 How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America
For this timely and thought-provoking book, Smith, a poet and journalist, toured sites key to the history of slavery and its present-day legacy, including Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello; Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary; and a Confederate cemetery. Interspersing interviews with the tourists, guides, activists and local historians he meets along the way with close readings of scholarship and poignant personal reflection, Smith holds up a mirror to America’s fraught relationship with its past, capturing a potent mixture of good intentions, earnest corrective, willful ignorance and blatant distortion.
《看不见的孩子——美国城市中的贫困、生存与希望》 Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City
Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. Dasani was named after the bottled water that signaled Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her family, tracing the passage of their ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, the homeless crisis in New York City has exploded amid the deepening chasm between rich and poor.
By turns heartbreaking and inspiring, Invisible Child tells an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family, and the cost of inequality. Based on nearly a decade of reporting, Invisible Child illuminates some of the most critical issues in contemporary America through the life of one remarkable girl.
gentrification (n.) 地区的贵族化 chasm (n.) （岩石、地面或冰面的）裂隙；峡谷；深渊 e.g. They leaned over the rails and peered down into the dizzying chasm below. 他们靠在栏杆上向下凝视令人眩晕的深渊。 (n.) （两种观点或两个团体之间的）深刻分歧，显著差别 e.g. There is still a vast economic chasm between developed and developing countries. 发达国家和发展中国家之间仍然存在着巨大的经济差距。
《关于解放黑奴纪念日》 On Juneteenth
Combining personal anecdotes with poignant facts gleaned from the annals of American history, Gordon-Reed shows how, from the earliest presence of Black people in Texas to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in the state, African-Americans played an integral role in the Texas story.
Reworking the traditional “Alamo” framework, she powerfully demonstrates, among other things, that the slave- and race-based economy not only defined the fractious era of Texas independence but precipitated the Mexican-American War and, indeed, the Civil War itself.
In its concision, eloquence, and clear presentation of history, On Juneteenth vitally revises conventional renderings of Texas and national history. As our nation verges on recognizing June 19 as a national holiday, On Juneteenth is both an essential account and a stark reminder that the fight for equality is exigent and ongoing.
poignant (adj.) 酸楚的；深深打动人的 e.g. The photograph awakens poignant memories of happier days. 照片唤起了对美好时光的深情追忆。 verge on sth 接近；濒临 e.g. At times, his performance verged on brilliance, but at others it was nothing special. 他的表现有时候近乎完美，但有时候却又显得稀松平常。
《红色彗星——西尔维娅·普拉斯短暂的一生与炽热的艺术》 Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials–including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews–Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s.
来源：New York Times，Library Journal，豆瓣，柯林斯词典，牛津词典，知乎@zydchina，微博@小怪是图图的猫
图源：豆瓣
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