10 Great Humanising Books I Read in 2021 (so far!)

Books that make us human again are not really very rare, these can include anything from a dramatic family tragedy by Isabel Allende to a light romantic comedy by Hannah Rothschild. A book that humanises us is a book that reminds us that we have to really sit with our feelings and situations, we have to make amends with each other and more than often, there are many people we care about that, if they disappeared, we would be very concerned and extremely upset.

Personally, I find that tragic books tend to humanise me. But also, we have the modernist novels that explore different kinds of friendships, different aspects of growing up, the bildungsroman turned on its head when coming of age is not necessarily a good thing or where we see a young man or woman create a new identity for themselves in the outside world. These are the books that tend to humanise me the most.

When I explore these novels, one thing I find more than anything else is that I am very much connected and invested in the character, their development and their story. It is almost like whilst I am reading the book, they are in the room helping me to understand where they are coming from.

There are ten books from this year that I have read that have really humanised me and many of them are from similar authors. Take a look at these:

(They are in no particular order)

10 Great Humanising Books I Read in 2021 - so far...

A Posthumous Confession by Marcellus Emants

A study in empathy, I feel like this book is character-driven in its sense of atmosphere. At first, we are made to feel sorry for the main character - his isolation a la Rousseau give us almost a romantic insight into his lonely world. However, as the book progresses, and with the changing identity he has in his favour, he gets to recreate himself and that is not the best possible thing to do in order to recover from this sadness. We garner less and less empathy towards the main character as the book goes on and that really makes me think about who we empathise with in real life and why we don't empathise with others.

Check out my full review here.

Young Hearts Crying by Richard Yates

Lucy and her husband, Michael, are two young people at the end of the Second World War. Disillusioned with politics, they have set out to have the most perfect lifestyle and marriage that they can. When their daughter is born, they try their best to give her everything whilst failing to admit that their perfect lifestyle is not all that perfect at all. The marriage is beginning to crumble and Michael is feeling emasculated by the fact his wife is a second generation rich girl, born into millions of dollars. An incredible book about how human nature can pull people apart instead of bringing them together, Richard Yates is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and proves it with this book.

Check out the full review here.

The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth

One of the reasons I adored this book is because of its humanising way of talking about experience. Joseph Roth goes to sit in a hotel lobby at one point and it is filled with millionaires. For that moment, for one hour only, he pretends he too, is a millionaire even though he isn't. He thinks about what it would be like to sit in a hotel lobby in a winter coat, discussing foreign affairs and important things with other millionaires whilst his wife drank an expensive mocha and ate fine cakes with the other wives. It is pure observation and I think we all understand that. When we look at someone whom we perceive as 'better' than ourselves, we think about what it would be like to be them for only one hour or so.

Check out my full review here.

House of Glass by Hadley Freeman

Sometimes, when your family is from a different culture, you can struggle with assimilation from time to time. I definitely tend to have some struggles with certain aspects of assimilation even though I was born and raised in England - my family is still Indian and thus, that is what I know. Hadley Freeman's "House of Glass" looks at that but in terms of Jewish people. The family saga that is told is a world of its own and as we explore deeper into the family's culture, we see that things are different everywhere and nobody is really the same. Even if the people involved all come from the same cultural background.

Check out my full review here.

The Arsonists’ City by Hala Alyan

This dark family saga is something I read for a book club online. It is an incredibly humanising book as at the very beginning we witness a brutal killing inside a camp. There is something absolutely terrifying about starting off a book about a family and their lineage with a murder or some kind of horrid death. The camp we witness is a refugee camp and as the book opens at night, there is this strange drop in the atmosphere where we know something is about to go horribly wrong and someone is going to die tonight. Everyone in the book links together and every event links to another, it is a brilliantly humanising book - I cannot possibly imagine what it would be like to know that a member of your family before you, lived and died in a refugee camp.

Check out the full review here.

The Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

A man named Micah is suffering a mid-life crisis. He lives on his own, all of his past relationships have failed, he is in such a strict routine that he will not be able to deal with variation and he spends a lot of time being a 'glorified handyman'. The variation comes when a child turns up on his doorstep claiming to be Micah's son. This shifts his entire world and honestly, the way we see what a realist situation looks like through the eyes of a man who is constantly dissatisfied is something else entirely. It's a brilliantly written book which serves as a great critique for people who are 'stuck in their ways'. They need to be shaken up in order to see the reality of the outside world. Micah is one of those people.

Check out my full review here.

Dreamland by Rosa Rankin-Gee

A book about movement, this is narrated by one of the children of an underwhelmed mother. They leave their life in London and move to the British seaside together. It is almost a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which the filthy rich have laid the entire country to waste - until you realise that is what is happening in Britain at the moment. But this family is about to be torn apart by their differing views on what they really want from this move to the seaside. It is a brilliantly formed nightmare of a book, long and arduous, it is very much worth the contemplation time.

Check out my full review here.

Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi

This book is absolutely harrowing as the political regime gets rid of deviants into the city of Eboli, our narrator and writer - Carlo Levi, witnesses some violent and terrifying scenes. One of the scenes he witnesses is that people are often writhing in agony. They are suffering intense diseases such as Malaria and this is one of the things the regime is doing - trying to let them die. A man he sees is screaming in pain and is visibly incredibly sick, it is a horrifying thing to read but possibly an even more horrifying thing to witness. A book that seriously makes you glad you were not there. It is a painful read.

Check out my full review here.

A Good School by Richard Yates

A brilliantly human novel set at the time pearl harbour breaks out and the narrator is at school. One thing I always loved about this book is that we get to hear snippets of other people's conversations, as if the narrator is going around spying on these people. We get to see the true range to the school and know that the characters who may meet the eye are not the same characters when they are by themselves or in their rooms. It is a wonderful novel about the way in which school children cannot really understand the true damage that the war is going to do, but they try hard to understand what is going on anyway.

Check out my full review here.

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

It's the 1830s and a preacher is on death row, he writes a confession before he dies, wishing to tell a story about the early 1800s in America at a time where he was condemned purely for existing. A wonderful work of prison fiction, it teaches us the struggles of a man who did nothing wrong to anyone, but still ended up on death row because people did not like the colour of his skin. It is a dark and often emotional novel with a ton of brilliant language uses. I really do hope you choose to read this one.

I will not be putting my review in here as it contains some spoilers to the book.