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Tomas Fish

Tomas Fish

I’m a third sector worker by day, also a freelance writer on sport, travel, history, and humour. Sign up to my Substack at tomfish.substack.com

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The One Book You Should Read in 2021

5 min readJan 5, 2021
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Roberto Bolaño and the real-life counterparts of various characters in The Savage Detectives. This photo does the rounds on the internet and I can’t find the exact source, but I found it here.

January is normally the time of year where anyone who loves books and reading makes a list of all the books that they want to read that year. Indeed, plenty of websites and celebrities publish lists of all the books that you simply must read in the coming year, lest you be left in the dust of all the real readers in the world who have inhaled thousands of pages before the daffodils have begun pressing their way out of the springtime soil.

Bill Gates, for instance, suggests five books you must read that cover topics such as racism in America (topical), a spy operating in the Cold War (escapism, perfect), and deadly genetic disease (read the room, Bill).

Vogue were not satisfied with five books and instead suggest over twenty books in their article published on Christmas Day.

Now, I read lots, but in 2013 The Guardian reported that 4 million adults a year never read a book for pleasure. Consider for a moment that this was in the days when a person hearing the word Brexit would assume it is a fancy new breakfast cereal, Donald Trump was still a moron but not a moron with access to nuclear codes, and deadly pandemics happened only in dystopian fiction and history books. 2013 was a year where it was surely much easier to focus on the latest bestseller.

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Tomas Fish
Tomas Fish

Written by Tomas Fish

I’m a third sector worker by day, also a freelance writer on sport, travel, history, and humour. Sign up to my Substack at tomfish.substack.com