protean depravity

High were the hopes for 2021 - after a disastrous pandemic year, tons of confusion, losses, sickness, bush fires, earthquakes and other catastrophes the world was going to enter a new, better era in 2021 with vaccination for all, freedom days everywhere, return to normality... It didn't turn out that way. Having reached the end of this year, having seen that the worst was yet to come, that those vaccines don't really work, 2021 actually feels like an extension of the most unpopular year 2020. The good things about the collective state that we are in can be counted on the fingers of one hand and one of them is certainly that there is much more time for reading compared to the old normal. So much did I read this year that it was seriously difficult to choose the winners for the Protean Depravity Best Books of 2021, but finally here they are!

As the whole world is shutting down, requiring people to withdraw into tiresome isolation and to see even less people than before, I feel myself more and more drawn to literary characters who are going through the same experience, dealing with various degrees of solitude, albeit under different circumstances. I had mentioned this strange kind of comfort before, in my review of Ottessa Moshfegh's books which feature insanely peculiar female characters in situations of extreme solitude. During the first lockdown in spring I read both My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Death in Her Hands by Moshfegh and found myself oddly fascinated by these women who, out of their free will, chose lonesomeness and told how they go through their days as if nothing else in the world mattered (and strangely enough, I never felt bored reading both these books, they are extremely captivating). That exactly, the ability to zoom out anything else going on around you and focus on your own microcosm is wha...