Some of the articles I most enjoy reading are the recommendation articles from the people I follow. So I thought to share my better discoveries of 2021. This article is not sponsored, and there are no affiliate links as I only want to recommend things that I found valuable over this year.
Books
There were quite a few books I marked with four or five stars on my Goodreads profile, but I want to talk in particular about three of them as they made a deep impression on me.
Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men by Katrine Marçal
This fascinating book asks insightful questions about how inventions that benefited women were not embraced on a large scale until they could make a pretty dollar for businesses.
It opened many new fields of thinking for me, and I developed some of these topics into my What Holds Back Innovation article, where Marçal proposes that stereotyping held back the adoption of the rolling suitcase.
I didn’t know that electric cars were invented more than a century ago but were deemed too “feminine”, so the gasoline engine became the de-facto standard. Where would we have been as a society if we adopted electric cars when they were invented? Could the climate crisis/disaster have been avoided or delayed?
Heavy and frustrating reading and I recommend subscribing to Marçal’s weekly newsletter.
There isn’t a single country on the planet in which women collectively don’t have less money and less economic opportunity than men. The fact that men have money and women don’t is one of the factors that fundamentally shapes our world. Naturally, it also plays a huge part in determining which innovations become a reality and which ones don’t.
Republic of Shame: Stories from Ireland’s Institutions for ‘Fallen Women’ by Caelainn Hogan
A devastating book about Ireland’s mother-and-baby “homes” for unwed mothers. “Fallen”, unwed pregnant women or girls were taken from their homes, sometimes brought to mother-and-baby institutions by their own families. Then, after giving birth, mothers were separated from their newborn babies and put to work for months, but most often years.
These institutions operated for decades, ran almost exclusively by Catholic nuns with the tacit knowledge and support of the Irish State through police officers and judges.
Many deaths in children occurred because of malnutrition, epidemics, lack of care. There are also child trafficking allegations, where American catholic couples made donations to nuns to adopt children from the institutions. These adoptions would sometimes happen without mothers’ notice or consent.
I could only read a few pages at a time as Hogan held nothing back in her writing. I will leave a quote that stayed with me long after I finished the book:
The Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, called the discovery (of Tuam’s mass grave of babies and children) a ‘chamber of horrors’. He also noted that “no nuns’ broke into our homes to kidnap our children. We gave them up to what we convinced ourselves was the nuns’ care. We gave them up to spare them the savagery of gossip’ and because of Irish people’s perverse, morbid relationship with what you call respectability”. He noted the double standards that let men off the hook, as though women ‘had the amazing capacity to self-impregnate’.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb
This heart-warming book is about Gottlieb, a writer and a psychotherapist herself, who does therapy after a break-up. The author skillfully intertwines memoir glimpses and introductions to psychotherapy concepts with scenes from therapy sessions with her clients or her therapist. I will probably re-read this book next year as it was full of profound remarks.
We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day. When the present falls apart, so does the future we had associated with it. And having the future taken away is the mother of all plot twists.
If you want other book recommendations, I wrote about the books that impressed me the most in 2020 here.
Children’s recommendations
We had to buy a car this year, and so, the most significant children’s recommendation I have is the Axkid Minikid rear-facing car seat we bought for our daughter from rearfacing.ie.
We read lots of new children’s books this year but the most asked, read and re-read were Pettson and Findus books from Swedish writer Sven Nordqvist. These books are part of a delightful series with whimsical and often hilarious illustrations about a quirky older man and his talking cat. We found English dubbed animated episodes with Pettson and Findus here.
Other books I wholeheartedly recommend are It Might Be An Apple, What Do You Do with an Idea? or What Do You Do with a Problem?
Alongside traditional puzzles or lego sets, we played endless hours of Snakes & Ladders, Jenga, Uno, Rummikub, Monopoly, Cluedo, Piratatak.
For the Christmas presents for our daughter, we bought, among other things, No Stress Chess and My First Chess Book, Rat-a-tat, Ticket to Ride First Journey, and Cauldron Quest.
I have other articles with recommendations for children here.
And others
I had been battling insomnia for quite a while, and it improved much after I gave up caffeine, a process I described in this article. I was looking for recommendations on how to improve my sleep further, so I decided to buy the Oura ring after reading Cristina Chipurici’s extremely detailed article (an English translation is here). It was a good personal investment as the Oura application monitored my sleep data and recommended that I make some adjustments. For example, my ideal time to sleep is between 8:45 PM – 9:45 PM. In disbelief, I tried this time window, and my sleep improved slowly from scores of 60 – 70 to 80 – 90. This sleep tracker might not be for everybody, but in my case, if I were to lose it, I would rebuy it.
If you are looking for well priced, good quality leather shoes, I recommend checking the Marelbo online shop. This shop was one of my favourites when I was living in Romania. The international shipping to Ireland is fifteen euro, and my new ankle boots fit me as well as they did in the past. I have two notes about this shop. Unfortunately, during one delivery, the outer package in which the shoeboxes were put arrived in poor condition, but the shoes and the shoeboxes were intact. Two, the knee boots might be more on the tight side around thighs. Nevertheless, the quality is top-notch, and I will continue to order from them.
I like to watch snippets from international The Voice shows with my husband, and Norway was especially impressive with their talent this year. We enjoyed many songs, and our firm favourite is this Into The Unkown version.
We were lucky that 2021 didn’t bring much, and it also didn’t take much. In this neverending whirlpool of loss, suffering, deprivation all over the globe, it feels like we are in surrealist fiction. We can live like Alice in Wonderland, enjoying the marvels of this century but simultaneously being hunted by the frightening Red Queen. Still, dark does not deny hope, and hope does not deny fear.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring