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“I thought you weren’t interested in war and politics,” said Kinri.

Dandelion laughed, a trace of melancholy in her eyes. “Much as I wish love conquered all, it’s impossible to understand love or the art inspired by it without seeing the ugliness of politics and war. War is love corrupted.”

“War is love corrupted?”

Dandelion nodded. “That’s how I see it. War comes from hatred, but hatred is always based on a selfish love, a love that seeks to confine rather than to expand-love of home can turn into hatred of strangers; love of country can turn into arrogance toward other states; love of fellow travelers can turn into a desire to suppress anyone with a different opinion.”

– Ken Liu, The Veiled Throne

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I’ve been studying French for just over 3 years now on Duolingo. One of the (many) things I really struggle with is accents. This comment on Ask a Manager really highlighted for me that this is something I should work on:

Mi papá tiene 47 años: “my father is 47 years old”
Mi papa tiene 47 anos: “my potato has 47 anuses”

Now I’m curious what homonyms I’m mangling in French. Is it a homonym if the accents are different?)

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What book are you reading right now?

I’m rereading Good Omens by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman. I’ve read this book more times than I can count. This is one of the books I pick up when I’m too tired to read something new or under stress. This book is the threadbare blanket that you turn to because, somehow, it’s the coziest blanket in the house.

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This is an incomplete list of books I read in 2021 — too late, I realized I hadn’t tracked them in goodreads. I assembled this list from memory combined with library receipts in my email. Next year, I think I’ll try to keep track of what I’m reading during the year. I’m listing these alphabetically by author, as I only roughly remember when I read some of them.

Upon a Burning Throne (The Burnt Empire Saga) by Ashok K. Banker is the last book I read in 2021 (I finished it on 12/30!). This was a huge first installment that I found by luck at Barnes & Noble. It is fantasy based in India and inspired by the ancient Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata. The characters were beautiful, the villain was terrifying, and the struggle between them kept me up late a few nights. I’m definitely going to grab the second volume in 2022.

Miles Morales : Spider-Man by Brian Michael Bendis details the origin story of Miles Morales as the new Spiderman. I loved this very different (non-Peter Parker) spiderman. He’s a young kid caught between the glamour and danger of being a super hero and the giant secret of hiding that from his parents.

Octavia Butler

I can’t believe I only started reading Octavia Butler last year. Her books are prescient, hopeful, & terrifying. And most of them were written in the 80s and 90s.

The Parable Series is about a young girl (Lauren Olamina) who, roughly, grows up as an empath in California, circa 2025. The world is rocked by climate change and America is run by a demagogue. While Butler gets a lot of credit for predicting someone like Trump, I think the best part of this book is the model she presents for a hopeful future.

I read two books from the Patternmaster Series (Wildseed and Mind of My Mind). These were both amazing. Wildseed is about Anyanwu is a healer and shapeshifter who comes into conflict with Doro, a mysterious being who takes over people’s bodies by instinct. Anyanwu is a minor player in the second book in the series (Mind of My Mind). Instead it focuses on their (many generations deep) offspring & Doro.

I haven’t decided if I”ll read more of Patternmaster. The next book (Clay’s Ark) is apparently the book that Butler liked least (she called it her “Star Trek” book). and I don’t want to jump over it.

Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline is (obviously) the sequel to Ready Player One. It was a good sequel and a fun, quick read.

Black Panther. A Nation Under Our Feet by Ta-Nehisi Coates in Ta-Nahesi Coates hands is one part Afro-futurism and one part political commentary, all wrapped up in a super hero.

N.K. Jemisin

Like Butler, I can’t believe I’m only just now discovering N.K. Jemisin. I read the Dreamblood Duology last year and fell in love. Her characters are beautifully constructed and her worlds fascinating. I read the Inheritance Trilogy this year. The political intrigue, the enslaved gods, and the people around them made the whole world a sight to behold.

My wife and my oldest daughter both told me to read The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune. It was funny and sad all at the same time. Very few books can give you the feels for the Antichrist and this book did it over and over again.

I read March (Book 1) years ago. March (Book Two) by John Lewis continues his good trouble.

Cixin Liu

I saw The Three Body Problem on Barack Obama’s reading list and received the entire Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy for Christmas last year. The translations were excellent (the footnotes were amazing!). These books were somehow both depressing in the structure of galactic civilizations (the dark forest) and hopeful in how he has defined individuals. I had no words when I finished the Death’s End.

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud was revelatory. It changed how I saw comics as a medium. It changed how I read them. Almost every graphic novel on this list was made better because I read this book.

A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul is a story of the Indian diaspora in Trinidad. Though beautifully written and often funny, I couldn’t like or identify with any of the characters (especially Mr. Biswas). This was the only book on this list I abandoned.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama was mostly disappointing. It’s not a history book and I shouldn’t have expected it to be one.

My wife has been telling me to read Richard Powers all year. Bewilderment by Richard Powers made me cry. The stages of Theo’s & Robin’s relationship made me think of my own kids and the backdrop of a darker, scarier 2020 really brought home how fragile everything is.

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson was wonderful. Stevenson did a wonderful job explaining why the death penalty serves no one well through his professional career and the people he tried to help along the way. He did a beautiful job humanizing all the people involved while not letting the system off the hook.

Paper Girls vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan is set in 1980s Ohio. It follows a group of newspaper delivery girls who end up in the middle of a war between two futuristic opponents. I can’t wait to read more of these!

Galactic Hellcats by Marie Vibbert was fun, energetic read with my favorite kind of story: unlikely friends pitted against incredible odds!

Gene Luen Yang

Gene Luen Yang is amazing! I first read American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints a few years ago. They made me think about my own immigrant background made me want to explore authors from India more (hence some of the books on this list).

Level up is a complicated story of a man who is trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. He struggles to integrate what he wants, what his father wants, and what society wants from him. The whole thing is told against the backdrop of A video game (Pac-Man ghosts and all).

Yang took a stereotypical “Asian” superhero, Shang-chi, and made him a person as interesting and as thoughtful as any in the Marvel universe.

In The Shadow Hero, Yang took the first Asian super hero (The Green Turtle) and breathed new life into him. His new Green Turtle has a backstory, parents, a love interest, and hijinks. I particularly loved the original comics and how he wove in apparently non-sensical elements into a cohesive story.

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It’s fortunate that other people’s outlook conflicts with ours, since then we have the chance to escape our narrow-mindedness and open ourselves to other values. I have lived in a community for twenty-five years, and I may have received more from people I found it hard to get along with than from those I found congenial. Those I found hard to get along with opened my horizons to other values, but if I’d only met people who agreed with me, I might never have glimpsed any new horizons.

Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom, pp 62-63.
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The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don’t want to see. Do you think a capitalist wants to see what is good in the commum’st system? Do you think a communist wants to see what is good and healthy in the capitalist system? Do you think a rich man wants to look at poor people? We don’t want to look, because if we do, we may change. We don’t want to look. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new.

Anthony de Mello, SJ – Awareness
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One further point: What really hurts is not so much suffering itself as the fear of suffering. If welcomed trustingly and peacefully, suffering makes us grow. It matures and trains us, purifies us, teaches us to love unselfishly, makes us poor in heart, humble, gentle, and compassionate toward our neighbor. Fear of suffering, on the other hand, hardens us in self-protective, defensive attitudes, and often leads us to make irrational choices with disastrous consequences.

Fr. Jacques Philippe – Interior Freedom
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The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multistory housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human waste for fertilizer and wastewater for irrigation, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.

– p. 553 Excerpt From Walkaway