Text

· · to read

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.

Text

· · to read

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

Text

· · to read

“We really like the situation we’re in,” Glenney says. “It gives visibility to the context of people with disabilities. It keeps them ‘in the market’ of ideas, so to speak. Our symbol is most successful when it’s not fully legal—when there’s lots of wrinkles and questions.” As long as conversation channels are open, he says, there’s still the possibility for change even greater than the simple replacement of one blue and white sticker with another.

The Controversial Process of Redesigning the Wheelchair Symbol – Atlas Obscura

I love the idea that the success of this project is not in adoption but in conversation. It’s successful because it raises questions instead of answering them.

Text

· · to read

In other words, the archival system on Scarif appears to be designed in a deliberate act of sabotage by anti-Imperial archivists attempting to undermine Palpatine’s rule. Like Galen Erso, the archivists chose to remain embedded inside the Empire, and as their act of resistance, build the most useless, asinine archival system the galaxy had ever seen.

As part of their plan, they adopted a magnetic tape format, to maximize the size of the facility and make it necessary to manufacture massive amounts of interoperable technology to support the tapes. Given that the tapes are never seen before or after Rogue One, it may be that the archivists developed the tape format using military funding, in hopes that diverting money away from weapons and into a bad R&D project would, in the grand scheme of things, save lives. From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck (Spoilers)

Text

· · to read

Picking up from yesterday’s readings on racism as a “done thing,” as a choice, these readings helped me understand why that choice was made and how essential it was to the American project. And if that is the case, if enslavement was essential, how could it be that its effects faded in 1860? Douglass says “a man is worked on by what he works on.” For 250 years, Americans worked on the breaking of people for profit. What I found, going forward, is that enslavement had worked on us too. You can see its ghost all over American policy, especially in the realm of housing.

And so the sources:

1.) Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson
Just a beautiful read. One of my favorite books of all time, and a book that does not entertain Neo-Confederate dissembling.

2.) “The Civil War and Reconstruction,” David Blight’s lecture series
Blight is a great lecturer and covers the essentials of both periods.

3.) “The Economics Of The Civil War,” by Roger L. Ransom
This is a really short but essential read. Perhaps more than any article I’ve read it explains the forces that led us to war.

4.) The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
Just beautiful. Don’t just read this to understand enslavement; read it because it is an incredible work of literature.

5.) Out Of The House of Bondage, by Thavolia Glymph
I actually came to this after the reparations article was in the queue, but it crystalizes something that Douglass demonstrates–the horrific violence that was slavery. You can not divide the two. The Cliven Bundy fantasy of black people happily picking cotton, and living in two parent homes with food and shelter provided is the exact opposite of what slavery was. You can not plunder a people nonviolently Slavery Made America

Text

· · to read

Pointing to citizens who voted for both Obama and Trump does not disprove racism; it evinces it. To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster. My President Was Black