The Books I Read in 2021

Every year, I participate in the Goodreads Challenge, where you challenge yourself to read a certain number of books for the year and then track your progress.

This year I set a goal of 35 books. I read or listened to 58.

I usually go through the books one-by-one, but I don’t want to write, and you don’t want to read, an annotated list of 58 books, so this year, I’m going to select my favorites from various categories, then post the whole list.

Favorite Fiction

The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Like many dutiful readers of speculative fiction, I’ve read my share of “cli-fi” (i.e., fiction that focuses on climate change). Still, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future outshines all the others. 

Several of my friends have read this one, and not all of them were as impressed as I was, but I enjoyed the relationships between the characters, the terrible vision of what’s to come, and the possibilities Robinson comes up with as to how any changes at all will be made to our societies.

If you’re living in the 21st Century, The Ministry for the Future is a must-read.

Favorite Nonfiction

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Written by an anthropologist and an archaeologist, The Dawn of Everything re-examines our understanding of humanity’s earliest years in light of the latest discoveries in anthropology and archaeology.

But more than an update on the scientific literature, the book restates the question of our origins. With examples throughout the world, they demonstrate that “There is no ‘original’ form of human society…[and that] as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities.”

Throughout the book, the authors reveal historical examples of various social structures. They use their findings to build new theories of domination and freedom, exploring how the growth of one led to the protection or expansion of the other, a sociological dance that is still ongoing today.

“What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, government, bureaucracies, ruling classes the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative than we are?”

The importance of this book is not just historical; it shows that, from the very beginning, humans have experimented with their social and political structures and that most changes in those structures were self-conscious. Our world has not always been this way, and this way is not an inevitable conclusion to history. We can, and we have always had, the freedom to change.

Not-so-Quick Note: Graeber and Wengrow put forth two major theories in this book. The first defines the primary forms of freedom.

In the United States, freedom is an empty word used primarily by people on the right to rationalize selfish acts. But Graeber and Wengrow argue freedom boils down to three things:

• The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands
• The freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year
• The freedom to disobey authorities without consequence

For example, most indigenous Americans belonged to a clan whose organization went above and beyond their nation, tribe, kin, or even language. Members of the Bear clan, for example, were welcomed into the homes of other members anywhere on the continent, regardless of language or nation. “This made it a relatively simple matter for anyone disenchanted with their immediate biological kin to travel very long distances and still find a welcome.”

Next, many cultures practiced different social relationships depending on the season. Indigenous Americans on the Great Plains, for example, “created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups.”

Finally, many “chiefs” we read about in history only held power in their immediate vicinity. If you didn’t want to follow the orders of the chief, you just had to move down the road a few miles, where a chief and henchman couldn’t see you. 

In addition, to reduce the arbitrary violence of a sovereign, most societies “would try to surround the godlike personages of [their] rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces.”

The second major theory the book makes defines the primary principles of social power:

• Control of violence (e.g., the state’s monopoly on the use of force)
• Control of information (e.g., religious and civil bureaucracies)
• Individual charisma (e.g., “I’m special and deserve to be treated differently”)

Graeber and Wengrow invite us to think of “the secret agent” as the mythic symbol here: “James Bond, with his license to kill, combines charisma, secrecy, and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine.”

Exploring history using these notions of freedom and social domination helps us understand “where we got stuck,” and invites us to imagine what a different world has actually looked like.

Everyone should read this book.

Favorite Graphic Novel

Paying the Land, by Joe Sacco

This is a nonfiction piece about the history of the Dene people in Canada. It covers a broad scope of history, but primarily focuses on the 20th century, when the Dene way of life in the Northwest territories came into conflict with the extraction of oil, gas, and diamonds. 

It tells the horrid tales of “the residential schools,” whose mass graves of dead children drew the world’s attention earlier in 2021. But it goes beyond that, exploring the rise of drug use and alcoholism among the Dene due to generational trauma and Western imperialist efforts to eradicate an entire culture. 

Sacco’s work in this book is incredible. It’s a piece of in-depth journalism that puts you in the heart of the region while empathizing with the myriad individuals Sacco interviewed and researched for the book.

An absolute must-read.

Favorite Story Collection

A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams

Each story in this collection imagines a different future for the United States. Its stories include: 

• A bookstore that skirts the border between America and California.
• A country where it is illegal to be non-binary, trans, or gay, to speak a language other than English, to not post to social media, or, really, to be anything other than “fine.”
• A country where “the strongest military in the world turned on their own people.”
• A country where librarians are the protectors of magic.
• An entry in a history textbook about the transition from our current political and social reality and into what comes next.
• A country where violent homophobia has become the norm (in this country, “Albany had had eighteen homophobic hate killings in the previous calendar year. Better than Buffalo, but then again, Buffalo had a 57 percent unemployment rate”), where the government filters art (the story takes place on the night Prince’s songs are added to the filter), and where “the best we could hope for was to keep our head down and find escape wherever we could.”
• A country where a plague caused by the Doomsday Virus has taken hold.
• A country where an unnamed but obvious President Trump is faced with an inter-dimensional time traveler caused by the success of the “MAGA Bomb,” a device which “erased a person’s racial development, resetting their genetic lineage back to their original code, called genetic cleansing.”
• A country where Americans don’t vote with their hearts or their heads, but their fangs.
• A country where “the full power of…bioengineering [was] not simply set loose on the world but left in the hands of…maniacal power-hoarding fiends, for them to weaponize and deploy at their will.”

And that’s only the first half or so of the stories in this collection. There’s such an embarrassment of riches in this book that I ended up using it to guide much of my reading for the rest of the year, checking out authors I first discovered here.

Favorite Book Series

The Centennial Cycle, by Malka Older

I discovered Malka Older in The People’s Future of the United States. Dr. Older has a bachelor’s degree in literature from Harvard and  a master’s degree in international relations and economics from the School of Advanced International Studies. Her doctoral work focused on the multi-level governance and disaster responses. Professionally, she works for the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University and was the Head of Office in Darfur. She’s worked in humanitarian aid in Darfur, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Indonesia, Japan, and Mali.

All of which is to say that Dr. Older knows what she’s talking about, and in this near-future trilogy, she puts it all to work. 

In her near-future, most nation-states dissolved and the world is made up of polities of 100,000 people — a centenal. Each centenal votes democratically for a particular party to lead it. Some parties are global, with designs to capture a majority of the world’s centenals and thus open themselves to more power, while others are hyper-local with no intentions of expansion.

Further, a highly regulated version of the Internet aims to be the sole provider of facts and information about the world. It might seem big brother-ish,  but it’s more like one solution to the current pandemic of misinformation. You can think of it as a mix of Augmented Reality, Wikipedia, Snopes, Yelp, and the United Nations.

Each book in the cycle furthers the timeline and the narrative while also exploring the stratification, self-interests, and outliers of Dr. Older’s society.

The result is a cohesive setting and a plot with local and global stakes acted on by interesting characters from diverse backgrounds and with various perspectives and desires. The best kind of page-turner.

The Complete List in the Order I Read Them

(I’ve bolded the books I highly recommend)

1. Family Tree: Volume 1, by Jeff Lemire and Phil Hester
2. The Hidden Girl & Other Stories, by Ken Liu
3. A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams
4. Ken State: Four Dead in Ohio, by Derf Backderf
5. My Friend Dahmer, by Derk Backderf
6. American War, by Omar El Akkad
7. G.I. Joe: Hearts & Minds, by Max Brooks
8. Code 7: Cracking the Code for an Epic Life, by Brian R. Johnson
9. Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson
10. Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, by Max Brooks
11. Blackfish City, by Sam J. Miller
12. She Persisted: Harriet Tubman, by Andrea Davis Pinkney
13. Liquid Reign, by Tim Reutemann
14. Solutions & Other Problems, by Allie Brosh
15. Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate, by Adam Jentleson
16. The Mere Wife, by Maria Dahvana Headley
17. The Adoption, by Zidrou
18. The Sacrifice of Darkness, by Roxane Gay and Tracy Lynne Oliver
19. The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson
20. The Times I Knew I Was Gay, by Eleanor Crewes
21. Paying the Land, by Joe Sacco
22. The Damascus Road, by Jay Parini
23. Piranesi, by Susanna Clark
24. To A God Unknown, by John Steinbeck
25. The Silence, by Dom Delillo
26. Mapping the Interior, by Stephen Graham Jones
27. Autonomous, by Annalee Newitz
28. Infomocracy, by Malka Older
29. Reason, the Only Oracle of Man {or} a Compendius System of Natural Religion, by Ethan Allen
30. Null States, by Malka Older
31. State Tectonics, by Malka Older
32. A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine
33. A History of the Town of Poultney, Vermont, from Its Settlement to the Year 1875, by Joseph Joslin
34. A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine
35. Germ Warfare: A Very Graphic History, by Max Brooks
36. The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins, by Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, Travis McElroy, and Carey Pietsch
37. Fake Blood, by Whitney Gardner
38. Sailor Twain {or} The Mermaid in the Hudson, by Mark Siegel
39. Templar, by Jordan Mechner
40. Punk Rock Jesus, by Sean Murphy
41. Factory Summers, by Guy Delisle
42. Two Dead, by Van Jensen and Nate Powell
43. The Girl from the Sea, by Molly Knox Ostertag
44. A.D.: After Death, by Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire
45. The Secret to Superhuman Strength, by Alison Bechdel
46. Walking Wounded: Uncut Stories from Iraq, by Olivier Morel
47. That Can Be Arranged: A Muslim Love Story, by Huda Fahmy
48. River of Ink, by Étienne Appert
49. Unrig: How to Fix Our Broken Democracy, by Dan G. Newman
50. Mason & Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon
51. The Jesuits: A History from Ignatius to the Present, by John W. O’Malley
52. The Awakened Kingdom, by N.K. Jemisin
53. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe
54. The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller
55. Blind Lake, by Robert Charles Wilson
56. The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom
57. The Mystwick School of Musicraft, by Jessica Khoury
58. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow