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

This year I set a goal of 45 books. I read or listened to 56.

I used to go through the books one by one. Now that I’m cracking 50 books a year, however, I choose my favorites in various categories, then post the whole list with a simple note on each.

Battle of the Linguist Mages

The second novel from Scotto Moore, a playwright from the Seattle area, Battle of the Linguist Mages is ridiculous, rowdy, hilarious, touching, and wildly compelling.

It combines virtual-reality video-gaming with linguistics, anarchism, artificial intelligence, magic, raves, and the apocalypse.

One of this year’s best-selling fantasy novels, Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, by R.F. Kuang, also uses the power of language to develop a system of magic, but where Babel is a magical history in the vein of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Moore’s ridiculous novel is more akin to Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash. They both take place in the near future, make use of virtual worlds, and have a hyperkinetic energy that keeps the reader flying through the pages.

If you like your books about the potential technodestruction of the planet to be hilarious and fun, Battle of the Linguist Mages will not disappoint.

Runner Up: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin

This book surprised me so many times, and never disappointed me. Another book centered around video games, this novel explores the lifelong relationship between two people.

I read a lot of high-concept fiction: speculative fiction, cli-fi, sci-fi, fantasy, etc. While Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow contains aspects of those, it’s a more character-driven story about two lifelong friends and the successes and challenges they face together…and alone.

Zevin’s book appears at the top of a lot of book lists this year. For me, though, Battle of the Linguist Mages has it beat due to the sheer audacity of what Mr. Moore attempted.

The Rest of The Fiction Books I Read

This list is arranged in the order I read them. It does not include books in a series or graphic novels, both of which I discuss further below. Recommended books are starred.

• Ulysses, by James Joyce
  This was my third reading of Mr. Joyce’s masterpiece, though this time, I stopped at Scylla & Charybdis. I found it tough to motivate through when I was only reading it before bed.
• Flint & Mirror, by John Crowley 🌟
  John Crowley’s latest historical fiction is about Tyrone’s Rebellion against the Tudor conquest of Ireland, with a dash of magic thrown in.
• This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal Al-Mohtar & Max Gladstone 🌟
  A beautiful romance about two opposing agents in a secret war to secure the future by destroying the past.
• Travel Light, by Naomi Mitchison 🌟
  A children’s book mentioned in This Is How You Lose The Time War, recommended by Ursula K. Leguin, and definitely worth your time.
• Termination Shock, by Neal Stephenson 🌟
  The newest from Stephenson, this cli-fi novel explores what happens when one billionaire decides to seed the clouds with sulfur in a fit of entrepreneurial geoengineering. The effects will create a new system of climate winners and losers.
• Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
  Many consider this a classic, and while I’m a big fan of Butler’s Patternmaster and Xenogenesis series, this one didn’t do it for me.
• Babel (or) the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators Rebellion, by R.F. Kuang 🌟
  A compelling magic system keeps the concept of this novel in the clouds; still, the characters and story are grounded in loss, grief, identity, self-worth, and colonialism.
• Gypsies, by Robert Charles Wilson 🌟
  A multiverse story about a family capable of imagining a better reality and then going there…oftentimes because they are hunted.
• The Aenid, by Virgil (trans. by Robert Fagles) 🌟
  This one’s as good as they say. The last time I read The Illiad was in 2010. I don’t remember it describing in as much detail the religious rituals and sacrifices that Virgil’s poem includes. As a result, Virgil’s poem feels more visceral — in every sense of the word.
• The City We Became, by N.K. Jemisin
  While I love N.K. Jemisin’s previous works, this one left me a bit flat. I enjoyed the characters enough. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy her conceit: certain cities are alive, personified in avatars, and their birth results in transdimensional disasters. I appreciate Jemisin’s creativity. Her Broken Earth trilogy blew my mind, and I loved her Inheritance and Dreamblod series. Unfortunately, this one just didn’t do it for me.
• The City in the Middle of the Night, by Charlie Jane Anders
  This author’s second novel follows humanity after we abandoned Earth and settled on a tidally-locked, alien-inhabited planet. Days and nights don’t exist, and temperatures range from burning your skin to freezing your blood. Despite its conceptual story of survival and politics on the edge of an eternal twilight, the characters’ obsession with each other will have you doubting some of their decisions.
• How High We Can Go in The Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu 🌟
  A strong contender for my favorite fiction of the year, this collection of interconnected short stories is sympathetic, darkly funny, and incredibly sad. Imagine a world where virtually all children and millions of adults are guaranteed to die from an ancient virus unleashed by the thawing of the Arctic tundra. Now imagine a series of short stories that explore a diverse range of subjectivities who inhabit that world, all of whom have lost someone (or everyone) they love. Now include enough bread crumbs in each story for the reader to discover a singular novel unwritten in the spaces between the stories. A beautiful book.
• Emergency Skin, by N.K. Jemisin
  A 40-page story, Emergency Skin is the transcript of a “consensus consciousness” giving instructions to a test-tube-created space traveler. The traveler has come to what is supposed to be a dead Earth to retrieve ingredients for the Founders (think Musk, Bezos, and Branson of the planet it came from, only to learn that all Earth needed to recover was to rid itself of the billionaire class. Decent enough for 40 pages, but nothing that will blow your mind.
• A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles 🌟
  Another strong contender for fiction novel of the year — and a wonderful book to read in December — A Gentleman in Moscow informs, delights, connects, and excites. This novel of a former Russian aristocrat under a lifelong house arrest in one of Moscow’s grandest hotels pleases on every level.
• When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut 🌟
  A masterful blend of fact and fiction, this collection of stories explores the inner lives of some of the most famous names in science and mathematics, including Heisenberg, Schrödinger, De Broglie, and Grothendieck. It makes for a fascinating journey on the borderland between genius and madness.
• No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood 🌟
  This book devastated me. If I didn’t finish reading it on New Year’s Eve (ten days after I originally posted this list), I might have even selected it as my favorite fiction of the year. Lockwood’s writing vividly captures the fleeting consciousness of today’s cultural moment only to smite it with tremendous emotional force in the back half of the work. This one made me laugh out loud several times, and then it brought me tears. Just a beautiful book that everyone alive right now should read.

The Expanse

The nine novels of The Expanse are essentially three trilogies that follow the crew of a spaceship named after Don Coyote’s horse.

The first trilogy begins after humanity colonizes the solar system and accidentally uncovers an alien bio-weapon that defies physics while infecting any lifeform it encounters.

The second trilogy takes the characters beyond the solar system via an alien technology that opens a gate to a kind of Grand Central Station for the universe. This section focuses on the politics of who will control the metaphorical Grand Central Station.

The third trilogy explores the mystery of the alien civilization that created the bio-weapon and gate while examining how the Expanse functions when an upstart galactic empire takes over.

Of the nine novels, only one (the fifth book, Nemesis Games) was a disappointment. I could only finish it because one of the characters, Amos, is a joy to read. The subsequent four novels returned to the quality of the previous four, and the whole series ended about great.

The series became a TV show on SyFy (and later Amazon), ending after six seasons in Dec. 2021. People raved about it, but when I tried it, I couldn’t get past the production quality and the way it ignored a vital element of the books.

The Expanse series is the first science fiction I’ve read that takes gravity seriously. It shapes the physical structures of a whole new class of human beings who’ve only ever lived in the zero gravity of space. But it also affects virtually every scene in the story. The writers (“James S.A. Corey” is a pen name for a pair of writers) take great pains to remind readers that things work differently in space.

The TV show avoids this crucial element of the books by giving the characters magnetic boots that allow them to walk semi-normally. I quickly grew bored by the show without the effects of gravity (or its lack) to make this tale different from any others I’d encountered.

I loved the characters in the novels, especially how they adapted and evolved throughout 5,000+ pages of the story. But what I loved most was the gravity.

Runner Up: The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells

I read five of the six novels in the series (so far) and found all five fast and intriguing. The titular murderbot is a hilarious, paranoid artificial intelligence who would rather spend time watching soap operas than having to murder so many humans. Most of the books are under 200 pages in this series, but they keep you turning pages fast.

Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11

One of my colleagues scheduled me to teach a summer class called “Conspiracy Theories.” Like any well-educated person, I’m familiar with many conspiracy theories. I adhere to some of them (e.g., Oswald did not act alone, nor did Epstein kill himself). Others, I find laughable (e.g., 9/11 was not an inside job, and the moon landing most definitely happened).

I didn’t want the class to be a rehash of various conspiracy theories, though. We’ve seen the consequences of misinformation, disinformation, and poor critical thinking skills getting in the way of reality. Over a million Americans died partly because our President told us to shine sunlight up our ass.

A class that surveyed some of the theories that bedeviled the country since the Salem Witch Trials might be fun for the students, but it wouldn’t prepare them to live in 21st-century America.

Thanks to Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, I could do more than provide a survey. Armed by Kathryn Olmstead, a professor of History at UC Davis, I could present a thesis that would be meaningful in their adult lives. Her book reveals the actual, no doubt about it, 100% real conspiracies enacted by the U.S. government throughout the 20th century that fostered the cancerous growth of the paranoid style of American politics.

Many Americans believe their government conspires against them because the American government admits it conspired against them.

Dr. Olmstead writes in her introduction, “…generations of anti-government conspiracy theorists since World War I have at least one thing in common: when they charge that the government has plotted, lied, and covered up, they’re often right.”

The book debunks many of the conspiracies of the 20th century. At the same time, it reveals the conspiracies that drove the anti-government groups crazy enough to imagine the now-debunked conspiracy in the first place.

For example, those interested in history have heard that President Roosevelt had an advance warning about Pearl Harbor. This “advanced-knowledge conspiracy theory” suggests the president allowed Americans to die and ships to sink because he wanted the U.S. to get involved in World War II. This, of course, is not true.

Thanks to American code breakers, Roosevelt knew a Japanese attack was imminent. But he (along with everyone else) expected it to take place in the Philippines (which, in fact, it also did). Olmstead writes, “American leaders knew only that war was coming somewhere, sometime soon.”

The actual conspiracy was not that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was the target. It’s that, after the attack, he conspired to prevent Congress from investigating his administration’s intelligence failure. As one Congress member said, “There will have to be an explanation—sooner or later—and it had better be good.”

Instead of letting Congress investigate, Roosevelt created a five-person commission to whitewash the administration’s failures. We can look at the Warren Commission and the 9/11 Commission for how other presidents followed Roosevelt’s lead.

The Roberts Commission’s objective was to determine which, if any, U.S. military officials the U.S. should blame for the attack. Most importantly, the commission was not asked to investigate the failures of civil politicians such as President Roosevelt and his cabinet.

Roosenvelt’s enemies fell into a frenzy when the Roberts Commission pinned the disaster on two of Pearl Harbor’s commanders. Their disbelief led to the creation of the conspiracy that is still debated today.

Olmstead’s book explores conspiracies related to the Red Scare, the Kennedy Assassinations (of course), Nixon and Watergate, UFOs, CIA mind control experiments, Jonestown, the Iran-Contra scandal, CIA-led infusions of crack into the Black community, Ruby Ridge & Waco, and (of course) 9/11.

Throughout each investigation, she shows that the crackpots who saw a government conspiracy in blameless behavior had their origins in the American government conspiring to do something else instead.

As the man said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”

Runner Up: Against Elections, by David Van Reybrouck

Elections are bought and paid for by the millionaire and billionaire classes in this country. The working poor and (basically non-existent) middle class has little say over its representative leaders. Nor do these “representatives” serve the interests of their constituents once they take office. The 2020 HBO documentary, The Swamp, clarifies that America’s electoral reality forces politicians (regardless of their original intent) to adjust their objectives to those of the lobbyists.

Surprising no one: electoral politics is all about money, and unless we fix campaign financing in the country, it will not change.

That is unless we decide to get rid of elections altogether.

In Against Elections, David Van Reybrouck argues in favor of replacing politicians with randomly selected Americans — think of Congress as jury duty. As he writes, “Elections are the fossil fuel of politics. Whereas they once they gave democracy a huge boost…it now turns out they cause colossal problems of their own.”

He doesn’t suggest replacing elections with sortition is a panacea. “Citizens chosen by lot may not have the expertise of professional politicians, but they add something vital to the process: freedom. After all, they don’t need to be elected or re-elected.”

His book has many examples demonstrating how sortition has worked in the past and practical methods for putting it into practice in the United States.

The jokes about the governing skills of a populace that can hardly name the branches of its government write themselves. They make it easy to dismiss Van Reybrouck’s idea. But I challenge you to give this short book a read and come out the other side not agreeing that the solution to Congressional gridlock is to abolish elections.

The Rest of The Nonfiction Books I Read

This list is arranged in the order I read them. It does not include graphic novels which I discuss further below. Recommended books are starred.

• Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), by Jeff Tweedy
  A memoir of the frontman for the rock band Wilco. You’ll enjoy it if you love Wilco. You probably won’t care if you don’t.
• How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky
  A shallow exploration of the title. Suppose you’ve read any decent magazine articles about the current state of our democracy and/or its historical precursors. In that case, there’s nothing here for you.
• Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, by Lyall Watson 🌟
  A beautifully written book that provides just what the subtitle says it will. This was the first read of my summer this year. It gave me a new sense of the sacred as I sat in my backyard, drinking a beer, listening to the wind tickle the leaves of our maple tree, and feeling its breath across my skin.
• How to Hide An Empire: A History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwahr 🌟
  So what do you know about how the United States conquered its territories (Puerto Rico, etc.) and dominated the globe? Not enough is what. Read this one to learn more.
• How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, by Thomas Cahill
  This one had been on my To Read list for decades before I added it to my Audible library this summer. I listened to it while carting students around Vermont. I’m glad I read it, but you probably don’t need to.
• JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass 🌟
  A good friend recommended this one while we debated the take on the Kennedy Assassination presented in Real Enemies. This book reveals a lot of information I hadn’t known, specifically the secret interactions Kennedy had with Kruschev and Castro, all in the hopes of peace. His move towards a common peace is “why he died and why it matters.”
• The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, by Michael Finkel 🌟
  This read like a great, extra-long magazine article. The hermit, Christopher Knight, lived for nearly three decades within a mile of a bunch of summer homes on North Pond in Maine, but he only spoke to humans twice during his self-exile. He did, however, burgle those homes a lot.
• A Human History of Emotion: How The Way We Feel Built The World We Know, by Richard Firth-Godbehere
  I was excited by this popular introduction to “the growing discipline called the history of emotion,” which “tries to understand how people understood their feelings in the past.” While I found some nuggets, the book eventually bogged down. The later chapters feel like a checklist designed to get us into the modern era.
• The Gus Chronicles: Reflections From An Abused Kid, by Charles D. Appelstein
  We were assigned this reading at my job this year. The Gus Chronicles is a fictional memoir of an abused kid at a residential facility. The main character is a composite of my students, and almost every page gave me something new to think about. But if you don’t work with this population, you’ll probably get bored by the author’s attempts at cleverness.
• Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, by Lisa Feldman Barrett 🌟
  One of my former colleagues gave a presentation highlighting “the lizard brain.” I’d known for a while that the theory of “the triune brain” had long been discounted, but I didn’t have a clear understanding of today’s more scientific understandings. This book gave a good introduction.
• Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power, by Pekka Hämäläinen 🌟
  This fantastic look at the Lakota perspective on North American history demonstrates that former European colonists were not the dominant civilization on the continent for much of our history.
• Yearbook, by Seth Rogen
  A fun memoir where the audiobook was recorded, in part, like an audio play with different actors performing different voices. Because I’m a sucker for Seth Rogen’s “fuck it” sensibility, I enjoyed this series of stories from his life. They generally circle around (surprise, surprise) his relationship with drugs. It didn’t include nearly enough Hollywood gossip, but each story was strong enough on its own that I didn’t much care.
• Index, A History of the: A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age, by Dennis Duncan 🌟
  Another book appearing on many Best of the Year lists, Index, A History of the doesn’t attempt to be more than it says it is, but it is more fun than you’d expect. Duncan makes each chapter compelling, and the indexes at the end are, as you might imagine, a vital part of the work.

Penultimate Quest

I picked this one up thinking it would be little more than an adult-appropriate Dungeons & Dragons-themed graphic novel, but it turned out to be much deeper than that.

The characters in the book experience a quasi-Groundhog Day existence. There’s a never-ending dungeon with monsters, treasures, and a tavern where they can celebrate their victories. If they die, they return to the start of the dungeon. However, the stakes of their existence are nil, and after several adventures, they question their purpose.

The sections in this omnibus take each character’s story deeper, revealing that there is more to this adventure than meets the eye.

I’m selecting it as my favorite graphic novel of the year because the omnibus surprised me so much. I generally had no idea where each story was going.

Runner Up: The Arrival, by Shaun Tan

This wordless graphic novel tells the story of a man who leaves his family behind in a dangerous country so he can make a start for them in a new land. Its use of “gibberish” symbols for writing and language, its otherworldly architecture, its alien food, and its alien creatures capture (I have to assume) the isolation and out-of-placeness of being an immigrant. By committing to the fantastic elements of his world, Tan makes the immigration story universal, bypassing the prejudices and bigotry that can quickly turn empathy into politics.

The art in this graphic novel is (as it must be in a wordless book) stupendous. Every page is a delight, every pencil stroke, every shadow. Next time you’re in a library or killing time in a bookstore, find this one, sit down in a comfortable chair, and allow yourself to arrive in this intimately drawn, strangely familiar world.

The Rest of The Graphic Novels I Read

This list is arranged in the order I read them. Recommended books are starred.

• Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species: A Graphic Adaptation, by Michael Keller & Nicole Rage Fuller
  One of my colleagues asked me to read this book and decide if it would be appropriate for our students with reading difficulties. The book is more than an adaptation of On The Origin of the Species; it also includes biographical elements and the broader context of the time Darwin worked in. Not a bad read, but definitely too complex for most of my students.
• Boxers, by Gene Luen Yang 🌟
  A fantastical version of China’s Boxer Rebellion, where a young boy who communes with the ancient Chinese gods leads the Boxers against the foreign devils: the colonialists and the Christians. Unfortunately, many of those Christians are Chinese, leading to severe moral questioning. A fantastic book.
• Saints, by Gene Luen Yang 🌟
  Picking up with one of the side characters from Boxers, this graphic novel explores the Chinese Christian on the other side of the Boxer Rebellion. More than just a retelling of the first book from a different perspective, however, Saints is a story about loyalty: to one’s people, one’s country, or one’s faith. Another fantastic book.
• First Man: Reiminaging Matthew Henson, by Simon Schwartz 🌟
  I’d never heard of Matthew Henson. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, this African-American salesclerk worked as Robert Peary’s valet, traveling with him to Nicaragua and, later, on seven voyages to the Arctic. According to Henson, he was the first person to reach the geographic North Pole in April 1909, not Peary (many dispute that Peary or Henson actually got there). As the White leader of the expedition, Peary took all the credit, of course. Though Henson did achieve some level of fame in his later years, he suffered through plenty of lean times. This graphic novel tells an imaginary version of that tale.
• They Called Us Enemy, by George Takei 🌟
  George Takei is one of country’s more famous individuals. He first gained fame as Sulu from Star Trek. Takei later became an outspoken activist for gay rights and one of the most followed individuals on Facebook. But before that, he was a Japanese-American boy whose family was illegally sent to an internment camp during World War II. In They Called Us Enemy, Takei shares his family’s story.
• Long Walk to Valhalla, by Adam Smith & Matthew Fox 🌟
  A story about a young man at the end of his rope. He grew up without a mother and with an alcoholic, abusive father and a special needs brother who hallucinates. He meets a young girl who claims to be a Valkyrie who has come to accompany him to Valhalla, but before that, there are a few things she needs him to do. Another book that ended up being more profound than I expected.

Thanks for checking out the books I read this year. I hope you’ve found a few books you can add to next year’s list.