Every year, I participate in the Goodreads Challenge, which is where you challenge yourself to read a certain number of books for the year and then track your progress. This year, like in years past, I set a goal of 30 books, and once again, I surpassed my goal.
This year’s list includes more audiobooks than normal, thanks to a walking regimen that saw me walking around five miles a day during the spring and summer of the Covid-19 pandemic. Once the cold weather came, I stopped walking so much, but the school year brought a 30-minute commute (I drive a couple of students to school in the morning like a de facto bus driver), so thankfully, I kept moving forward with audiobooks.
Anyway, without further ado, here are the books I read or listened to in 2020.
The Legends of Luke Skywalker (433 pages)
I wrote a longer post about this short-story collection back in February, so I’ll just copy and paste some of the general points here.
In STAR WARS: Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Rey says to Han Solo, “Luke Skywalker? I thought he was a myth.” This question became the basis of Ken Liu’s canonical short-story collection, The Legends of Luke Skywalker.
Released during the run-up to the eighth movie, The Last Jedi, Liu’s short-story collection centers on an evening of stories told to the young deckhands of a transport barge making its way across the galaxy to Canto Bight.
These six legends of Luke Skywalker add little to the galaxy of STAR WARS, but they do provide readers with a deeper understanding of what it means to be a Jedi knight and how the Force is interpreted in different ways by the various cultures in the STAR WARS galaxy (much like the diverse cultures on Earth interpret the hard-to-grasp concept of divinity).
I don’t necessarily recommend this book for adults, but if your pre-teen or teenager is a big fan of Luke Skywalker and STAR WARS, this collection of short stories will expand with their understanding of the Force.
We Stand on Guard (168 pages)
Taking place 100 years in the future, this graphic novel follows a small band of Canadian freedom fighters as they defend their country against an invasion by the technologically superior United States.
I loved the concept of the story (as the author of a novel about the secession of Vermont from the U.S., how could I not?), and the artwork bedazzled me, but the characters felt wooden, and in this story of a possible future, the United States acted more like a faceless torturing monster than a complex antagonist with whom the band could grapple. Finally, many of the details of the U.S.’s technology seem ripped from The Empire Strikes Back (with Ottawa standing in for the ice planet of Hoth), limiting the artist’s innovations.
It’s a short graphic novel, and I was able to read through it in about a half-hour. If you’re able to do the same, you’ll find it a decent read.
The Witcher Saga (2,038 pages)
After watching and loving the first season of The Witcher on Netflix, I decided to dive into the story’s fantasy world by reading the original novels.
Written by Polish author, Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher saga follows a genetically-modified monster-hunter-for-hire named Geralt of Rivia. It also follows, and no less focuses on, his sorceress star-crossed lover, Yennefer, and the golden child they’re both sworn to protect, an orphaned princess named Cirilla whose magical elvish blood has been prophesied for generations.
Like the TV series, the books play with the audience’s expectations of time and their understanding of the interconnectedness of causes and effects, and like the series, the novels do not make it easy to understand the political dynamics of this rich fantasy world or the motivations of all the complex characters who inhabit it.
While I enjoyed the saga, Sapkowski’s writing compares unfavorably to other fantasy epicists such as George R.R. Martin, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ursula K. LeGuin. Sapkowski’s lack of rhythm and deftness could be the fault of his translators, but the five books I read were translated by different artists, and for some reason, I doubt they all experienced the same flaws in their work. I’ve read online that the two short-story collections Sapkowski published before the five-novel saga are much better reads, but I haven’t picked them up.
With that being said, if you enjoyed the Netflix series, I think you’ll enjoy the five books in this series. The characters you met on TV are all here, and Sapkowski takes the story to its full completion, which I think will improve your enjoyment of future seasons from Netflix (the production of Season 2, by the way, has been delayed, first because of the coronavirus and then because of injuries to the main actor).
Verax: A Graphic History of Surveillance in the 21st Century (229 pages)
This non-fiction, book-length comic (i.e., a nonfiction “graphic novel”) tells the story of Pratap Chatterjee, a journalist who dug deep into the role of electronic surveillance in domestic and foreign affairs. We follow Chatterjee as he investigates the complex industrial ties of drone manufacturers, government agents, journalists, whistleblowers, and more, but the crux of the story is the tale of Edward Snowden (one of Snowden’s code names was “Verax”).
The information contained within the comic is frightening, and the decision to tell this story in comic form improves its tale, but the author’s focus on his personal journey gets in the way of the book’s impact. I found myself zoning out whenever the comic became memoir-like rather than straight-style reporting.
I enjoy reading non-fiction, book-length comics (such as The 9/11 Commission Report), but Verax didn’t do it for me. If the topic of surveillance in the 21st century interests you, you’re better off reading the revelations of Edward Snowden for yourself.
Frogcatchers (112 pages)
The second graphic novel I’ve read by Jeff Lemire, this surreal story captured my attention and held onto it.
A young man wakes up in what might as well be called “Hotel California” but is instead called the Edgewater Hotel. He discovers only one other person in the place, a small boy who seems to know a little bit more about what’s going on but who also doesn’t have all the answers the protagonist seeks.
I don’t want to give away anything more than that, but I will say by way of recommendation that Frogcatchers is, essentially, a quick and insightful sketch into the meaning and memories of a life. I gave it five stars on Goodreads as soon as I finished it. Definitely pick it up if you can.
The Messengers (1 hour, 20 minutes)
This short audiobook, an Audible original, was written by a playwright who received a commission from Audible’s Emerging Playwrights Fund. She penned this collection of interwoven short stories about a decades-long intergalactic war and the messengers who play a part in it.
I enjoyed every part of this audiobook. The stories and characters engaged my imagination, and the production and sound effects added to my immersion into the storytelling.
This was a free story for Audible subscribers, so if you’re already paying them every month, definitely add this one to your queue.
The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, & Heretics (240 pages)
Written by Elaine Pagels, one of my favorite authors of Christian history, The Origin of Satan is less a history of the fallen angel and more an explanation of how Christians demonize those who threaten them.
The history of Christian demonization starts with Christ’s earliest followers thinking their Jewish neighbors were the sons of Darkness. Early Christians were, essentially, a radical Jewish sect, and so the major threat to their safety and their mission came from the Jews who would not join their new movement and from the Jewish leaders who actively worked to erase their gains. The early Christians responded by turning their neighbors and leaders into agents of Satan.
But after St. Paul and St. Peter convinced Christians it was okay to proselytize to gentiles, the threat stopped being their Jewish forebears and instead became the Roman pagans whose influence now ran counter to their Christian mission. Satan shifted his influence from the Jews to the Romans and became the driving force of the Empire’s persecutions of the Christians. The Roman gods of Apollo, Zeus, and the others became allies of Satan, and their followers were those the Evil One had duped and betrayed.
After Rome converted to Christianity, the major threat to its centralized power became the diversity of Christian beliefs one could find throughout the region. The war between Good and Evil shifted to a war between Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, with orthodox Christians seeing themselves as soldiers of God and the “heretics” as spawns of the Evil One who have come to corrupt the souls of good Christians everywhere.
Pagels writes, “For the most part, Christians have taught — and acted upon — the belief that their enemies are evil and beyond redemption,” and her book lays out a clear argument for why Satan ought to be understood as a sociological phenomenon and not a supernatural entity or force acting upon or within the world.
Exhalation (368 pages)
This short-story collection from Ted Chiang, the author of the short story that served as the basis for the movie Arrival, was a joy to read.
It includes nine stories that use sci-fi and fantasy plots to explore the human condition. There are stories of:
- time travel
- anatomical investigations of mechanical life
- the technologically (and thus, scientifically) proven absence of a free will
- “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”
- automatic nannies
- vast cloud-based video libraries of one’s memories
- the existential angst of parrots who wonder why humans work so hard to find and communicate with aliens when there is still plenty of intelligent life on the planet they still haven’t communicated with
- the divine creation of the Earth (as demonstrated by the archaeological discovery of trees without growth rings and men without navels), and
- ways to communicate across the branching dimensions of the multiverse (and thus learn the outcomes of the roads not taken).
The longer stories are roughly a hundred pages (on my Kindle), while the shorter ones are only a dozen or so. This diversity of length helps keep a reader on edge.
If you enjoy the genre of speculative fiction — the genre of literature that begins with the question, “What if…?” — then Ted Chiang’s stories will definitely satisfy.
The Wild Robot (288 pages)
For the longest time, my daughter refused to read novels with me. She and her mother have read novels together for a while, but with me, she wanted books we could finish in one sitting (actually, she prefers listening to improvised “choose your own adventure” stories from me, but dads don’t always have the energy for improvised storytelling).
This is why The Wild Robot will always have a place in my heart. It was the first novel my daughter and I finished together.
The Wild Robot tells the story of a mechanical creature who is being shipped over the ocean from the manufacturer to the market. The shipping boat sinks, and the creature washes up on a deserted jungle island. Designed to fit into any culture or household, the robot is capable of learning from the lifeforms around it, so it learns from the foxes, turtles, geese, bears, and so much more. At first, the animals shun the robot, but it soon starts to grow on them. It ends up adopting an abandoned gosling, and when it struggles, the other creatures pitch in to help.
Unfortunately, the robot’s past is still out there, and sooner or later, it will come for her.
The book has simple illustrations every few pages to keep the wandering minds of children engaged, but the characters and plot were enough to hook my daughter and me. If you’ve got a young one at home, this one belongs on their shelf.
All Summer Long (176 pages), Stargazing (224 pages), and Snapdragon (236 pages)
These three graphic novels, all enjoyed by my daughter, basically focus on young girls learning what it means to be a friend and the difficulties that sometimes ensue.
All Summer Long focuses on a thirteen-year-old girl whose best friend goes away to summer camp. Stargazing tells the story of two Chinese American neighbors, one of whom sometimes sees celestial beings in the stars. And Snapdragon focuses on a young girl who befriends the town’s local witch.
All three of the books are great. My wife being the awesome mother that she is, we even ate meals inspired by each of the books, and me being the dorky father I am, we even exchanged DMs with the author of Stargazing via Twitter, where we shared a picture of our homemade Chinese dumplings as Nora tried them for the first time.
Island Book (278 pages), The Harrowing of Hell (128 pages), and Rice Boy (548 pages)
Island Book is another incredible graphic novel. Written by Evan Dahm, it tells the story of a young creature who defends her island from a monster, only to have everyone else on the island shun her. She leaves the island to figure out what attacked them and discovers that her island isn’t the only one in the sea, and the others all have life on them too.
This beautifully illustrated book with fantastic creatures and characters reveals an author with a powerful heart. My daughter and I were both so impressed, we ended up purchasing two more books by the same author.
The first, The Harrowing of Hell, is not for children. It tells the story of Christ’s descent into Hell during His three days as a dead man, interspersed with scenes inspired by the Gospels.
In Dahm’s telling, Christ descends, only to be prophesied to by Satan, “Retribution. Incarceration. War. In Thy Name, Jesus Christ. All flesh comes to worship before me…In Thy Death, And In Thy Memory,” and in thanks, Satan offers Christ a crown. Rejecting the offer, Christ struggles with the Evil One and is cast down once more, where He comes before the imprisoned souls of “the first…from the dust…we who disobeyed the First Law…all of our children suffer by our sin…it is as we were told.” Christ offers the first couple redemption, and when they question His power to forgive, he tells them, “The Sons of Man have power on Earth to offer forgiveness.” They reject him, however, choosing instead to remain imprisoned for eternity in their guilt.
It’s a beautiful and harrowing work, and it adds a necessary component to the rich literature of Christian apocrypha, one whose origins can be found in some of the earliest Church communities but whose powerful tale has long been shunned.
Dahm’s other work, Rice Boy, is also powerful, but in completely different ways. My daughter read it before I did, and she seemed to enjoy it while also thinking it rather weird. I feel much the same. It strikes an interesting balance between the child-friendly illustrations of Island Book and the powerful, yet ultimately subversive, themes of The Harrowing of Hell.
With these three works, Dahm may have become my favorite graphic novelist. I’m excited for the May arrival of his sequel, Island Book: The Infinite Land.
Akata Witch (369 pages)
After finishing The Witcher novels and Ted Chiang’s collection of short stories, I decided to start a new series by an author I’d never read but whom I followed on Twitter, Nnedi Okoraphor, Ph.D.
Her Akata series has been called the Nigerian Harry Potter, and while the label is obviously problematic, the story shares with the Harry Potter books a story of a young person entering a life of magical adventure.
I only read the first book in the series because I can’t say I enjoyed it. Elements were interesting, but it was too much of a young-adult novel for me. This is not the fault of the author. I suspect (and the book’s commercial and critical success demonstrates) plenty of people enjoyed it, but after The Legends of Luke Skywalker and The Witcher series, not to mention all the books I read along with my daughter, I may have just been done with young-adult novels for a while.
It didn’t help that, after The Wild Robot, I embarked on the following young-adult novel with my daughter.
The Magician’s Nephew: Book One of The Chronicles of Narnia (171 pages)
C.S. Lewis’s classic, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, may have been the first book written and published in The Chronicles of Narnia, but in the world of the books, The Magician’s Nephew comes first. It explains why there’s a London lampost in the middle of the Narnian woods; depicts the creation of Narnia by the lion, Aslan; looses the White Witch from her native realm and sets her up to become the historic antagonist in Narnia; and inaugurates the Narnian tradition of having a human king and queen rule over the land.
It’s also very much written by a very English gentleman in the middle of the twentieth century. While the excitement of the plot kept my daughter’s attention, Lewis’s vocabulary, grammar, and style proved too challenging for my eight-year-old rural American girl, and she bowed out with only two chapters left in the book, forcing me to finish it on my own.
As I put it back on her bookshelf, I thought to myself, “Another one bites the dust.”
Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America (320 pages)
Having finished The Origin of Satan as my audiobook, I shifted from the ancient world of early Christianity to the contemporary world of (hopefully?) late-stage Capitalism.
In Hiding in Plain Sight, Sarah Kendzior combines memoir, history, and analysis to tell a three-fold story that explains the current moment. She makes note of the political, economic, and cultural changes that have been wrought over her lifetime (which, coincidentally, is also my lifetime; she’s a year younger than I am) and which laid the grounds for the eventual election of President Trump.
Kendzior is famous for a few reasons. First, she wrote The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America, a self-published collection of essays that went on to be named by National Public Radio as a Best Book of the Year.
Second, she was one of the few political pundits who predicted President Trump’s victory in 2016, and her keen analysis made her a desired voice in the days and weeks and months that followed.
Third, she’s one of the co-hosts of Gaslit Nation, a podcast where she and her co-host uses their expertise on authoritarian states (the subject of her master’s thesis and her dissertation, not to mention several scholarly articles and book chapters) to analyze the news and global affairs.
In Hiding in Plain Sight, she shows how her life, the life of Donald Trump, and the economic and political state of the United States at the turn of the second decade of the twenty-first century align. It’s a story of the collapse of a democracy, the enrichment and entrenchment of an elite (and nihilistic) economic class, the decline of journalistic integrity, and the rise of existential despair for so many millions of Americans.
The story is infuriating and scary and doesn’t suggest much hope for America, but for all that, it is absolutely necessary to hear/read.
I wrote to Kendzior on Twitter, “How did you get through even a single take on this without breaking into tears?” She responded, “A few parts were tough going…”
If you read/listen, you’ll understand why
The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (592 pages)
After listening to Kendzior, I decided to follow up her outsider perspective on Donald Trump and his cronies by reading John Bolton’s memoir of his 453 days as President Trump’s National Security Advisor.
I hesitated before getting this book. Like many people on the left, I first heard of John Bolton after President Bush named him as our country’s 25th Ambassador to the United Nations in 2005. Bolton had already served in the previous two Republican administrations, first in the Justice Department for President Reagan, then in the State Department for President George H.W. Bush, but when the second President Bush used a recess appointment to make Bolton our ambassador, the Democrats threw a tizzy, bringing his name out of the hallways of Washington and into the living rooms of regular Americans such as me.
Since then, I’ve learned to loathe John Bolton and his leading voice in the neoconservative movement that conquered Republican (and moderate Democratic) politics in the early part of this century, and which reached its apotheosis in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
After serving as the ambassador for four months (because he was appointed during a congressional recess, he had to resign before a newly empowered Democratic majority in the Senate could reject his official nomination), Bolton went on to become a leading pundit for Fox News and the rest of conservative press.
The Room Where It Happened starts with Bolton finding his name on the list of individuals being considered for employment in the Trump Administration. He wouldn’t join the administration until Gen. Michael Flynn’s ignominious removal from the role of National Security Advisor in February 2016.
President Trump loved the negative reaction to Bolton’s appointment, telling him, “Some of them think you’re the bad cop.”
Bolton joked that when the president and the NSA advisor work together, the president is always “the good cop.”
The president laughed, “The trouble is we’ve got two bad cops.”
The rest of the book reveals just how terrible President Trump was for our country: his lack of a basic understanding of world affairs, his woeful management skills, his narcissism and delusions, his impulsiveness, etc.
Bolton’s book doesn’t contain a lot of surprises, but it does provide a day-to-day picture of the ineptitude of the Trump Administration. It’s also written by a relatively charismatic writer who is quite sure of himself, and who I’m also quite sure is wrong on most things, which makes for a relatively fun read despite the subject matter directly resulting in the deaths of more than 330,000 Americans, a shameful period of American foreign policy, and the ushering in of what might be the last era of the Republic and/or the American Republican Party.
A necessary read, though if you can find a way to pirate a copy to refrain from putting money into Ambassador Bolton’s pockets, I highly encourage it.
The Starless Sea (487 pages)
In a lot of ways, this book seemed tailored just for me. As the protagonists uncover the mysteries of a secret organization, they are both hunted and led deeper by various factions of that organization. The chase leads them to a fantasy location that combines the wonders of House of Leaves and a vast Borgesian library, a world based on secret doors, time travel, and an endless depth. The tone of the narration strikes a balance between the timelessness of One Thousand and One Nights; a contemporary, casual conversation; and the whimsy of literary poststructuralism. In short, it strikes all the right notes when it comes to my taste in books.
If you share those tastes, give it a read.
Duty (640 pages)
Bolton’s epilogue quotes liberally from Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, by Robert M. Gates. I enjoyed the quote enough to make his memoir my next audiobook.
Secretary Gates would prefer the world to think of him as the 22nd President of Texas A&M University, but his history of public service goes back to 1966 when he was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. He would later serve as a CIA-sponsored officer in the Air Force before becoming an analyst with the Agency. In 1987, President Reagan tried to appoint him as Director of the CIA, but potential questions about his role in the Iran/Contra Scandal forced him to withdraw his name from consideration. President Bush repeated the nomination in 1991, and this time it passed the Senate. He served until 1993 when voters decided they wanted the Clinton Administration to take over the Executive Branch.
During the Clinton years, Gates found refuge in academia, lecturing at most of the country’s top universities and serving on the board or as a trustee of two more academic institutions, until finally being named the President of Texas A&M in 1999.
In 2006, after launching two wars and beginning to lose one of them, President George W. Bush nominated Gates to replace Donald Rumsfeld as the nation’s Defense Secretary. Gates had earlier turned down the opportunity to join the Administration as the Director of National Intelligence, but with so many young Aggies choosing to do their duty in the military, he couldn’t stomach the idea of not living up to their ideals, and so against his better judgment, he said yes.
In Gates’ version of this period of his life, he focused on two major goals: giving his soldiers (and he very much considered them his soldiers) everything they needed to achieve their mission and erasing every penny from the Defense Budget that was not intended to help the soldiers achieve their mission.
He believes he ignored Washington’s partisan politics as much as any Defense Secretary can without failing at their duty. His faith is supported by President-elect Obama’s decision to ask him to remain in the Cabinet despite the two of them being in opposite parties and sharing very few political values.
The President had other reasons, of course. It was 2008, immoral financial professionals had just flushed the global economy down the toilet, and the United States was engaged in two wars of counterinsurgency and a global war of counterterrorism. As the new president, Obama needed to focus on the economic crisis, and Secretary Gates had already demonstrated his ability to prioritize the needs of the front line over the needs of some general’s fantasy of a future war. The new president could trust him to work in good faith on the new administration’s priorities, and the Secretary promised that if he wouldn’t do the President’s work, he would be the first to say so.
His unique experience as a Cabinet-level insider in both a Republican and a Democratic Administration makes this political memoir a must-read. You just have to force your way through the Secretary’s myriad references to his preference for red meat.
Like…for real…he brings up his penchant for burgers and steaks a lot.
Between the World and Me (176 pages)
Read by the author, Ta-Nehesi Coats’ epistolary essay, personal memoir, historical analysis, and first-rate journalism makes for an emotionally-charged political denunciation of America’s systemic racism.
As you probably have heard, this short book is written as a letter to Coats’ adolescent son. That framework allows him to tell the story of his life as both a confessional and as an indictment, decrying the racism that has forced him and the people he loves to live a double life, one that celebrates all of their beauty and power while mourning the tragic centrality of racism in American life.
Having recently finished Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, I thought Coates intended to follow the same structure of Ellison’s bildungsroman (though with none of the latter’s taste for the picaresque), but it seems Coates actually intended to follow the structure of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which I have never read. By all accounts, he was successful.
This book killed me. As I walked the five miles from one edge of my village to the other and back, Coates’ reading frequently brought tears to my eyes. I felt his pain, his rage, his wonder, and his love, and the experience reinforced my sense of this writer’s importance on the contemporary stage.
Year of the Rabbit (380 pages), A Fire Story (154 pages), and Poppies of Iraq (120 pages)
These three nonfiction book-length comics tell the stories of, respectively, the Khmer Rouge, a Californian wildfire, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
I picked up the first book because I realized this year that I knew little to nothing about the Khmer Rouge, and wanted to correct that mistake. The book covers the real-life escape of the author’s family that began when the artist was just three days old. While there are some examinations of the Khmer Rouge, it’s mostly a vivid depiction of life as a refugee: depending on neighbors, bartering for goods, living in work camps, suffering from hunger, etc.
Where Year of the Rabbit tells the story of political refugees in Cambodia, A Fire Story focuses on climate refugees in Northern California. A wildfire forced the artist and his wife from their home in 2017. In the days that followed, the Eisner Award-winning nonfiction comic artist went to work capturing the experience in the form he knows best, and he shared it with the world a couple of weeks later. The comic went viral, and then his local radio station turned it into an animated video that went on to win an Emmy. In this book, the artist expands the story to capture not just own his tragedy, but that of his neighbors, providing a fuller picture of the damage wrought by the wildfires.
Poppies of Iraq was my least favorite of these three. It felt like an unfocused memoir that maybe had something to say, but couldn’t quite figure out what it was. It’s the story of a family of middle-class Orthodox Christians living in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s regime. The family finally escapes to Paris, where the protagonist doesn’t feel at home.
I recommend the first two. The last, not so much.
Stitches (329 pages)
This book-length comic memoir was crazy. The artist’s father was a physician in the 1950s who decided to treat his fourteen-year-old son’s health problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly resulting in the artist’s throat cancer. He undergoes a strange operation, and when he wakes up, he’s mute.
The story continues with an examination of the artist’s parents, both of whom are incredibly repressed. The story is accompanied by shadowy and surreal images that communicate the emotional tragedy of the household.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and as a teacher, I was aghast, once again, at the horrors that some children call home.
Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (496 pages)
For an audiobook, I followed up Between the World and Me with Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. Published in August of this year, Caste demonstrates that the racist policies of the United States are best understood through the lens of caste, rather than race. She compares the experience of blacks in the United States with the Dalits in India and Jews in Nazi Germany.
While I enjoyed the audiobook, I wish I had read it as a regular book because the highlights I would have made would have been really helpful right now. Luckily (I guess), every time something in the book blew me away, I pulled out my phone while in the middle of my walk and texted some version of the passage or fact to a group of friends.
Here are just a few of the items that caught my attention:
- The reigns of Andrew Jackson’s horse were made from the flesh of indigenous Americans (a fact to which one of my friend’s responded, “Your walks are detrimental to my mental health)
- In 1921ish, the Supreme Court ruled that a Japanese man with white skin was not white because his blood did not originate in the Caucasus Mountains, thereby making “Caucasian” the intellectual stand-in for white. However, in 1923, when a member of India’s upper caste applied for immigration as a white person since it was common knowledge that the upper caste in India derived from Aryans who had immigrated south from the Caucasus mountains (thereby making the applicant even more Caucasian than the men on the bench whose origins lay in Western Europe), the White justices said no.
- In the U.S., a member of the dominant caste’s purity could be tainted by one drop of blood from the subordinate caste, whereas in South Africa, a subordinate member’s blood could be cleansed by dominant blood. The resulting South African child would be put in the middle caste, whereas in the U.S., the resulting child would be seen as a member of the subordinate caste, and hence, a slave. South African whites were in the minority, and so they needed more people on their side, while in the US, it was the opposite: Whites held the majority and needed more slaves.
- For much of American history, the dominant caste of men eliminated competition for their women and, in fact, for all women. Laws and punishments forbade lower-caste men from even showing a hint of interest in dominant-caste women, but the laws also allowed dominant-class men (the ones who made the laws and carried out the punishments) to rape and impregnate all subordinate-caste women. In other words, only dominant-caste men could impregnate dominant-caste women, and dominant-caste men could also rape and impregnate subordinate-caste women. Thus, for most of our country’s history, the dominant gender of the dominant caste controlled the genetic makeup of our citizens.
- Even though the courts ruled miscegenation laws unconstitutional in 1967, Alabama didn’t officially repeal theirs until 2000 in a public referendum, where 40% of Alabamians voted in favor of retaining them.
- The Nazis looked to the U.S. as a model for their Nuremberg laws, which resulted in a long debate between the Nazis about how many Jewish grandparents a child needed to be considered Jewish. Their final decision was that three Jewish grandparents made the child Jewish, while two Jewish grandparents opened up the “association” clause, which assigned the child’s ethnicity to whichever culture the family belonged to, Aryan or Jewish). This was a victory for the moderate Nazis at the table. The radical Nazis wanted to copy the United States’ “one-drop” law. In other words, our homegrown racists were more racist than the majority of Nazis.
There’s a lot more to the book. It’s well written, powerfully presented, and thorough in its history and its analysis.
I not only recommend Caste to you, but I endorse it as required reading (or listening).
The Undertaking of Lillian Chen (430 pages)
This graphic novel tells the story of a young Chinese man named Deshi Li whose brother has died a bachelor. In Li’s culture, a man who dies without a wife will be lonely forever in the afterlife, but there’s a loophole: if Li can find a woman who will marry his dead brother and agree to be buried with him, then Li can save his sibling’s fate.
He sets out to bring either a recently deceased female body or an agreeable live woman. Enter Lillian Chen, a young woman who needs money and a way to escape the arranged marriage her father is trying to force her into.
This was a great story. The characters are rich, the plot feels unique, and the watercolor-style artistry is a feast for the eyes while also serving the story.
The Dreamblood Duology (960 pages)
A collection of two novels, The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun, this duology from N.K. Jemisin (who is quickly becoming one of my favorite contemporary authors) explores a fantasy city where dreams have the force of magic and an entire religion has arranged itself around them.
The first novel tells of the Gatherers, a group of priests who are responsible for two things: first, gathering the souls of those who are about to die into the eternal dream of the afterlife, and second, enforcing the moral laws of the society by gathering the souls of criminals while they sleep.
The novel covers a political conspiracy between the royal house that rules the society and the priesthood, a conspiracy that could result in the end of the world.
The second novel takes up the story a generation after the first, and it expands the scope of the world to include the hinterlands outside of the city and the political opponents who took command of the city in the aftermath of the first novel’s climax.
I enjoyed the two books (though the second was better than the first), but not as much as I’ve enjoyed Jemisin’s other works. If you’re on the Jemisin train with me, you’ll definitely want to check these out, but if you haven’t gotten on board yet, you’re better off starting with her Broken Earth Trilogy.
All The Birds in the Sky (317 pages)
I just said to my wife, “Christ, I just read this book like a month or so ago, and from the title, I have no recollection of it.” But then I read the short synopsis on Goodreads, and boom, it clicked. I’m glad it did because I really enjoyed this book.
This two-pronged story follows two young prodigies from the time of their friendship in childhood to the time of their adulthood when they stand on opposite sides of a growing war. The conceit, however, is that one of the prodigies is magical (she’s a witch) while the other is scientific and technocratic (he’s a mad scientist).
I really, really enjoyed this book. It takes place in the near future, which is always a fun setting for books, and it explores the nature of reality from both a scientific and magical perspective, also a fun theme for books.
At just 317 pages, it’s definitely a nice one to add to your list. It won a bunch of awards, including the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Again, definitely add it to your list.
Thrawn Ascendency: Chaos Rising (336 pages)
Last year’s reading list included three books about the STAR WARS character, Thrawn, who was created by Timothy Zahn back in the early 1990s as the first entries in STAR WARS’ expanding universe. As I wrote last year, “Once Disney bought LucasArts, they exiled the Expanded Universe from the official timeline, relegating its stories to non-canonical ‘Legends’ to give themselves a blank slate from which to build the Disney version of the STAR WARS galaxy. Some ‘Legends’ characters refused to remain in exile, however, and the entire STAR WARS fandom reacted with joy when…Grand Admiral Thrawn rejoined the canon in the third season of the animated STAR WARS show, Rebels. With Thrawn back in the fold, LucasArts commissioned Zahn to bring the rest of Thrawn’s story into the canon.”
The trilogy I read last year was more like three separate novels that covered different aspects of Thrawn’s life in the Empire, but this book brings us back to the days and years before Thrawn left his home galaxy, the Ascendency, to venture into the Empire.
This first book in what I will be another trilogy sets the ground rules. It explores how Thrawn’s civilization compares to other civilizations in the chaotic outer regions beyond the rim of the Empire’s “galaxy far, far away.” It continues developing Thrawn’s character, revealing more of his cold, observational mind as well as the emotional aspects of his soul.
I love the Thrawn novels, and if you enjoy STAR WARS, you will too.
Mother American Night (288 pages)
My last audiobook of the year, Mother American Night came highly recommended by one of my friends. It is the autobiography of John Perry Barlow, one of the Grateful Dead’s lyricists (he wrote “Cassidy,” “Mexicali Blues,” “Black Throated Wind,” “Estimated Prophet,” “Hell in a Bucket,” “Looks Like Rain,” etc.). But to say that Barlow was just a lyricist is to miss the Forest Gump-like life that he had.
He was also a pioneering thinker of cyberspace (and is directly responsible for the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet’s most important defender of digital privacy and free speech), a dedicated Wyoming political activist who once worked for Dick Cheney, a committed acid freak who mentored a teenage John F. Kennedy, Jr., and the man who introduced Timothy Leary to the Grateful Dead.
The guy seems to have known virtually everyone in the latter half of the twentieth century and he was as equally comfortable getting drunk on his ranch as he was in a conference room with Steve Jobs.
You know those Dos Equis commercials for “the most interesting man in the world?” Well, John Perry Barlow wasn’t fictional. And whether you like the Grateful Dead or not, everyone should know his life.
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (568 pages)
After listening to or reading a lot of African-American history this year, I decided to end 2020 with “the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party.”
Reading this work, I continually asked myself why the Black Panther Party for Self Defense was no longer active, and sure enough, the book explains why.
The first thing to know is that the Black Panthers interpreted Black America as a conquered colony within the bounds of the United States, and they found commonalities with the North Vietnamese’s rejection of the American empire. They believed that the police forces in the United States actively worked to keep Black people down, and the Panthers organized armed self-defense to hold police accountable.
Think of the Black Lives Matter movement, except instead of wielding smartphones to record police beatings and murders, the Panthers came to the scene with shotguns, handguns, and assault rifles to defend themselves and their communities from the extrajudicial atrocities of the police.
Did the Panthers fire at the police, killing some of them in the process? Yes. But they did it in response to warrantless invasions of their private property and in response to being physically and lethally threatened by the “pigs.”
The book charts the development of Panther ideology from the influence of Malcolm X through the factional split between Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, the former of whom wanted to moderate the violence of the Black Panther Party and the latter of whom wanted to ramp it up.
Marxist-Leninist ideology calls for a vanguard of radicals who will lead the masses against the capitalist-imperialist state. During its heyday between 1968 and 1971, the Black Panther Party was, objectively speaking, the vanguard of the radical left in the United States, and Cleaver wanted to take that even further, believing that the time was ripe for a true revolution, but Newton and the rest of the party leadership recognized that their influence would decline if they ramped up the violence.
This ideological split doomed the party, as did the Nixon Administration’s capitulations to the moderate left in the early seventies (the ending of the draft and affirmative action, to name two). Of course, the United States’ counter-intelligence operations against the Black Panther Party didn’t help (on June 15, 1969, J. Edgar Hoover declared, “The Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”).
If you have any interest in 20th century American history, this book is a must-read. The Black Panther Party represents the last credible attempt to revolutionize the United States in a leftist direction. As the authors write at the end:
“No revolutionary movement of political significance will gain a foothold in the United States again until a group of revolutionaries develops insurgent practices that seize the political imagination of a large segment of the people and successively draw support from other constituencies, creating a broad insurgent alliance that is difficult to repress or appease. This has not happened in the United States since the heyday of the Black Panther Party and may not happen again for a very long time.”
Charlotte’s Web (184 pages)
The final novel I read aloud to my daughter this year, Charlotte’s Web continued to amaze me. I’m assuming you’ve already read it, so I won’t get too deep into it, but I loved White’s depictions of the barn’s downtime and the passing of the days and seasons. It feels so perfectly described.
I’d been trying to read this to the kiddo for years, but it wasn’t until this winter that she finally relented, and once we got a couple of chapters into it, she was hooked. She didn’t have the emotional response to the ending that I was hoping for, but she did enjoy the book…just not as much as I did.
Final Stats for the Year
- Total Number of Books: 37
- Total Number of Pages: 12,780+
- Total Number of Book-Length Comics: 14
- Total Number of Fiction Books: 26
- Total Number of Nonfiction Books: 11
- Total Number of Audiobooks: 8
- Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2020: “Hiding In Plain Sight“
- Favorite Fiction Book of 2020: “Exhalation: Stories”
Paying the Land, by Joe Sacco
A Russian writer, doctor, and playwright, Mikhail Bulgakov started writing this novel in 1928, but it wouldn’t be published until 1966, twenty-six years after his death. It’s supposed to be a 20th-century classic of Russian literature, one that depicts the greed, corruption, and paranoia of Soviet culture while also philosophizing about Jesus Christ, the Devil, and more.
This was perhaps my favorite book of the year, and it is definitely my favorite religious book since 
This essay collection (roughly 100 pages) investigates the overlapping territory of cybernetics (a scientific field invented by the author) and religion, asking questions about the self-consciousness of machines, the ability of machines to create machines, and the ethical relationship between humanity and machines. The essays are based on some lectures Weiner gave at Yale and at other educational institutions.
“Any living thing (individual or aggregate) that’s not adapting, adjusting, learning, changing…is either dying or it’s dead.” Thus ends the opening memo in Jim Channon’s manifesto for a new kind of soldier and a new kind of army, one that is dedicated not to the nation, but to the Earth as a whole, where warrior monks and guerrilla gurus protect humanity and the planet using the force of their hearts, the force of their spirits, and the force of their arms.
I loved this series! Written by a powerful African-American woman who is “so fucking sick” of genre fiction’s “white supremacist, neo-feudalist fantasies,” the Broken Earth trilogy imagines the events that will lead to the real, true end of the world (as in…the end of the planet itself). It’s a world with more than one species of people on it, and some of those species possess powers that can only be described as geological (as in…the science of the Earth’s physical structure).
Like most Americans, I fell in love with Lin Manuel-Miranda’s interpretation of the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, but I also found myself curious about the life and times of the man who shot Alexander Hamilton, a man who also happened to become the only Vice President in history charged with treason.
This book was as dry as its title would suggest. The author looks at “God’s Word [as it was] addressed to his people in a culturally and historically conditioned context.” He tries to place the prophets into the social world of Israel and to interpret their messages for both their historical meanings within their temporal context and for their ahistorical meanings across all of human time.
