2023 in review: reading

I have had this post in my drafts for some weeks, as can be seen by the Christmas tree in the background of the photograph. Time to finally finish it and send it on to you and get on with 2024 around this newsletter. Best wishes for the still-new-year, and thanks as always for reading what I write.

Reading

You can see a more complete list (though I’m sure I forgot some things) on my Goodreads page. Here are some brief thoughts on some of the books I read, all of which I recommend.

Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore, and Tehanu. For the first three books this was a very welcome re-read for me. I love Le Guin’s writing, her humanity. I particularly enjoyed Tehanu for its story, but also for its politics. It features discussions about sex and gender, and power, with exchanges like,

“She obeys me, but only because she wants to.”

“It’s the only justification for obedience,” Ged observed.

and

“If power were trust,” she said. “I like that word. If it weren’t for all these arrangements—one above the other—kings and masters and mages and owners—it all seems so unnecessary. Real power, real freedom, would lie in trust, not force.”

After the Revolution by Robert Evans and Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072. I was wondering recently why the Left doesn’t have our own central mythological novel in the way that the Right has The Turner Diaries. Where that novel represents a hateful, racist, violent, paranoid worldview, we could have a story of hope, tolerance, optimism, and humor. Neither one of these novels is exactly that, but they are getting somewhere. Everything for Everyone is the more serious of the two, and the “oral history” framing of the novel means that the authors are able to cover many different aspects of the post-revolutionary, post-global-crisis anarcho-communist future, but it also means that the book lacks a plot or focus, and sometimes gets a little repetitive or tedious. Evans’ book is more action/adventure/military science fiction, with a balkanized United States, supersoldiers and super drugs, with a heavy debt to William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors.

Tam Lin by Pamela Dean and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. About ten years ago when friends mentioned how much they liked Tam Lin, I tried reading it. I bounced off it, hard. I didn’t like the literary pretentions of some of the main characters, and I think I wanted a book that was more of a straightforward fantasy. This year I found a copy in the thrift store and decided to give it another try, and I’m glad I did. I found the characters more sympathetic this time around and allowed them and the story to be more what it was than what I thought it should be. The whole time I was reading it I was thinking about another college novel, The Secret History. This one I had read before, successfully, and really liked the first time around, and I enjoyed it at least as much on the re-read. For some reason I really want to write an adaptation of the novel for the stage.

Nonfiction

Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber. I had planned to read everything by David Graeber this year, and while that didn’t happen, I think it actually shows how setting ambitious reading goals helps me in that it pushes me to actually finish some longer, more challenging books. I need to go back and look at my notes on Debt, but it had a lot of interesting ideas about slavery, property, honor, violence, and so on. I look forward to taking on his other big fat theory of everything book that was published posthumously, The Dawn of Everything.

Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet by Lyndal Roper and Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard M. Wunderli. I have long had a pretty casual interest in early modern German history due to my interest in the history of printing. This was awakened this year a little bit by my watching a lot of German soccer, but more so by the game Pentiment, a story game that takes place during the reformation. It’s a lot of fun to explore the world that game creator Josh Sawyer and the designers and programmer created. Sawyer, who has led creative teams on much bigger games saw Pentiment as an homage (or a debt paid?) to his love of history which he honed as a student at Lawrence University (yay!). It’s the only game I have played that I’m aware of having a bibliography.

Anyway, after playing I read one of the books from the bibliography, Peasant Fires, which has a compelling portrait of the religious fervors that sometimes overtook people, leading them into conflict with the Church, as well as some interesting historiography. Roper’s biography of Luther was fascinating and readable and made me appreciate what a strange and singular character Luther was.

The Storm is Here by Luke Mogelson. The author brings a war correspondent’s sensibility to the radical events in the USA in 2020 and 2021 and reminds me that I didn’t hallucinate all those hours of livestream footage that I watched from the streets of Minneapolis, Portland, and the US Capitol. Things have been quieter for most of us for the past few years; I expect 2024 to be significantly worse.

Comics

Bad Machinery books by John Allison. I read some really good new comics this year, but I also spent a lot of time this summer re-reading these stories from the 2010s of teen investigators solving paranormal mysteries. The fact that they are English give them a different kind of charm, and the fact that they were published originally as a serialized webcomic means that each page has a satisfying punchline. The characters are dear to me, and it’s some of my ideal comfort reading.

Two asides: I also picked up what might have been Allison’s first print publication at a resale shop this year, and while I haven’t read it yet, the illustrations are terrible. This should be inspiration to anyone who has begun a creative enterprise and found themselves unhappy with their first results. Keep at it. Second, Allison wrote a short series for Dark Horse this year called The Great British Bump-Off which was fun and cute and brought back Shauna from Bad Machinery, now a young woman, so it was nice to catch up with that character.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton. Kate Beaton is best known for her very funny comics under the name Hark! A Vagrant!. Ducks certainly has many signs of her dry, warm humor, but it comes out in close observations of the people she worked with as a young adult in the Alberta oil sands. Overall the book deals with serious topics like sexual assault and coercion, and environmental degradation, always in the context of Beaton’s personal experience as a young woman far from home in a mostly male environment. This was on many people’s best of the year lists, and I think it will end up seen as a classic comic book memoir.

Monica by Daniel Clowes. Like all good Clowes, this starts out weird, gets grotesque, then gets weirder. Highly recommended.

2024

Here is a blurry shot of the books I would like to think I might read this year, along with a nice photo of Loki, the cat.

I’d love to hear what you have been reading and what you hope to read in the future.