BOOKLIST 2020

1. Love’s Not Colorblind – Kevin Patterson
2. Bowie’s Bookshelf – John O’Connell
3. Notes from Underground – Stephen Duncombe
4. The Nickel Boys* – Colson Whitehead
5. Information Services Today – Sandra Hirsch, ed.
6. Understanding Comics – Scott McCloud
7. The Last Emperox*- John Scalzi
8. The Hard Tomorrow* – Eleanor Davis
9. Too Much and NeVer Enough – Mary Trump
10. Spinning* – Tilllie Walden
11. Hot Comb- Ebony Flowers
12. Radiohead: Music for a Global Future – Phil Rose
13. A Contract With God – Will Eisner
14. I Know What I am – Gina Siciliano
15. Death’s End – Cixin Liu**
16. How to Be An Antiracist *- Ibram X. kendi
17. The Dispossessed – Ursula K. leGuin***
18. Ball Lightning – Cixin Liu
19. What If? the World’s Foremost Historians… – Robert Cowley, ed
20. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes – Suzanne Collins
21. Hench**- Natalie Zina Walschots
22. Culture Warlords* – Talia Lavin
23. Unfuck Your Boundaries: Build Better Relationships Through Consent, Communication, and Expressing Your Needs-Faith G. Harper**
24. Check, Please! – Ngozi Ukazu
25. The Splendid and the Vile – Erik Larson
26. Mediocre-Ijeoma Oluo*
27. The Girl with All the Gifts – Mike Carey
28. White Too Long – Robert P. Jones*
29. Pet – Akwaeke Emezi**
30. A Lot of People are Saying – Nancy Rosenblum & Russell Muirhead

OVERVIEW:

• Gender-balance this year is 16 male writers/editors, and 15 women or nonbinary writers/editors.
• The above includes a few graphic novels that I read for a graphic novels class for school. My general guideline around counting comic-based works as “books” on this list is whether or not they are intended to be a singular narrative work, as opposed to a collection of issues in trade paperback form.
• Like many folks, I went through a lot this past year, and found it hard sometimes to settle down enough to get my mind around reading. I started several books that I didn’t finish for a few different reasons, such as a book being interesting, but not as interesting as another prospective read; heaviness/emotional activation potential; and just plain proximity to year’s end. I’ll definitely finish all of these this year, with the exception of the Philip Jose Farmer (part of the Riverworld series, which I’m less interested in these days). These include the following:
  • The Freezer Door – Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
  • Heavy – Kiese Laymon
  • Unfuck Your Intimacy – Faith Harper
  • Comfortable with Uncertainty- Pema Chodron
  • Close to the Knives – David Wojnarowicz
  • Love and Rage – Lama Rod Owens
  • The Dark Design – Philip Jose Farmer
  • Why Won’t You Just Apologize – Harriet Lerner
  • Beyond Survival – Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Ejeris Dixon (editors)
  • Records Ruin the Landscape – David Grubbs
  • Too Like the Lightning – Ada Palmer
  • At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill
• Also, not included are 3-4 books of which I had to read major sections for school, but not the full body.

SPECIFIC REVIEWS

The reason this booklist took longer than usual for me to post is because it was hard to muster the focus and energy to dig through and consider even just a handful of books towards writing reviews for them. But I eventually got here, with this combination of reviews and honorable mentions. If the Tillie Walden review seems a little out of place, know that I wrote that for a class.

The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday).

It is difficult to say a lot about this book without giving up some major spoilers, but this novel, the newest by Colson Whitehead, is a powerful story centered on the experiences of poor Black boys sentenced to a brutal “reformatory school” in Jim-Crow Florida. It’s based on a true story, so it’s rich with detail, humidity, trauma, and shadow, and shows how such institutions helped keep many elements of plantation culture — with all its related racist abuses and exploitation — alive long after Emancipation. The book jumps back and forth in time, exploring how race and trauma shape and change the main character, and the society around him. It’s definitely a heavy read, but it continues the vein of Whitehead’s work that seeks to wrestle with the history of slavery and race in new ways.

Spinning by Tillie Walden (First Second). ** CONTENT WARNING / Sexual assault **

This memoir by Walden, revolving around her adolescence/young adulthood as a competitive figure skater and queer girl growing up in Austin, Texas, is told through a quiet and intimate style that pulls you into her mind, and memory. Framed through chapter headings named after skating moves, she rather rawly excavates the bullying, anxiety, trauma, ache to belong, and emotional turmoil of her teenage years. Walden’s aesthetic balances between minimalism and deep detail in use of space/setting, which enables the reader to focus on the characters’ interactions and Walden’s outer expressive and inner narrated worlds. It is primarily black-and-white, with some occasional uses of color, usually to indicate montage, and/or flashbacks, which again call the reader to focus on the characters over setting. Walden also makes good use of wordless panels and sequences to heighten the emotional charge of particular moments. I loved Spinning; I was carried along by the honesty of Walden’s struggle to embrace a life of uncertainty and agency over one circumscribed by harsh schedules and standards. The burden that expectations around her performance (as a young girl, as a closeted teen, as a competitive athlete) in contrast to her emerging desire for something else (queer love, life as an artist) forms a compelling backbone for the work, one that speaks both of her particular lived experience, and that of many other young queers, and young girls/women; this unique and bold coming-of-age story deserves a place within the graphic novel canon.

The Last Emperox by John Scalzi (Tor Books)

This is the last in a trilogy (The Interdependency series) set in an interstellar empire undergoing collapse of its wormhole-style transit system, The Flow, and the ensuing political and social shenanigans. I say shenanigans because Scalzi is a sci-fi writer with a wicked sense of humor. This book was a pretty satisfying ending to the series. It’s hard to say much more without going into the plot more, so start with the first book, The Collapsing Empire, and see how you feel.

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin (HarperCollins)

I re-read this last year, and since I can’t really remember when I first read it (in college?), I am counting it as a book for this year. I don’t re-read books often, but I’ve had this referenced so much over the past several years, and particularly thought it would be interesting in the context of all the Black uprisings, mutual aid networks, and other activist movements and bits of infrastructure that emerged last year. I definitely had forgotten most everything that happens in this book, but found it a really rewarding attempt to wrestle with both the promises and challenges of an anarcho-syndicalist utopian society; the book’s subtitle “An Ambiguous Utopia,” makes LeGuin’s personal stance fairly plain  Like the main character, Shevek, I both loved some of the social practices of his home world, Anarres, while bristling at others, brought into even starker contrast by his choice to travel to the more capitalist sister world of Urras, the planet from which those who live on Anarres fled from to be free. Anyone interested in radical leftist politics should give this a read. It’s my favorite work from LeGuin.

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

This YA novel blew me away from the very first paragraph. Within the first page, I knew it was easily one of the best books I’ve ever read, and definitely one of the best in 2020. Its setting is a city AFTER the revolution has happened, and we shifted many elements of our society and culture towards a more utopian, affirming, mutual vision. However, Emezi uses this seemingly beautiful setting and fantasy to poke at a question that I’ve wrestled with for many years: even after radical social transformation, can we really ever fully turn the page on the monsters of the past? What are the ways our utopias fail, and what are the real costs of maintaining them? Main character Jam accidentally releases a creature that takes the name Pet. Pet has a singular purpose: to hunt down a “monster” in Jam’s community — one that adults simply refuse to acknowledge exists, and which Jam struggles to accept as real herself. The novel is an allegory for the complexities of transformative justice and change, and the need for complexity in utopian, liberatory imagination.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

• Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots was a really entertaining book, set in a world with superheroes and villains, from the perspective of a freelance/temp henchperson for villains. Its complexity of character really creates some unpredictable turns, and its humor had me laughing out loud at several spots.
• Unfuck Your Boundaries by Dr. Faith G. Harper provides some really snarky, yet valuable insight on how to really investigate yourself, what you want and don’t want, and how to better communicate those. It’s a really useful self-help and growth work resource, even if you generally don’t like such things, and part of a series the author has around doing personal work. Trauma-informed and queer-inclusive as well.
• A Lot of People Are Saying by Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead is a book I’ve referenced several times over the past two months since I read it. It offers a clear-minded analysis that distinguishes more classic conspiracy theory (which focuses on facts, even if it develops non-hegemonic interpretations and narratives from those facts) and the new conspiracism, which is based more around base assertion, truthiness, and extreme demonization that defies reasonable discussion — QAnon anyone? Honestly, it paints a kind of bleak picture about the future, in that it notes that treating both of these as the same and working to fact-check/debunk conspiracist narratives is increasingly untenable. But an interesting read.
• Death’s End by Cixin Liu is the conclusion of the Three-Body Problem trilogy. I’m having a really difficult time coming up with a way to neatly sum up this book, and/or this series, because its scope is pretty astounding. My best stab is the aftermath of the discovery of extraterrestrial life by humans and vice versa, how that would likely go fairly badly, but there’s SO much more. I guess, give the first book (The Three-Body Problem) a try, and go from there. This book was a satisfying ending for me. Check out this review for a bit more context.
• Love’s Not Colorblind by Kevin Patterson discusses how issues of race in polyamorous communities, including fetishization, refusal to take issues of racism seriously in such spaces, and other concerns.

TRADE PAPERBACKS

My trade paperback count (collections of individual comics issues into a single volume) is 29. As the pandemic hit, I began reading graphic novels and trades via Hoopla Digital, since the Seattle Public Library has a stellar online collection. I’m providing summaries of a few that I had to write for my graphic novels class below. A few other standouts include Jonathan Hickman’s current run on the X-Men (in House of X/Powers of X, and X-Men), and Spider-Man: Life Story by Chip Zdarsky & Mark Bagley. It’s hard to describe the former, but the latter is based on the premise of Peter Parker aging naturally, and spanning the decades from him gaining his powers to close to present day.

I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi by Gina Siciliano (Fantagraphics).

This work is a fascinating and informative excavation of the life of a truly fearless and trailblazing visual artist of the 17th century, Artemisia Gentileschi. Siciliano’s feat in creating this work, however, lies not just in working to dramatize Gentileschi’s struggles and situate her  as a woman and artist both of and beyond her time, one who resisted men’s attempts to define and control her life’s trajectory and her work. I Know What I Am goes beyond this, to provide an engaging and expansive history of Renaissance art, politics, and intrigue, full of rich expository text combined with images and dramatizations from Gentileschi’s life and the larger world in which she lived, including renderings of famous artworks by other artists. This content — based on significant historical research — brings this faraway time to life in a way very different than a classic biography. A follower of Caravaggio’s style, Gentileschi developed this further to use biblical scenes to speak to more contemporary concerns. Her painting Judith Killing Holofernes, painted just following the trial of her rapist, unflinchingly presents a forceful message evoking women’s power and refusal to be victimized. A contemporary and friend of Galileo’s, Gentileschi painted, traveled, and eventually became a member of prominent artistic circles and societies, widely known, if not always widely respected.  Siciliano’s work is a successful fusion of history, biography, comics, and feminism, clearly worthy of inclusion in the graphic novel canon, with each page a feast for the eyes and imagination.

Mister Miracle by Tom King (DC Comics).

In this collection of his run of Mister Miracle, Tom King creates a disorientingly fresh and pleasurable juxtaposition of the mundane and larger-than-anything lives of a lesser-known DC Comics superhero and his wife, Big Barda. More accurately, Scott Free is a alien demigod warlord, survivor of torture and brutal gladiator tournaments, and heir to a planetary kingdom, who plays an escape artist to pay the bills. King works at a few different registers of tone, moving from the dry comedic, to soaring epic bombast (reminiscent of 1960s Silver Age Marvel and DC writing), and metaphysical rumination, sometimes in a matter of just a few panels. His collaboration with Grads creates a mesmerizing level of play with the relationship of text and image, for example, dream-like sequences, jump cuts to painful flashbacks, distortions that last one panel, such as on a rickety TV set. All of these work in service of telling the story of Free’s trauma, and how present it still is with him even in the most quiet and everyday of moments. These, alongside sequences such as Scott and Barda’s discussion of war over lunch and argument over renovations to their condo during an extended heated battle, displays a level of narrative synthesis and attention to and willingness to play with tone that many comics writers do not attempt to undertake. Mister Miracle could easily sit in the canon alongside other works seeking to subvert and make new the classic superhero story.

Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Bá (DC Comics).

Daytripper is a mix of sumptuous art and reflective, meditational narration and dialogue. The premise of the comic — with each issue exploring the death of the protagonist, Brazilian Bras de Oliva Domingos at a different point in his life — seems best realized in this collection. The presentation of several iterations of Bras’ life (including with some of the same friends, lovers, family members, etc.) provide an opportunity to consider the meaning and value of a life as not dependent upon reaching a particular age or place, but just by virtue of being. Each version of Bras is given an equal depth of attention, even if some deaths come off as more tragic than others. Bras dies as a young boy, an old man, and several other ages in between, but always having had some deeply significant experiences, some joys, and some losses, some failures and some successes. In addition, over the course of his lives, both Bras and the reader are presented with many observations around living, love, and loss, all of which contribute to this deeply human and relatable work. While he appears most ready to embrace death as a sick, elderly man, it is also clear that there is always more living that could be done, with all the risk and promise that living brings. This work made me reflect more on my own life, and what meaning I am making and finding in it right now. What better test of an artistic work can there be?