- Heartstopper: Volume 5 – Alice Oseman
- The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy – Dave Neiwert
- The Guest – Emma Cline***
- Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories – Mike Rothschild**
- Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma, and Consensual Nonmonogamy – Jessica Fern**
- America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators – Jacob Heilbrunn**
- Network Effect – Martha Wells**
- Doppelgänger: A Trip into the Mirror World – Naomi Klein***
- The Sami of Northern Europe – Deborah Robinson
- Reboot – Justin Taylor
- Who’s Afraid of Gender? – Judith Butler**
- Manhunt – Gretchen Felker-Martin*
- The Liberators – E. J. Koh
- The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination -Sarah Schulman***
- White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy – Thomas Schaller & Paul Waldman***
- Of Thunder and Lightning – Kimberly Wang
- Kafka – Robert Crumb, David Zane Mairowitz
- Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch – Guy Colwell
- Men I Trust – Tommi Parish
- Clementine: Book Two – Tillie Walden
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States: A Graphic Interpretation – Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Paul Peart-Smith
- Shadow of the Batgirl – Sarah Kuhn with Nicole Goux
- Shook! A Black Horror Anthology – misc.
- The Free People’s Village– Sim Kern***
- Socialism: A Very Short Introduction – Michael Newman
- On Lying and Politics – Hannah Arendt*
- Fall Through – Nate Powell*
- Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction – Colin Ward
- Communism: A Very Short Introduction – Leslie Jones
- The Message – Ta-Nehisi Coates*
- Orbital – Samantha Harvey*
OVERVIEW
Overall Completion Rate – Something I’ve noticed over the past few years is that I really have gone down in my overall reading, and/or completion rate for books (some of past annual booklists have been in the 50-60 range, and last year was 49). I think that between COVID lockdown time and grad school, my attention span and overall leisure habits have shifted, with my listening to podcasts and watching TV more often than in the past. I’m actually looking to turn that around in 2025, through intentionally setting aside time for reading, and not defaulting to TV, podcasts, or movies as much.
I’ve also gotten into a pattern of starting, but not finishing books in a timely manner (at least not the same year), resulting in a lot of reading time that doesn’t really count towards a given annual booklist. (For example, I started Polysecure back in 2021, but only just finished it this past year.) I’d estimate at least a dozen books I started this year that I didn’t complete (The New Saints by Lama Rod Owens, Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, and What It Takes to Heal by Prentis Hemphill, to name just a few). I will try and pick most back up in 2025, but might let a few fall away, as I’m not that interested in the story anymore (such as Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert and The Magicians by Lev Grossman).
The above list includes graphic novels, which I include as books when they are singular narrative works. Trade paperback collections of serial issues of a comic book are counted separately below.
The titles marked with asterisks are the titles I enjoyed the most, which made the most powerful impression on me, or both.
GENDER BREAKDOWN
The gender breakdown across books is 18 by female and/or nonbinary/trans authors (about 58%), and 13 by male authors (about 42%). Last year was roughly 67% (33 of 49) and 33% (16 of 49) in those areas, respectively.
SPECIFIC REVIEWS
Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories by Mike Rothschild
I’ve had a deep and morbid fascination with conspiracism and conspiracy theory culture since I was a teenager; I couldn’t give you a count of the number of books I’ve read about these, whether simply at the narrative or the more sociological/meta level. This book by Mike Rothschild (no relation to this book’s focus) is a robust, engaging, and detailed history tracing the development, dissemination, and mutation of the specific anti-Jewish narrative around the wealthy Rothschild family, and how the role that proliferation and adjustment of that narrative by anti-Jewish bigots has helped sustain larger antisemitism over the past two centuries. (The title plays off of Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s promotion of a conspiracy theory that the November 2018 California wildfires may have been caused by clean-energy transmission laser experiments connected to a Rothschild-connected company, later depicted by many journalists and commentators as “Jewish space lasers.”) The author works with a ton of primary historical sources and political commentary spanning from the 1800s to present, showing the ongoing, intentional construction (and reconstruction) of this narrative over time, as always with the goal of justifying all sorts of injustice, oppression, and violence against Jewish peoples around the world. It’s also another clear recognition that misinformation, fake news, and historical revisionism are nothing new, but simply that the moment we are in sees antisemites using new technologies (such as social media) and pathways to share them at an increasingly accelerated rate, enabling them to spread more easily, and with less and less substantive critical challenge.
Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
Considering how much of her analyses and ideas are influential in political movements I’ve participated in and aligned myself with over the years (specifically, those critical of capitalism and corporate power), it’s surprising that this is the first book by Klein I’ve read. This memoir/political rumination examines a lot of the current information landscape, diving into areas of how conspiracy culture has gotten normalized and the fragility of truth online, with its social and political implications (both positive and negative) for transformative social change. The overall premise starts from an experience Klein had where she overheard a conversation where her identity and that of Naomi Wolf, were confused/conflated. The author proceeded to explore this confusion online, only to find it very common, and then went on a deep dive to understand the commonalities (such as shared support for Occupy Wall Street) and stark differences of her own worldview from that of Wolf’s (a third-wave feminist who rose to prominence in the 1990s, who has subsequently become a promoter of right-wing-aligned conspiracy theories, including Islamophobic and anti-COVID vaccine misinformation). The last section of the book also digs into her experiences as an anti-Zionist Jew in Israel, and her sense of the cognitive dissonances and friction generated by the incongruities between the country’s national mythology and the historic and current political realities between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. This section, again, provides rich soil to examine how “doubling” (in Klein’s words) has come to shape our present politics, and leads to messy, slippery juxtapositions that obscure facts and serve the interests of hierarchy and power.
(Note: the Wikipedia articles for Klein and Wolf each have a note at the top saying not to be confused for the other.)
Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler
Butler (pronouns they/them) is one of the most prominent thinkers around gender and feminism of the past 40 years, having proposed the notion of gender as a performance — that gender is not a fixed thing, but something created through behavior — in an essay back in 1988. They fleshed that concept out further through their influential book Gender Trouble two years later, becoming deeply influential in the then-emergent field of queer theory and third-wave feminism. This book explores the ways in which this understanding of gender has morphed and become distorted both among queer/trans folks and antiqueer/trans bigots (including JK Rowling), and how it is complicated by current understandings of sex and gender; i.e., Butler examines new facets of and nuances around how we talk about and think about gender, in the context of now, a present where reactionary misogynist and anti-trans perspectives are in ascendance, and increasingly embedding in our shared political landscape. They thus point to ways of seeing the conversations that have to be had and the struggles to be waged towards gender liberation for all.
The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination by Sarah Schulman
Like Naomi Klein, I’ve heard of Sarah Schulman’s work for many years (and even own a copy of Conflict is Not Abuse, not yet read), but just got to my first book of hers in 2024. This book — a mix of memoir and larger social history — is slim, but incredibly dense, packing an epic level of emotional and political punch. It was one of a few books I brought along with me during a three-week trip through Spain and Portugal in October, and I found it so compelling, I finished it within the first few days. It’s simply mind-blowing. Schulman employs her own personal history as a queer elder, activist, scholar, and survivor as a point of departure through which to open up a larger narrative about the devastating impact of the 1980s/1990s AIDS crisis on New York queer community — through the loss of people, spaces, culture, creativity, and struggle. This loss enabled a process of gentrification along all of these dimensions to transform NYC from a dynamic place where marginalized folks (artists, queers, organizers) could create their own worlds and contribute to the larger culture to a commodified, homogenous urban space for folks with money. This erasure, Schulman notes in the book, has not just affected larger culture and those survivors of the plague, but even younger queer and trans folks, having lost an entire generation of mentors, icons, and role models through which to dream themselves into their fuller, freer selves; they instead simply know of those few who have been themselves successfully commodified by the mainstream (hetero-dominated, neoliberal) world (Keith Haring, for example). Schulman’s response is not just producing records like this powerful book (and her book Let The Record Show, a political history of ACT UP), but also co-producing documentaries, the ACT UP Oral History project, and MIX NYC (formerly the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival) as antidotes to this powerful amnesia. With so much distilled into so few pages (190), this book is an essential contribution to any conversation around memory work and the preservation of social/political/cultural histories of marginalized communities damaged by systemic forms of violence. Pretty much every page had at least two-three points of insight or moments of dark, brutal truth that required me to pause and take a breath, re-read them, and then move onward, changed.
White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy by Thomas Schaller & Paul Waldman
I read this book shortly before the US election of 2024, and it actually prepared me (somewhat) for the result, and helped me make sense of it (somewhat). Schaller and Waldman delved deep into the political and cultural dynamics of rural American communities of the last few decades to try and develop a more holistic and expansive understanding of the question posed by Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? back in 2004 — namely, why have many rural Americans across the US have come to support the Republican Party, despite the fact the GOP’s policies almost invariably work against their individual, household, and community interests. While some of their insights were familiar to me (i.e.,that Republicans lean heavily on culture war as their political strategy, since their policies — when clearly stated — are actually pretty unpopular in relation to Democrats), others were instructive. For example, while many have understood and discussed how the anti-democratic structure of the Senate and Electoral College has increasingly supported an unequal balance of power favoring more rural over urban states, the narrative of rural vs. urban communities as deployed successfully by the GOP maintains the exact opposite — which fits into an ongoing persecution mindset among rural residents. This — coupled with culture war narratives — helps reinforce an us vs. them mentality between rural and urban communities, which the GOP has worked to exploit through increasingly complex gerrymandering of congressional districts. This creates a situation where they present themselves as the defenders of rural communities against urbanites, but with no incentive to actually produce results, and thus, no actual accountability. Which then leads to more frustration and grievance, which is placed at the foot of Democrats and urban communities, over and over and over again. This is essentially the GOP enlisting rural communities into their strategy of “owning the libs,” based more in trolling and obstruction than problem-solving or compromise. And Democrats (at least at the national level) have become complicit in this by giving up on fighting for votes in these communities, and thinking that the urban centers will carry the day. This tribal ideology is meant to close off any understanding of the actual power rural communities could wield if they held these politicians more accountable; in fact, Schaller and Waldman argue that if rural communities across the US were able to develop a more shared vision and platform, they would be the most powerful voting bloc in the country — again, an assertion flying in the face of the more common narrative of urban communities as wielding inordinate power over rural ones. But they stake this claim unequivocally — political power is directly dependent upon who wins rural communities. Additional observations are about how white and non-white rural residents share many affinities (politically, culturally, socially, economically), even as racism is deployed to create divisions between them, and how the persecuted rural community narrative works to obscure racial inequities in these communities — since rural whites are seen as the “real” rural Americans. Finally, I appreciated the authors’ breakdown of the complexity of defining rural, urban, and median communities (ex-urban) as well, noting that the definitions are not universally fixed, but slightly differently defined across different fields of study, data collection, and even geographies (one state vs. another). I finished this book with the clear understanding that Democrats and progressives need to find ways to address the GOP’s culture war strategy and successful branding of the Democrats (as a party) as “other” than rural Americans. They simply can’t avoid these conversations, but instead need to find ways to challenge Republicans’ caricatures and outright lies about things such as DEI, trans rights, and many other issues related to challenging structural inequity. If they continue running away, or even worse, start adapting their message to appear as a softer version of the Republicans,’ they will begin throwing people under the bus. Such work won’t be easy, but it is essential to regaining the support of folks in all communities that were lost in this election; countering culture war with policy (the current approach) simply won’t be enough to break the spell. Democrats lost votes across their long-standing coalition in 2024, and need to understand that these shifts — while partially economic — have a lot to do with allowing the GOP to define them for so long that folks only see them as elites, even as they cast their vote for a man who has more money than they will ever see in their lifetimes. A crucial read, for these crucial times.
The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern
I simply can’t say enough about how amazing, sweet, funny, heart-breaking, and inspiring this novel is; it’s become one of my favorites ever. This book, by climate journalist and self-identified space billionaire dragger Sim Kern (based upon their series of tweets roasting Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, etc. for their space ventures), takes place in an alternate now (actually a few years back) where Al Gore won in 2000, and set in motion a massive infrastructure based around clean climate technologies, but still didn’t address many of the inequities created by capitalism. Set in a low-income neighborhood in Houston, and centering on a public school teacher turned punk musician and the community that emerges around a DIY squat/gathering space, it examines punk, radical organizing, racial politics, queer romance, and wrestles with the messiness inherent in building, living, and loving your way towards a freer world, within a brilliantly crafted story that oscillates between utopia and dystopia. Kern also includes some really satisfying moments of humor that felt like in-jokes for lefty activists (particularly, some digs at the Revolutionary Communist Party/cult of Bob Avakian, and socialist factionalism). I strongly suggest it for anyone interested in radical change, punk, and sci-fi as well.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Guest by Emma Cline
This new novel by the author of 2016’s brilliantly feral The Girls was a wonderful start to the year, and really hard to put down. One of those amazing and painful(ly funny) stories of someone — a young woman of flexible morals — making really bad decisions, over and over, creating wreckage everywhere she goes. Considering it happens in moneyed Long Island and the folks impacted are mostly rich folks, there is a bit of perverse pleasure in her shenanigans.
America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators by Jacob Heilbrunn
Heilbrunn’s book is a helpful overview of how the right-wing in the US has actively celebrated, drawn inspiration from, and collaborated with authoritarian rulers worldwide since the early 20th century to present. As such, it provides context for how the seeds of the seemingly recent shifts towards unchecked executive power were sown decades ago, with Trump and other far-right figures’ embrace of Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the recently deposed Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un as directly connected to the growing reliance on repressive power, weaponized misinformation, and the building of MAGA-like, cult-like factions to implement right-wing policies, as an alternative to the more traditional democratic approach of working to develop, sell, and generate popular support for such policies.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
This gorgeous novel plays out over 24 hours, as a space station completes 16 orbits around Earth. The main characters are the six astronauts, examining their lives, joys, and sorrows both in orbit, and back on the ground. It provides many fascinating details and meditations around both the profound and mundane aspects of life in space, and page after page of elegant, musical prose describing different parts of the world from 250 miles up. This was the last book I read in 2024, and it truly hit this space nerd’s heart in all the right places, at a time when it was sorely needed.
I’d toss the three Very Short Introduction books I read towards the end of the year in here as well…I have recently been trying to clarify what (if any) label or affinity I’d locate myself in as a leftist. Throughout my years of involvement in radical struggle movement spaces and communities, I’ve had difficult experiences with anarchists, socialists, and communists as well as other lefties, particularly in how they do or don’t address racial and gender oppression. This has led me to generally avoid labeling myself, though I have historically seen myself as located somewhere between social/collectivist anarchism and democratic socialism. Reading these helped me really consider the pros and cons of each of these, validating some of my concerns (beyond my personal experiences, mainstream caricatures of these, and even leftist critiques) and leading me to actually see myself as more anarchist (again, social, not individualist) than I previously thought.
TRADE PAPERBACKS (COMICS SERIES)
My trade paperback count (collections of individual comics issues into a single volume) is only three, down from 11 last year. FYI: I put “et al” in recognition of the fact that while the first person listed below is usually the primary author, there are other folks (colorers, letterers, editors, etc.) who contribute to comics. No major standouts this year.
- Spider-Boy: Vol 1: The Web-less Wonder – Dan Slott, Paco Medina, et al
- Ignited: Vol 1: Triggered – Mark Waid & Kwanza Osajyefo, et al
- Ignited: Vol 2: Fight the Power – Mark Waid & Kwanza Osajyefo, et al