1. Dread Nation – Justina Ireland
2. And In the End: The Last Days of the Beatles – Ken McNab
3. Deathless Divide – Justina Ireland
4. The Dark Fantastic – Ebony Elizabeth Thomas*
5. Project Management – Adrienne Watt
6. Who I Am – Pete Townshend
7. Bloom – Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau
8. You Brought Me the Ocean – Alex Sanchez, et al.
9. Off the Edge – Kelly Weill**
10. The Kaiju Preservation Society – John Scalzi
11. Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel
12. Narrator – Bragi Olaffson
13. The High Desert – James Spooner
14. Bring the War Home – Kathleen Belew***
15. The Freeze-Frame Revolution – Peter Watts
16. The CIA Makes Science Fiction Unexciting – Joe Biel, ed
17. Coyote and Crow Rulebook – Connor Alexander, et al.
18. What We Don’t Talk About – Charlot Kristensen
19. Clementine: Book One – Tillie Walden
20. Choose Her Everyday – Bryan Reeves
21. My Year of Rest and Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh
22. We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories – Margaret Killjoy** 
23. Tragic Relief – Colleen Frakes
24. Stuff They Don’t Want You to Know- Ben Bowlin, et al
25. Freud for Beginners – Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate
26. Light from Uncommon Stars – Ryka Aoki**
27. Why Art? – Eleanor Davis
28. Wild Seed – Octavia Butler**

OVERVIEW

• The gender balance across books has 15 1/2 women and nonbinary folks as primary or co-authors, and 12 ½ men (I count folks as half when there are co-authors). The Coyote and Crow Rulebook has multiple authors of different genders, but I’m counting Connor Alexander (who uses he/him/his pronouns) as primary.
• 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.
• After years of refusing to use Goodreads following its acquisition by Amazon.com, I finally found an alternative online reading tracking app, The Storygraph. I had downloaded my reading data from Goodreads several years ago, and was able to import it into a Storygraph account. If you have an account on The Storygraph and want to connect there, my profile is nj_bookworm.

SPECIFIC REVIEWS

Off the Edge by Kelly Weill 

This book — which tracks the development of flat-earth theory through its present-day manifestations and its intersections with QAnon — was a fascinating examination of how one man’s singular extremist opinion can deeply impact the world. As someone who considers myself a long-time student of conspiracy theories and crackpot ideologies, I was surprised to learn from this book that not only did the notion of a spherical earth exist as early as the 6th century BCE, but the development of flat-earth theory in its current iteration can be directly tied to a 19th-century English inventor, writer and utopian socialist, Samuel Rowbotham. Weill draws out how a single fringe idea can grow to undermine narratives based on common sense and reason, and lay the foundation for other fringe ideas. Modern flat-earthers are not just believers in a silly idea, but are participants of a larger ecosystem rooted in conspiracist thinking that seeks to explain the world via clear binaries, as well as providing those who participate with a sense of identity through contrarianism. Such ideas and the communities that sustain them are increasingly interconnected and cross-pollinating via the World Wide Web, podcasts, and in-person gatherings. This book shows how increasingly difficult it is to challenge the expansion of conspiracy culture (flat-earth, QAnon, etc.) in a world where so many folks spend their lives in cultural/social bubbles. 

(To be clear: I definitely think there are real-world conspiracies, but they are primarily pretty easy to explain and understand through greed, self-interest, and a desire for power and influence. As someone who identifies as a leftist, I believe most “official” narratives of history tend to serve the interests of folks in power — men, white people, straight people, rich people, etc. But conspiracy theories frequently require a leap into explanations based in more supernatural, essentialist notions of good and evil, where those doing things you don’t agree with are not just wrong or awful, but actually demonic. This level of understanding justifies any action to oppose them and an identity of self and allies as persecuted, whether you actually experience any real oppression or not.) 

The High Desert  by James Spooner  

Spooner is the filmmaker behind the seminal documentary Afropunk, which strived to excavate the history and crucial role of Black folks in punk culture. Spooner produced and first screened the film based in a DIY ethic, traveling across the country multiple times to create a multifaceted picture of Black punk life through interviews and oral history, and subsequently traveling to show the film himself at small festivals and other events. This sprawling graphic memoir (which he both wrote and illustrated) of his life as a Black teenager growing up in a small town in the white-dominated High Desert area of California is an incredible complement to that nearly 20-year old film. Through this work, Spooner explores how finding punk simultaneously offered him a new, freer way of understanding and being in the world, but also forced him to navigate issues of racism in a seemingly liberatory culture, highlighting how reactionary/Nazi expressions of punk culture frequently existed alongside more radical, anti-oppressive forms. (This experience is one most any non-white punk — including myself — has had to reckon with at some point.) Spooner’s work also dives into issues of masculinity (through examining the impact of an estranged relationship with his father on his own growing sense of himself as a man), substance abuse among friends, and teen love. While there are certainly differences between my own experience growing up as a Black punk in white-dominated suburban southern New Jersey and Spooner’s, I found and felt many parallels in my own teen punk years, which have informed my political, social, and creative outlook and way of being in the world ever since. The last third or so of the book shows a similar development for Spooner, showing how his participation in punk led him to develop more rigorous and committed politics, including adopting veganism (he pioneered vegan-friendly tattooing, and currently runs a vegan friendly tattoo shop in Los Angeles, alongside other community and media projects). The word monumental likely gets used too often in reviews, but this book felt exactly that to me, likely because of the resonances between Spooner’s journey and my own. However, I believe it will still prove a deeply rewarding read for even those who know very little about late 1980s/early 1990s punk culture.

Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew 

(Full Disclosure: this review is partially reworked from a few Facebook posts.)

Kathleen Belew’s Bring the War Home, brilliantly and painstakingly draws a through line from the Vietnam-era rise of a paramilitary white power movement through the seeming “lone wolf” racial terrorists of today. She makes a powerful argument that post-Ruby Ridge and Waco, the government —fully aware of a broad and diverse movement — worked to minimize any perception of the Oklahoma City bombing as anything more than the act of a few (McVeigh, Nichols, Fortier), when there was robust evidence of McVeigh participating in various white power community spaces over the years, and developing skills and knowledge focused around how carry out acts of racial terrorism. In addition, the model of leaderless resistance and use of secure computer bulletin boards across white power communities going back to the 1980s also both helped distance McVeigh from the larger movement, and really has reached its most profound expression in individuals such as Dylan Roof or other mass shooters radicalized by racist, misogynist content online, who then carry out acts of murder and violence specifically intended to ignite a race war. 

In this study/history of the white power movement from the 1970s to present, Belew argues that the Vietnam War (a war based in reactionary ideas around race, America’s place in the world, and the use of military force against civilians as justified) deeply impacted the subsequent movement and distinguished its acts from previous racist terrorist eruptions. While I’ve always kind of understood how loss of the war sowed the seeds for the reactionary backlash of the late 1970s-1980s, Belew draws out several ideological, psychological, tactical, and material connections between returning right-wing veterans and white power paramilitary groups, which effectively transformed the white power movement. For example, while the KKK usually had resurgences after the US’ major wars from the Civil War through Korea, it wasn’t until Vietnam that any movement coalesced around disciplined paramilitary organization and tactics, or the notion of actually overthrowing the government (as opposed to just getting things back to how they were during Jim Crow, or even slavery, in the case of the KKK). I’d argue that this book is an essential read for any antifascist or person who opposes the political violence of the right, (such as groups like the Proud Boys, Patriot Front, and Oath Keepers, and so many others).

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki 

In a year of some really solid reads, this was probably my most favorite book. So unexpected, unique, and beautiful. It’s incredibly difficult to describe this book without giving some important things away, but suffice it to say, I suppose it is best labeled as speculative fiction. But here’s a basic overview: it’s set primarily in Los Angeles, time is roughly now, and its characters include a young trans violin prodigy, an infamous violin teacher with a dark secret, and a seemingly ordinary immigrant family that runs a donut shop which is most assuredly NOT ordinary. Within the story are some wonderful reflections on music, family, identity, agency, as well as a refreshingly sweet tale of queer love. Anything else, and I’m saying too much. Just give the book a try.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts 

This sci-fi book was suggested to me by a friend, and boy, is it a weird ride. The setting is a spaceship where folks go through short cycles of wakefulness (a few weeks or months) and long stints of suspended animation-type sleep (centuries, even millennia) as part of a journey to build stargates to enable interstellar and intergalactic travel. At some point, a plan develops to mutiny against the AI that controls the ship and sustains the overall ecosystem and lives of the travelers. It asks the question: how do you undertake a revolution across millions of years?

Coyote and Crow Rulebook by Connor Alexander, et al. 

This rulebook is for a brand new role-playing game, and was developed by an all-Native American group of developers. It is thus the first of its kind, and envisions a world where North America was never colonized, and full of a diverse range of indigenous cultures and civilizations, and chock full of both fantasy and science fiction elements. This rulebook is incredibly detailed in describing the world, the different cultures, an extensive history, and the mechanics of the game, and an interesting dimension of the game is how it works to decenter combat as the go-to resolution of encounters (as opposed to more classic roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons, which certainly include some level of diplomacy or nonviolent resolution, but are generally more built for resolutions of conflict through force). (I’ve been trying to track down a circle of folks to try this game out with, but have yet to find anyone either virtually or in-person.)

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler 

This novel is chronologically the first in Butler’s Patternist series, but was published after the book Patternmaster, which occurs at the end of the overall chronology. Having read many other Butler books over the years, I’m not sure why I never got around to this tetralogy, but I found this book deeply engaging, and a great introduction to the world Butler builds over the whole series, a story centering around a thousands-year old telepath who is working to create a new race in his image through breeding and other forms of control. I finished this just before a trip to Mexico where I finished the second and third books in the series — Mind of My Mind and Clay’s Ark — each of which I enjoyed, but I think this one may be my favorite. 

TRADE PAPERBACKS

My trade paperback count (collections of individual comics issues into a single volume) is 17, the same as last year (2021).

One standout for me is Far Sector, a Green Lantern series written by speculative fiction writer N.K. Jemisin, which features a Black queer woman named Sojourner Mullein as the Green Lantern assigned to a massive city of 20 billion people called the City Enduring on the other side of the universe. Jo is charged with solving a murder mystery in a culture where such crimes are virtually nonexistent, the result of centuries of suppressing citizens’ emotions by the powers that be. The other is Step by Bloody Step by Si Spurrier; this fantasy/sci-fi story follows a nameless girl traveling across various lands accompanied by a metal giant. The most engaging part of this story is that it features no narration or (understandable) dialogue.

• New Mutants Vol 1 – Ed Brisson, et al.
• Star Wars: Darth Vader: Vol 1, Dark Heart of the Sith – Greg Pak, et al.
• Stray Dogs – Tony Fleecs, Trish Forstner
• X-Corp Vol 1 – Tini Howard, Alberto Foche, et al.
• X-Men: Vol 3- Jonathan Hickman, et al.)
• Naomi: Season One – Brian Michael Bendis, et al.
• Save Yourself – Bones Leopard, et al.
• Far Sector – NK Jemisin, et al.**
• Stillwater Vol 1 – Chip Zdarsky, et al.
• Batgirl: Vol 1: Batgirl of Burnside – Cameron  Stewart, et al.
• Stillwater Vol 2 – Chip Zdarsky, et al.
• The Life and Death of Toyo Harada – Joshua Dysart, et al.
• Inferno – Jonathan Hickman, et al.
• Moon Knight: Vol 1, Lunatic – Jeff Lemire, et al.
• We Stand on Guard – Brian K Vaughan, et al.
• Devil’s Reign – Chip Zdarsky, et al.
• Step by Bloody Step – Si Spurrier, et al.**