It's December again! Somehow! Which means it's time for my now-two-year-running “best books” roundup!
Unlike most of the “Best Of” lists you read, these are not books that came out this year. They are books that I read this year. I am actually totally unclear as to why anyone would make a list of books that only came out this year unless they were like, I dunno, financially beholden to the publishing industry and were little more than an advertising organ.
As per usual, the books below are affiliate linked, which means if you click on them then buy them, they kick me back a few bucks. Because I’m not a fucking monster, they aren’t linked to Amazon, they are linked to Bookshop.org, which allows you to make the purchase through a local bookshop, thus supporting hard-working local business owners and not a human penis who is spending his retirement trying to shoot himself into the sun while his former employees scramble to get better pay and working conditions.
Okay! So, starting with the best:
Favorite Book of the Year
The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing
This book makes absolutely zero sense for me to pick as my "best of the year" -- it's written by an academic, so it's not exactly enthralling writing. It's also the only book I listened to this year, and the audiobook reading was not top-tier. But in a chaotic, bleak year, this bizarre book is the one that brought me the most comfort.
It's about a mushroom: specifically the matsutake mushroom, which is highly prized in Japan, but which is impossible to cultivate. For whatever reason, the matsutake mushroom only grows in places that have been ecologically destroyed. It is rumored to be the first thing to grow in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, and it now flourishes in the clearcut, logged forests of the Pacific Northwest. Because of its value in Japan, groups of refugees and immigrants have converged on these forests to find and pick the matsutake, and in studying both the fungus and the people that hunt it, Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing finds hope for a world that is being systematically destroyed by capitalism.
The subtitle is On the possibility of life in the capitalist ruins, and Lowenhaupt-Tsing doesn't envision some sort of revolutionary utopia, but instead sees how people will figure out a way to survive amidst the destruction and chaos. The people who hunt the matsutake have already seen some shit: Hmong refugees (who escaped the Vietnam War), Latino immigrants, off-the-grid survivalists (often also Vietnam vets), and hippie mushroom enthusiasts. The message, if there's anything, is that: there's life after destruction! It's complicated and weird! But life finds a way, and people and nature adapt.
The book makes for dense reading, but it's packed with ideas, and it's bizarrely hopeful for a book about ecological collapse.
If that’s a bad pitch, I’d recommend a Netflix documentary on a similar theme: Fantastic Fungi.
Books that made me cry
Only two entries in this category this year! Honestly, this was a year of emotional growth for me, so it’s probably healthy that my cries in 2021 were connected to actual life events rather than fictional stories, but I kinda like this category, so I'll read sadder stuff next year, I promise.
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
12-year-old Conor's mother is extremely ill, and his grandmother, whom he can't stand, is more and more forcefully suggesting that Conor move into her house. While resisting the brutal reality bearing down on him, he looks out his window one night to find that the enormous yew tree in the yard has transformed into a giant monster, who demands that Conor listen to his stories and answer his questions.
This is a super quick read (it's technically marketed as Young Adult, but it's an all-ages book), and it is beautifully illustrated by Jim Kay. And man, it really knocks you off your feet. The tragic end that's coming is visible from the first page, but the book is not cloying about it. There is almost certainly a copy at your local library, go find it.
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen
This is a quick one — you can read it in one sitting — about a second generation immigrant named Tien who relates to his refugee mother through fairy tales. Tien is not sure how he’s supposed to come out to his parents, and his mother is not sure how to process being separated from her homeland, her family, and culturally separated from her son.
This is a beautiful little book, with a real gut punch of an ending.
Best Mindfuck
The Magus by John Fowles
Our culture is, at this point, so saturated with "twist ending" movies and stories that we're hardly surprised by them anymore. But John Fowles 1965 novel The Magus is something different: I finished it back in January, and I still don't know what the fuck happened in it.
This should not suggest that this isn't an exciting read, and it's not to suggest that I finished it disappointed: it's great. The story follows the young Oxford graduate Nicholas Urfe, who takes a boring, fairly easy job teaching English at a school on the island of Phraxos in Greece. While there, he stumbles across a wealthy recluse named Maurice Conchis, who is despised by the locals for his collaboration with the Nazis in World War II. Nicholas, though, finds Conchis captivating, even though he can't quite put his finger on what his deal is -- is he putting on a performance? Are the people living with him servants, or actors? Why does Conchis always play such bizarre mind games with him?
The relationship between Conchis and Nicholas keeps changing, the stakes keep ratcheting up, to the point where you, by the end, will be questioning what was real and what was staged.
Fiction
The Fisherman by John Langan
My runner-up for book of the year is John Langan's absolutely brilliant horror story, The Fisherman. Two men, both grieving personal tragedies, form a bond by driving around New York's Catskill Mountains and fishing the various streams and rivers that flow into the Hudson. One day, one of them insists that they try a new stream, one that they can't seem to find on the map, and that the locals insist they stay far away from. But the bereaved fisherman insists: there may be something about this stream which could return what was lost.
Guys, I don't want to give any sort of spoilers, because this is a fucking great horror book. It is the best I've read in years (and the three regular readers of mine may recall, my "best book of the year" for 2020 was also a horror book, The Ballad of Black Tom). It is so spooky, it is so good.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
In fiction, there's a rule known as "Chekhov's gun." The rule was named after Anton Chekhov, who insisted that, in a play, if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off by the end of the third act. The point being that the most effective stories are ruthlessly efficient, and that no words are wasted on elements that don't serve the overall story.
While this rule tends to be slavishly followed in both the theater and in the writing of short stories, in practice, most novels don't follow the principle of Chekhov's gun. Writers have a hard time resisting tangents and side plots, and given the length of novel, most authors will throw in a thing or two that makes them feel clever, or that scratches an itch.
Revolutionary Road is one of the few novels I've ever read that follows Chekhov's gun perfectly (I think maybe John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is the last one I read that fits the bill? And I read that five years ago). It is a clockwork novel, and it is spectacularly written.
The story itself is simple: Frank and April Wheeler had high hopes for their lives. They thought they would take the world by storm. Then they got pregnant, and they found themselves slipping into a boring, conformist life of the 1950's Connecticut suburbs, and it is driving them insane. They decide to try and escape, and… well, no spoilers.
I can't call this my favorite book of the year, but I will call it a perfect book.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Virtually everyone read Parable of the Sower this year, because it seems, ahh… a bit prophetic. Written in 1993, the book is set in 2024, and it imagines a future America torn apart by ecological collapse, a crumbling infrastructure, social inequality, and a violent, brutal drug epidemic. Also, the President is a far-right lunatic who runs on the slogan "Make America Great Again."
So there's that. For my money, the most interesting part of the book is the religion invented by its narrator, Lauren Olamina, a teenager whose community is under attack and must the increasingly dangerous city of Los Angeles. The religion, called Earthseed, speaks not in terms of solid, eternal truths, but in terms of the inevitability of change, and how one can both live with and "shape" change to be something more positive.
It's not an optimistic book by any means (and by all accounts, the sequel, The Parable of the Talents, which I have not gotten to yet, is bleaker), but it's a good book to read if you're struggling with the world's chaos.
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
I first became familiar with Russell Hoban when I was 2 years old, through his "Frances the Badger" series. But turns out, he also wrote visionary post-apocalyptic literature for adults!
Riddley Walker would be a strange story regardless, but the main appeal to it is its language. The story is narrated by Riddley, an 11-year-old boy who is living in ruins of a post-nuclear war Britain. The language has degraded in intervening years to something familiar but coarser. Here's a snippet:
“Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it werent you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.”
As I've gotten older, I've appreciated dialect books like this a lot more -- Trainspotting being the best other example I can think of -- because by forcing you to sound out the words in your head, it takes you that much further towards inhabiting the brain of the character. This book is astounding, if you're patient enough to work through it.
Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
Sci-fi stories about alien invasions are usually about what the aliens want from us -- they want to destroy us, they want to harvest us for food, they want to form an intergalactic alliance, etc. But Soviet-era sci-fi writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky had a more plausible idea: if they came, would they even notice us? Would we just be a waystation that they stopped at en route to something more interesting?
The world of Roadside Picnic has been fundamentally changed by one of these alien visits, where they stopped for a few hours and left. The sites of their roadside picnic are littered with their trash, which to humanity are unbelievably high-tech (and thus insanely dangerous) treasures. The sites have been cordoned off by governments, but are plundered by "stalkers" who sell the tech to criminal syndicates and scientific researchers alike.
Short Stories
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Ted Chiang's short stories are insanely inventive. His earlier collection, Stories of Your Life and Others included the story that became the movie Arrival, but even that unbelievably good adaptation doesn't show the man's range. He's an idea guy, and his stories revolve around him playing with ideas and science in a way that literally no one else can. A good book for people that aren't always into books.
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
Mariana Enriquez's other collection of short stories, Things We Lost in the Fire made my shortlist for the best books of last year, and this follow-up collection does not disappoint. The Argentinian writer has published four novels, of which none of have been translated into English. If we're lucky, this will be changing soon, but in the meantime, her unbelievably spooky and effective short stories will have to tide us over.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
This is a one-of-a-kind book: George Saunders is widely regarded as the greatest living short-story writer, and for years, he has been teaching a course at Syracuse University on the great Russian short story writers. The course is obscenely exclusive — it’s a handful of students each year — but in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, Saunders offers the course in written form.
The stories aren’t his — they are by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol — and after each story, Saunders explains what makes it great. In doing this, he also offers his techniques for how to write a good short story. It’s a great book for anyone engaged in the craft of writing, and a rare generous instance of a great writer offering his entire technical toolkit to the public.
Comics
A Secret History of Coffee, Coca & Cola by Ricardo Cortes
Ricardo Cortes is better known as the artist behind the hit children's book, Go the F**k to Sleep, but in this book, he looks at the history of three stimulants: coffee, coca, and cola. The pharmacological properties of the three plants are fairly similar, but one has become one of the world's most consumed plants, one has become a banned substance, and the other (when combined with the illegal one) has been turned into the world's best-selling soft drink.
This book is short and sweet, but it's an interesting look into how decisions made by the powerful can turn a plant into a crime or into a billion-dollar crop.
Baltimore by Mike Mignola
A World War I veteran travels across Europe to battle vampires, werewolves, and golems while being chased by a new Inquisition. If that doesn't sell you on it, I'll add that it's drawn by one of the most distinctive artists in comics, Mike Mignola. The look of the book alone is worth checking out, the excellent story is just gravy.
Asterios Polyp by Dave Mazzucchelli
I buy comics for our local library, and this was on a lot of best-of lists, so I got it, and then put off reading it for years because it looked kinda pretentious. The main character is an insufferable middle-aged white dude, a professor of architecture who likes to hear himself talk, especially if it's over the voice of a woman.
When I finally picked it up this year, I was pleasantly surprised at just how good it is, and how well it uses comics as a medium. Comics are often derided as just picture books for adults, to be used to dumb down actual literature or to provide future filmmakers with a storyboard. But there are some things you can only do in the comics medium, and this book is a great example of why comics should be appreciated in their own right.
Cinema Purgatorio by Alan Moore
Not many people on the internet liked this book! I am an Alan Moore fanboy, so I did, but I also think there's something to be said for it on its own: the story takes place in a movie theater, and features famous old movies, but told with a weird twist: in It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart is stopped from jumping off the bridge by his stuntman, who explains how many stuntmen actually die in shooting the movies. The corpse who opens Sunset Boulevard is met in the morgue by all of the many, many, many other Hollywood corpses, fictional and real, who all shout over each other for attention. And the Marx Brothers become the Warner Brothers, stabbing each other in the back until the cynical Jack Warner comes out on top.
There is an overarching story to the comic, but the fun of it is watching Moore and artist Kevin O'Neill (whom he did The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with) play around in Hollywood's seedy underbelly.
The Department of Truth by James Tynion IV
Imagine: You're an FBI agent doing undercover research on QAnon and conspiracy theorists, so you attend a flat-earther event. The funders of the event pile you onto a plane, where they fly you out to the edge of the world.
When you return, realizing the conspiracy is true, you are picked up off the street by members of a shadowy government agency who tell you that what is "true" has less to do with objective fact, and more to do with belief. If enough people believe the world is flat, the world becomes flat. So he who controls truth controls the world. For this reason, you are being recruited into the ranks of the people who protect reality, the Department of Truth, led by their fearless leader, one Lee Harvey Oswald.
Non-fiction
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall
I spent six years of my life studying political science and taking comparative politics classes, and in not a single one of them did my professors ever say, "This is what anarchists believe." We engaged with all of the other ideologies -- socialism, fascism, capitalism, liberalism, communism -- but never once with anarchism, which, consensus seemed to be, was on its face stupid.
It has only been in recent years that I've realized many of the people I admire most -- Alan Moore, Leo Tolstoy, George Orwell, Mahatma Gandhi -- all had (or have) anarchist leanings, and in 2021, I finally went down the rabbit hole and started brushing up on anarchism as an idea.
I started with Peter Marshall's enormous Demanding the Impossible, which charts anarchism from its roots in belief systems like Taoism and the English Digger movement all the way through the 80's and early 90's. It's a monumental book, but if you're interested, I recapped it on my Instagram stories. They are still available here:
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Pyotr Kropotkin
When Darwin released On the Origin of the Species, all sorts of authoritarians seized on it as a natural justification for the domination of the weak by the strong. Capitalists saw in it a natural law that proved that competition was inherently good, and that inequality was necessary for the furthering of the species.
Russian biologist and anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin was Darwin's contemporary, and pointed out what most biologist already knew: cooperation was at least as common a driver of evolution as competition. His book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is both a biological and political argument that cooperation is at least as much our birthright as is competition and domination.
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
Most of us are at least dimly aware that, in spite of America's soaring rhetoric about democracy and freedom since WWII, the actual arms of the American Empire through bodies like the Central Intelligence Agency have been engaged in violence, torture, assassination, and in propping up dictators since their inception in the 1940s.
Tim Weiner's exhaustive history of the first 60 years of the CIA's existence is staggering not just in revealing stuff we already knew about -- Abu Ghraib, MK Ultra, Iran-Contra -- but in showing just how bad the CIA has been at protecting and promoting American interests abroad. They've racked up an impressive body count for sure, but in terms of achieving actual American foreign policy objectives, they've been continually bested by superior intelligence services like MI6 and the KGB.
This was another one I recapped on Instagram, view those stories here:
Nature's Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy
When activists talk about what needs to be done to prevent the worst effects of climate change, they typically focus on changing the minds -- or at least placing significant pressure -- on the people who are powerful enough to actually do something.
This is disheartening to say the least, because the people in power have no interest in relinquishing their wealth and their power, both of which are byproducts of the system that is destroying the earth.
This is why books like Douglas Tallamy's Nature's Best Hope are so vital to maintaining any sort of optimism about the future of the planet. In it, he argues that the way to protect the earth is to turn our backyard into tiny nature preserves by cultivating native plants, promoting healthy homes for native birds, bugs, and other wildlife, and by turning our boring, lifeless lawns into oases.
It's a great example of grassroots activism: if you want to change the world, first you must literally tend your own garden.
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe
In 1972, Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, was "disappeared" from her flat in Belfast by masked men and women, never to be seen again. Hers was one of hundreds of deaths in "The Troubles," the struggle between the Irish Republicans and the pro-British Unionists in Northern Ireland, but it's implications have been enormous.
Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story of McConville's disappearance mostly through the eyes of the people who were responsible for it, the IRA operative and hunger striker Dolours Price, as well as Sinn Fein head and (allegedly) former IRA head Gerry Adams. Following Price's radicalization, her involvement in London bombings as well as murders and assassinations, and her hunger strike in prison, her force-feeding at British hands, and her later disillusionment with the IRA cause, the book shows just how history can be rewritten, not only by the victors, but by those who are trying to maintain peace.
Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
The common wisdom is that humans are bad, and they need to have their worst impulses checked by institutions of power. Bregman's Humankind: A Hopeful History argues the opposite: that actually humans are pretty good creatures on the whole, designed to care for each other and pretty good at organizing their own affairs when empowered to do so.
In it, he dissects the major arguments made against human nature (the Holocaust, the Milgram experiments, the bystander effect, Lord of the Flies) and offers a hopeful alternative: maybe we aren't that bad after all?
To an anarchist like myself, this book is maddening because it makes all the arguments anarchists make while never actually acknowledging it in the text (the notes in the book are absolutely peppered with anarchist writers and arguments). But that is presumably to make the argument in favor of the inherent goodness of human nature more palatable without having to confront anarchism's not-always-savory reputation. Which isn't such a terrible thing.
A House in the Mountains by Caroline Moorehead
When Americans talk about World War II, they're almost never talking about Italy. Italy was the first fascist country, but it fizzled out halfway through the war, with Mussolini holding on to power only through Hitler's wavering support.
A House in the Mountains is the story of the northern resistance army (and more specifically, the women in it) which sprung up when Mussolini's government collapsed, and which fought the occupying Nazis to the death. They received only tepid support from the Allies, who were worried about a communist takeover of post-War Italy, and were beset on all sides by Nazis and fascists.
It's an important reminder that resistance was everywhere in Europe in WWII, even in fascist strongholds.
Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff
I read a lot and I parent a lot, but I tend to not read many parenting books, for the same reason I don't read diet books -- I don't really trust them or anyone who self-styles themselves a parenting expert. Like, talk to me in 30 years so I can ask your kids about how great your advice.
What's more, we're living in a strange limbo world in parent culture where it's somewhere between helicopter parenting (manage your kids entire life) and free range parenting (put your kid in charge). Michaeleen Doucleff's Hunt, Gather, Parent moves beyond these two paradigms by asking: how have most parents in history raised their kids? The title was obviously invented by a marketing department, as she is mostly looking at indigenous, non-western parenting methods rather than hunter-gatherer parenting methods, but everything between the covers is a goldmine for parents who want kids that aren't tiny tyrants but aren't willing to use fear or coercion to get them to be that way.
Doucleff is a science reporter for NPR who traveled to different indigenous communities (Mayan, Inuit, Hadzabe) for advice on how to deal with her tantrum-y daughter. The resulting book is full of concrete advice on how to raise children to be autonomous, compassionate, and responsible members of a family and community.