Time to try and wrap up these wrap-ups while 2020 is still visible in the rear-view mirror. I think this one on reading is my last of these, though it’s possible I’ll write something about looking backward/looking forward.
On Reading
I feel very fortunate that I was able to read a lot this year. In past years when my mental health wasn’t as good it was difficult for me to concentrate to read, and I know some of my friends had that happen to them this year in their anxiety over the pandemic and other current events.
In the list at the end of this post, you’ll see that I read a lot of non-fiction this year, mostly about politics, economics, and race. I remind myself that reading is not activism, but as our current political situation makes further left-wing politics more and more attractive to me, I think the reading is providing an intellectual underpinning to my more emotional and visceral responses.
In 2021 I hope to be able to keep up with this much reading. I expect to move back to a more balanced fiction/non-fiction ratio. I also feel like I have a lot more capacity for reading comics, and want to make sure I don’t neglect that this year.
On Buying
It’s a truism that reading books and buying books are two entirely separate hobbies, and if I did a good job on the first hobby in 2020, I did a great job on the second.
I bought from many different vendors: Poor Richard’s, Escape Velocity, Muse, and Barnes & Noble in Colorado Springs; Powell’s in Portland, Moon Palace in Minneapolis; a few from Amazon in moments of weakness; and many many books and ebooks directly from publishers Haymarket, Verso, AK Press, and PM Press.
It turns out that buying directly from those publishers is great. They are always running sales of one kind or another; they can afford to because they are selling directly to readers rather than to retailers. Most of the printed books I bought from these publishers I got at something like 40% off, and Haymarket was selling ebooks for 90% off at one point. Haymarket and Verso also generally include the ebook with the purchase of the printed book. I would always prefer the printed book over the ebook, but ebooks are handy to have available regardless, and when they are selling at 90% off I’m willing to take a chance on books I wouldn’t otherwise buy.
The List
According to what I logged in Goodreads, these are the books I read in 2020. I’m not going to do a book-by-book writeup but I’m happy to discuss any of these books further in the comments here or on Facebook or privately. But here are a few notes somewhat at random.
I read We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest and Possibility, by Marc Lamont Hill as part of a “book group” of two people, meaning that a friend and I agreed to read & discuss together. I enjoyed that and want to do more discussions with friends and acquaintances; we plan to do the same for Pedagogy of the Oppressed soon.
I usually read non-fiction with a pencil in hand to help me track the arguments or main points, and to mark passages that I think are particularly well-written. I realized this is futile with James Baldwin because every sentence is so damn perfect and you can’t underline the whole book.
Police have always been primarily tools of capitalist control.
The Pushcart War holds up as well as I knew it would with the very minor quibble that changing the supposed dates of the war in later editions to keep it always in the near future seems silly.
Eleanor Davis is incredibly good, even though The Hard Tomorrow isn’t my favorite thing she’s done. And Ursula K. Le Guin is as good as everyone says she is.
Antifascism is self-defense.
I should probably re-read Myriam Gurba’s Mean this year, it’s so good.
OK, here’s the list in roughly reverse chronological order of when I read them in 2020.
Reckless, Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Jacob Phillips
Incognito, Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Val Staples, Bill Hader
Heavy: An American Memoir, Kiese Laymon
To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown, Stephen B. Oates
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
The Doom Patrol Omnibus, Grant Morrison, Richard Case (and many other artists)
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Night Thoughts, Wallace Shawn
We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest and Possibility, Marc Lamont Hill
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, Talia Lavin
Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective, Scott Crow, Kathleen Cleaver
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2), N.K. Jemisin
The Secret Life: Three True Stories, Andrew O’Hagan
Permanent Record, Edward Snowden
V for Vendetta, Alan Moore, David Lloyd
Surviving Autocracy, Masha Gessen
Pulp, Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Jacob Phillips
Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction, Colin Ward
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley
Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams
Policing In Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915, Sidney L. Harring
Y: The Last Man, Vol. 1: Unmanned, Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Goran Sudžuka, José Marzán Jr.
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
The Pushcart War, Jean Merrill, Ronni Solbert
The End of Policing, Alex S. Vitale
The Hard Tomorrow, Eleanor Davis
Females, Andrea Long Chu
Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation, Danny Katch
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Naomi Klein
Anti-capitalism: A Beginner’s Guide, Simon Tormey
How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century, Erik Olin Wright
The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein
Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Mark Bray
The New Authoritarians: Convergence on the Right, David Renton
This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki, Jillian Tamaki
A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America, Philip Rucker, Carol Leonnig
Mean, Myriam Gurba
How We Fight For Our Lives, Saeed Jones
Post-mortem (Cometbus #59), Aaron Cometbus
Thanks for reading my newsletter! I’d love to hear more about what you have read or are reading, or your thoughts about any of the books on my list. Right now, my books in progress are Debt: the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber for an online book group led by Franz (see my podcast post); A People’s Guide to Capitalism: An Introduction to Marxist Economics by Hadas Thier; NW by Zadie Smith; and Marvel Masterworks: The Fantastic Four, Vol. 2 by Jack Kirby & some other guy.
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