Books that made space for me to dream in 2022
2022 was a year of both promise and frustration for me. I started the year in my last semester of grad school, taking inspiring courses where for example, I created a curriculum unit combining computer science and body movement.
There’s one particular class, “Power and Pedagogy”, that I’m still chewing on, many months later. I referred to this class in my (frequent) downloads to my partner as “the intense class”. The professor and teaching assistants tried in each session to strip away the familiar tropes and ch feckpoints around what “good” students expect; we had all gotten there by being achievers, but if we wanted a definition of achievement there, we’d have to construct it ourselves. This reflected back to us how much we expected to lean on authority to define success, and to make decisions. The class basically shined a blacklight on my layers of obedience and groupthink, and made me realize how much I have to learn about building understandings in community.
Meanwhile, the Russian invasion of Ukraine introduced a steady thrum of horror in my ears. I’ve been to Kyiv, and it’s incomprehensible to me that neighborhoods like the ones I remember have become places where families could be obliterated, and human life ground into dust. On top of this, as someone deeply influenced by Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, I was additionally disoriented by knowing there are other cruelties underway around the world, with nothing like that much Western attention—some of them perpetrated with U.S. funding and support. So I find myself distrustful of how my own moral outrage is being fed, even as the horrors I’m seeing are absolutely worthy of outrage. My heartache is a playing piece in billionaires’ games, but I must try to cultivate it with care rather than turn from it.
I graduated in May and returned from leave to my job, but I quickly hit snags. Many longtime colleagues and friends had quit in distress, a distress I soon came to know well. I was told by managers that my frequent questions and preference for transparency were getting in the way of decision-making, and I was given piercing criticism—for example, I was told that I only seek out voices who already agree with me, which is perhaps the last thing I would want to be true of myself. I was crushed and confused, but then there was a change of leadership, and I finished the year with the new executive director begging me not to quit, and promising a better role, with more room for my product expertise and with managers more eager to engage ideas with challenge and intensity.
To make space to dream, without fear; that has been the purpose I kept coming back to in the last year. It’s a bit preposterous to consider the right of a Ukrainian child to dream without mortal fear, and then a paragraph or two later insist on my right to dream without my mundane fears, or even the right of a working-class American schoolchild who uses the work I produce to create what they dream of.
What can I say—it’s been a preposterous year. Here are the books that helped make space for me to dream, all the while.
My highest recommendations
- An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger
- The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
- Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler
- Fledgling by Octavia Butler
- Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
- My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
- Discipline by Dash Shaw
Past years’ lists
See my writeups from 2023, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.
Table of contents
- Fiction
- Nonfiction
- Children’s books
- Comics
Fiction
This was the year that I realized I am simply going to read every word ever published by Octavia Butler.
In his forward to Butler’s posthumous collection Unexpected Stories, Walter Mosley writes that her scenarios are “deeply embedded into histories, beliefs, and landscapes that share ghostly traits of our own, stretched and blasted and made strange.” That spectral imagery captures why I can’t get enough of her books. They don’t merely take place in America; they are haunted by America, crushed by the weight of our invisible — but undeniable — national myths.
Butler has been steeped in America’s stories about itself, and knows they are dressed-up lies. Her urge to peel back these false fronts acts as a center of gravity for her storytelling; she circles it but stays oblique to it. Her own dance mirrors the elusiveness of our myths, in a sort of pas de deux where direct truth has no currency, and change can only come through alternative mythmaking.
Again and again, Butler shows how frequently people choose illusions to keep them from having to grapple with reality—and most of all, to keep from having to grapple with themselves. She knows the ways people find to lie, and the unmistakable signs of this; the stories people will concoct to avoid having to say they simply don’t care about the truth; the way those who boast loudest of honor are often cowards.
“[Butler’s scenarios are] deeply embedded into histories, beliefs, and landscapes that share ghostly traits of our own, stretched and blasted and made strange.” –Walter Mosley
Butler always resisted others’ reading her work as an allegory for slavery, and nothing more. Rather, I think it is her intimate experience with the storytelling necessary to support a horror such as slavery that opens her imagination to the broad wealth of bullshit that people will tell themselves in order to justify their thievery and control.
Each of her villains is the hero of their own internal story. Which means, they must be storytellers themselves. But their stories, constructed from expedience and arrogance, have no integrity, none of the internal consistency a story needs to hold together in the face of questions and pressures. This offends Butler as a storyteller beyond even her disgust at the abuses themselves that the stories enable.
In both the Xenogenisis/Lilith’s Brood trilogy and her short story “Amnesty”, aliens wield immense power over humans. But even as her human protagonists feel constrained by the aliens’ power, they find themselves appreciating the clarity with which these aliens state their intentions and rules, in contrast to their fellow humans, who react with animal disgust or wounded pride, and fill in more polished explanations later. Human myths, to Butler, are not merely oppressive; they are embarrassingly shoddy.
One of life’s great joys is to fall deeply in love with an author, and to delight in immersing yourself in their words across many books. I’m thrilled that Butler is having a moment where awareness of her is exploding (thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of adrienne maree brown). Here’s to a future where 16 year olds pass each other Parable of the Sower instead of The Fountainhead.
Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler
This sequel to Parable of the Sower is mentioned less often, but the two books fit together as a single work. Anyone who reads the first should read the second.
Reading The Brothers Karamazov years ago, I had the sense that Fyodor Dostoevsky understood everything about life; that no human foible was unknown to him. I had that same sense reading Parable of the Talents.
Sower follows hero Lauren Olamina’s fight for survival in a crumbling near-future America, as she creates the new religious doctrine she needs to make sense of it all. Talents sees that doctrine gather adherents and grow into an evangelical order, all while American reactionaries try to stamp it out. Butler’s 1990s portrait of right-wing Christianity, with its ready accommodation of racism and its wildly selective demonizing of sinners, bears a prescient resemblance to Trumpism. Because, of course, the falsely pious, rapaciously dishonest core of Trumpism has always been present in American politics and identity.
Butler’s disdain for these so-called Christians’ dull incuriosity is constant:
Somehow, our “teachers” have gotten the idea that we worshiped trees, thus we must have no trees nearby except those that produce the fruit and nuts that our “teachers” like to eat. Funny how that worked out. The orange, lemon, grapefruit, persimmon, pear, walnut, and avocado trees were good. All others were wicked temptations.
Again and again, she shows how frequently people choose illusions to keep them from having to grapple with the realities of the world and of themselves. I felt profound recognition in these episodes. At one point, a preacher gets patient pushback from his audience about the infallibility of the Bible, and is flustered; but rather than acknowledge to himself that he has more to learn, he decides this rhetorical challenge was an “ambush”. Butler illustrates precisely how effective this sort of mental parry is, allowing us to flip and twist any sense of uncertainty until we find an orientation that can be wedged into a slot we prefer — and thus dismissed.
Despite the importance of Lauren’s religious movement to the plot, there isn’t a very clear portrait of its practices and acts of devotion, and I struggled at times to connect with it. I will have to reread Sower and Talents to fully process the religious ideas and allegories, starting with the books’ titles.
In the Biblical parable of the talents, a rich man goes away and leaves the men he enslaved various amounts of money (a “talent” seems to have been the amount a peasant might earn in 10 or 20 years). When he returns, those men entrusted with the most talents have made a profit for him, and he rewards them. But one man did nothing with the money; the rich man punishes him, saying “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”
This parable is usually interpreted to mean that each of us should make the most of our opportunities, lest we squander the “talents” entrusted to us by God. I suspect that the modern English use of the word “talent”, which many trace to this parable, adds to that interpretation. With this meaning in mind, maybe Butler means the title to refer to Lauren’s making use of her skills—seeing her razor-thin chance of survival not as meager, but as a privilege upon which to build a movement that can change the world.
But I don’t think that interpretation holds up to scrutiny. Here’s the parable’s final exchange between slaveholder and victim, per the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible:
Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow and gather where I did not scatter?’ –Matthew 25:24–26
In other words, this “master” is a thief! Matthew’s is the most social justice-oriented gospel; surely, he is describing precisely the sort of rich person whom Jesus is talking about when he says, a few chapters earlier, that it’s easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for the rich to get into heaven. Matthew’s Jesus wouldn’t consider this enslaver analogous to God! The enslaved man’s refusal to earn him profit is not lazy, it is brave and righteous.
Note the enslaver’s specific immediate focus: not on his money not having been exploited, but on the audacity of his accuser to see his thieving, and name it. The incipient religious movement in Talents is called “wicked” and “lazy” by the Christian right in just the way this enslaver derides the refuser. Lauren’s greatest sin, in her oppressors’ eyes, is not taking anything from them—she just wants to do her work—but her refusal to go along with their paper-thin piety act. And a final parallel: as the enslaved man is cast out into the darkness for his refusal to profit evil, Lauren’s movement, “Earthseed”, seeks to leave humanity’s cruelties behind forever, casting itself from the face of the Earth to spread to the stars.
I concede that Butler’s own personal outlook on success, as reflected in her journals, was a “bootstraps” philosophy, not a reformist one. But her protagonists’ efforts to mind their business and achieve success always run up against a hypocrisy that must be overcome with radical action. I want to interpret Butler’s choice of title as intended not to celebrate Lauren’s pluck, but to follow the parable’s refusenik into the wilderness, where the unknown can be faced with integrity. I see it as a call for moral people to arrest the wickedness of the American machine, and to accept the risks of building a better world.
Highest recommendation.
Fledgling by Octavia Butler
After reading Parable of the Talents, I realized I had loved everything of Butler’s that I’d read. Could her books really all be good? I picked one I hadn’t read at random: Fledgling, her one vampire novel. (Giddy side note: it’s been optioned by HBO, with Issa Rae, JJ Abrams, and the writers of Lovecraft Country involved, though there hasn’t been any news in a year.) The title seemed generic; surely this would be the first dud.
It was fantastic.
The plot’s central conflict centers squarely on the sort of pretentious, hypocritical racist bullshit that so pissed Butler off in Parable of the Talents. If you’re familiar with the Enneagram, you’ll recognize a passionate “type 1: reformer” in Butler’s view; her hero takes integrity as her bedrock, and is drawn to others for whom their decency and honesty are inviolable, while around her move many for whom principles, beliefs, and formalities are nothing more than fodder for shaping whatever is convenient in the moment.
The particular abuses of truth here explicitly serve racism and enable racist violence; this seems to be one example where Butler would not protest that her work is a clear allegory for the myths and lies that enabled slavery, Jim Crow, theft, and murder. These crimes, alone, are not all that elicit Butler’s fury; she is furious at the sniveling, cowardly front that white supremacy puts up to duck responsibility for its craven abuses.
All the while, on a parallel track, this was absolutely the best literary take on vampires I’ve encountered. Butler tunes into the allegory of sexual intimacy that has always been at the core of the vampire myth and finds new facets and intricacies. Vampire feeding here involves a swirl of desire, hormonal dependence, consent and resistance; the humans who fall in with vampires struggle with their complicity and agency, knowing their desire is profound but suspecting themselves of false consciousness. Butler seems to be challenging the reader to acknowledge the ultimate limits of anyone’s claims to sexual agency, and the rarity of consent with absolutely no coercion. There is also a deeply disturbing aspect of (apparent) age differences; I didn’t know Butler had this streak of transgression in her imagination.
Fledgling achieves that most important aspect of vampire novels: being convincingly erotic, in ways that induce shudders.
Highest recommendation.
Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler
This small volume collects two previously unpublished stories by Butler: the novella A Necessary Being, and “Childfinder”, a short story she wrote in honor of Harlan Ellison, a legendary science fiction writer and Butler’s early mentor. These sit squarely in the mix of themes that entranced Butler over the course of her career: the curious ways that the most powerful caste is also the most helpless, and the least powerful caste the most capable; the ways that arbitrary superficialities get twisted into indicating permission and identity; the tendency to fear independent action by others, and to suppress it.
A Necessary Being, on top of all of this, is one of the most effective stories about the mechanisms of leadership that I have read. The hero wields power as a tool she has matured into completely; she rules not by fiat but by moving fluidly between dictating and listening, farming political capital where it is well-planted and consuming it as fuel when others’ expectations must be upset. Officially, she has absolute power; but she is well aware of the narrow scope of her power in practice, and of how losing the wrong allies would shut her out of power completely.
“Childfinder” concocts a scenario that reminded me of a favorite comic, the 1990s series Harbinger, with its teenagers on the run from a corporation that seeks to control and exploit their raw, incipient superpowers. The story is ultimately about the struggle between making change within the system or in secret rebellion, in isolated pockets that defy the system without its knowing. How do you keep alive a tradition whose light might die out? And if you do that while selling out everything else, is it really survival?
Highest recommendation.
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler
Butler begins this collection by confessing that she doesn’t particularly like short stories, and doesn’t particularly like writing them. Her stories here, as she sees them, do not stand alone; they are sketches of scenarios that want to be explored at novel length. Part of the delight in this volume comes at the end of each story, when she comments on her career frustrations at the time, or the itch she scratched through this writing.
My favorite stories set up scenarios fruitful enough for a novel. “Bloodchild” and “Amnesty” each cover humans coexisting uneasily with aliens, and feel almost like alternate universe versions of Butler’s masterpiece Dawn. “The Evening and the Morning and the Night”, a story with distant echoes of the zombie genre, evokes genetic dystopias like Kazuo Ishiguro’s later Never Let Me Go or the film Gattaca in its celebration of those written off as dangerous as they struggle for dignity, self-determination, and hope.
The last portion of the book is a pair of short memoir essays. In one, Butler digs into the role of racism in her fiction, in its reception, and in her process:
There seems to be an unwritten rule, hurtful and at odds with the realities of American culture. It says you aren’t supposed to wonder whether as a black person, a black woman, you really might be inferior — not quite bright enough, not quite quick enough, not quite good enough to do the things you want to do. Though, of course, you do wonder.
[I’m just sitting quietly and rereading that.]
Highly recommended.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
I read this book a few years ago, partially out of order. It was clearly written beautifully, but I didn’t catch fire as a reader the way several friends and family members had. (See my thoughts from reading it in 2016.) This year I started over at the beginning and read it properly, and I found that fire, and then some!
There’s a sort of alchemy in Ferrante’s conjuring of the world as seen by Elena/Lenu, her semi-autobiographical stand-in, at each stage of her youth. Her world’s rules emerge and congeal from adults’ offhand comments, or rumors, or glimpses that she extrapolates into assumptions: cold water on a hot day will kill you and make blood leak out of your head; the edges of her neighborhood form an inviolable boundary.
When Lenu is little, these assumptions are truly fantastical. They brought back memories from my own childhood, of absurd chains of cause-and-effect and imagined psychic connections. When Lenu’s friend Lila decides she has seen a feared neighborhood father take supernatural form to steal her doll, it becomes an established fact in precisely the same way I remember believing, both with deliberate choice and instantly established reality, that my teddy bears had thoughts and complaints.
Reading of Lenu’s endless hours spent on the floor of her building’s extensive courtyard, I kept thinking about days I spent at six and seven in Cambridge’s Holden Green, a curious old Harvard staff and student housing complex. My best friend (also named Ben!) lived there in cramped quarters with his underpaid adjunct professor parents, and he and I would explore the back alleyways all day, scouring the dumpster area where scholarly detritus would collect: marbled role playing dice, talmudic science books, telephony connectors clearly from another dimension.
Ferrante tracks Lenu’s construction of reality as she ages, which happens not linearly but with lumps and wiggles and steps backward. She is sure of her academic prowess for months, and then one day her friend says the wrong thing and it is pierced and over, her identity smashed. Then she stumbles around until she strikes on a new self-myth that she can rebuild her identity around, and she’s up and running again. The magical thinking becomes less violating of the rules of physics over time, but no less powerful at bending reality; the supenatural is replaced by the certainty that a particular boy’s approval offers Lenu’s only path to salvation.
Highest recommendation.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
In the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”, he gives this summary:
I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story… which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.
This encapsulates two of Dick’s fixations as an author: first, someone’s assumptions are not merely a filter on reality; for them, they are reality itself; and second, because we are social beings whose realities are made up of each other, your reality has the power to become mine.
Reading Klara and the Sun, I was struck by how similar Kazuo Ishiguro’s projects are to Dick’s. Ishiguro novels are not all science fiction, but even the earthbound Remains of the Day centers on reality as it appears to someone raised entirely within one totalizing ideology.
Mr. Stevens, the narrator of Remains, knows in every fiber of his being that his purpose is to serve his aristocratic master, and that this is the rightful order of the world; he would no sooner demand nights off (or, god forbid, hit on a guest) than he would, I don’t know, bite a pig. It’s only when he’s forced by circumstance to step far outside of his customary role—and, in fact, confronted with a conflicting ideology so undeniably repulsive that it undermines the worldview he has always considered as inviolable as the laws of physics — that he dares to even imagine what it might feel to let his own desires guide him.
Klara, the robotic protagonist of Ishiguro’s latest novel, is very much a Mr. Stevens 2.0. She was literally created to serve her human family as a companion, and comes equipped with sophisticated programming that keeps her intentions oriented, almost magnetically, towards this purpose. The only comparable passion in her programming is her desire to be shined on by the sun, which she needs to keep her solar-powered batteries charged.
Ishiguro finds all sorts of playful ways to bring these desires to life, and to suggest what unexpected implications Klara’s programming might have for how she processes the world. This sort of concocted cultural relativism is standard in sci-fi, but rather than use it as just a winking allegory for religion, Ishiguro works to find poetry in it, to show how it feels to Klara to be bathed in sunlight, and to be bathed in appreciation from the unhappy girl she was bought to comfort and support. Ishiguro is so incredibly good at this, and so patient; he wants to evoke the sublime in Klara’s programming, not to use it as a punchline.
And as with Philip K. Dick, Ishiguro also wants to know how a character’s perception of reality can change reality itself; and he has Klara intervene in all sorts of unexpected ways with the world around her, fueled both by correct perceptions of need and by glitchy flights of fancy sparked by her programming as a formal companion. These keeps catching until they have combusted into an undeniable force, a clandestine system of barely coherent meaning.
Meanwhile, in the slightly dystopian future Ishiguro has designed around Klara, there has been a slow creep of comfort, a sanding off the edges of the unpredictable, so that even children’s playdates must be carefully managed and medically modulated by adults. In this context, Klara’s clarity of purpose—however unrecognizeable the world is to us through its lens—seems to glow and throb with life. There’s a sequence where some humans follow Klara’s lead into ludicrous action, and I struggled a bit to buy how readily they do so; but Ishiguro may be suggesting that purpose itself can become a rare and valuable thing, in a society which tries so hard to avoid hard work, difficult conversations, and personal risk.
Highest recommendation.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
I generally like Murakami’s books, and his Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is one of my favorites. I’d been meaning to read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle forever, but it was an uneven experience. At times, it reads like a John Irving novel: engaging, crowd-pleasing, plot-driven, easy to make meaning of. At other times, the stilted prose and meandering mix of realism and magic seem purposeless—so pointless that I suspect he’s trolling the reader.
Jay Rubin’s translation may have pushed this quality even farther; his Murakami prose is considered more stiff than that of Murakami’s other translators into English, Alfred Birnbaum and Philip Gabriel. Birnbaum did a quick translation of an earlier version of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which allows us to compare the opening of the novel, as each of them handles it:
Jay Rubin: When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
Alfred Birnbaum: I’m in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.
Some say Rubin is truer to the way Murakami reads in Japanese, which I cannot assess. I enjoy the flow of Birnbaum’s sentences, and find they help me access Murakami more eagerly. They have panache. But of all Murakami’s books that I’ve read, maybe The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the one where it’s clearest that Murakami is trying to avoid panache, filled as it is with characters who, to put it lightly, have no chill.
The anthropologist Simon Baron-Cohen has suggested that autism is a case of “extreme maleness”, and WUBC’s narrator has a blinkered practicalness that strikes me as extremely male, in a spectrum-y way. (At the other extreme is Elizabeth Strout, whose Anything is Possible I was reading at the same time; her writing could be called extremely female-observant, interpersonally sensitive, and relationship-focused.) I think this is intentional on Murakami’s part; there is romance and sex here, but they are absurdly formalistic, written as though the storyteller has never spent time with an actual human body.
This book was published in the middle of Japan’s “lost decade”, when the frothy growth of previous decades stalled and many people reported loneliness and lack of hope. I don’t know much about Japan, but I appreciate how Murakami personifies some of these elements in the portrait of an unemployed man who sits inertly while fate, fantasy, sexuality, and wealth and poverty buffet him randomly. Murakami seems to be rejecting the standard compelling character journey, and instead he sort of disassembles the novel, stripping it of coherent meaning, rendering it shapeless.
The narrative jumps in time back and forth from the Japan of the present to occupied Manchuria during World War II, with its wartime atrocities that often hinge on quirks of timing or whim. There is a stark contrast between the life and death immediacy of wartime versus the calm of modern life. But as the book goes on, the two seem to converge, with both scenarios accumulating strange connections and similarly bizarre details. Murakami seems to be asking: is modern life, with its recursive searches for meaning in an empty landscape, any less absurd than the madness of war? Is there any more sense in a peacetime society unable to confront its problems, than there is in one undergoing violent collapse?
Recommended.
The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
I liked Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (see my 2019 writeup), where the straightforward prose and familiar elements of human motivation were crucial in easing me into her scenario’s complexies. In contrast, I couldn’t find such an entry point in The City We Became, which starts with abstractions and takes a while to get to the actual story. A sci-fi version of New York City should be extremely my shit, so why did I find myself so bored? Manhattan getting dap from Lagos and teaming up with Queens to curb-stomp a tectonic monster sounds neat in theory, but it felt inconsequential.
Not recommended.
A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller
Haha, I thought, this book’s trick would be that its obscure-sounding title belies prose that is actually brisk and clever!
Nope. The prose was as clunky and unpleasant as the title. I dreaded dragging myself through its sentences.
Not recommended.
Nonfiction
An Ethic of Excellence by Ron Berger
Ron Berger is a veteran elementary schoolteacher, and the founder of EL Education, a program which tries to bring the team-building and identity-building aspects of Outward Bound into schools. An Ethic of Excellence is his memoir of teaching, an anecdotal distilling of his philosophies. It’s short, very readable, utterly convincing, and incredibly moving.
Berger describes his own teaching, which is focused on stimulating his students to identify projects and causes that are authentically meaningful to them; his role is then to coordinate and guide their work, to apportion responsibilities among them, and to engage in a rich give-and-take with them as their projects evolve through the school year. Drawing on the effectiveness of this approach and the way he has seen it mold students into proud, intentional scholars, Berger calls for a public school education focused on building whole people, one that aims to crystallize students’ sense of purpose as learners and as citizens.
As with all memoirs by phenomenal people, the question I am left with upon finishing is: how do we scale his individual brilliance so that it can be repeated by large numbers of people? Berger acknowledges this problem, and makes at least an attempt to distill the core elements of his approach. He explains the value of even small steps towards a world where students are deeply proud of their schoolwork because it is truly valuable, not merely because it is scored highly by adults or praised by them.
One of Berger’s stock lessons is called “Austin’s Butterfly”; you can see a quick video of this here:
This book is only the beginning of a conversation about how to make American public education excellent, but it is an inspiring and substantial beginning—as well as an entertaining read.
Highest recommendation.
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
One of my favorite books. Primo Levi was a chemist with an insatiable curiosity about both atomic interactions and human interactions, and in this episodic memoir he dances among these interests in equal part. Each chapter takes its title from an atomic element, and touches somehow on that element’s properties as they weigh on human affairs. Mixed in are two short stories, each with one foot in historical fiction and one in speculative fiction; in each case, the story’s headline element plays a crucial role.
Levi was imprisoned at Auschwitz, and recounted those bleak horrors in his book If This Is a Man (published in the US under the inferior title Survival at Auschwitz). He doesn’t discuss that time here, but it is present in his sense of loss in remembering the Piedmontese Jewish community of his youth, and the friends and comrades he’ll never see again. In one remembered episode, the lost thing is merely a chance at love that he didn’t seize; but somehow, in the light of all the more material loss, this missed chance echoes especially profoundly.
Levi’s empathetic imagination makes him an extraordinary teacher. Even though Levi only employs chemistry knowledge on the page to give context for his stories, I learned more than I’ve ever known before about how a chemist sees the physical world, and what their work consists of. I long for more books like this, which take us inside the worldview of a curious mind with deep subject expertise.
Highest recommendation.
Moral Mazes: the World of Corporate Managers by Robert Jackall
A few times in my life, I’ve come across a piece of writing so incisive that it changes my perception of the world.
That was the case for me years ago when I encountered the book Advice to a Young Wife from an Old Mistress by Michael Drury. That book’s framing—the “old mistress” is not Drury but an imagined narrator who dictated the book—provided a lens through which to illuminate gender, sexuality, desire, promiscuity, aging, and power. I had of course encountered critiques of our stubborn pieties in this realm before. But I had never before encountered such a sincere attempt to simply describe social reality, without being clouded by wishful thinking.
Paul Graham, the venture capitalist and blogger, once tried to identify what society collectively knows, but cannot say:
Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don’t matter — just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what’s inside this guy’s head with what’s inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what we can’t say.
What is left over, that the grizzled world-traveler knows, but the protected teenager doesn’t? Some deep areas of appreciation, certainly, but plenty that might be called ugly: ugly not because it is mean-spirited, but because its usefulness requires that it be unadorned.
Moral Mazes contains such understandings. Robert Jackall embedded as a researcher for several years with two corporations, conducted hundreds of interviews, and assembled an ethnographic portrait of the American corporate manager that is unflinching. God, how I wish I had read this before I worked within a company of more than 10 people. I lost count of the number of times it felt like a Jackall was specifically talking about my personal history.
To give just one example: he describes the inner life of the corporate manager as a state of neverending, pervasive insecurity and fear. Because their value is so difficult to measure, there is little to determine their place in the hierarchy besides loyalty, perceived political allegiance, and the sense that unpredictable things don’t happen when they’re overseeing people.
Of course, not all unpredictable things are bad! Sometimes someone low on the food chain has a great idea for someone else’s project, or points out an oversight by a different team or a leader which it’s crucial to catch early. Jackall’s point is that while these unexpected contributions might be valuable for the company as a whole and for its mission, they’re almost always bad news for the manager, who now has senior leaders wondering why they can’t make their team more predictable.
Thus managers must guard fiercely against not only surprising irresponsibility by their subordinates, but surprising responsibility. What managers hate most is when those proposals-out-of-turn make sense, because they threaten to expose the manager for having failed to anticipate a need, and in addition, having failed to keep the unexpected from percolating up to the level of their own managers.
As managers see the world, it is “right” to produce a steady path of predictable progress, and “wrong” to make their own superiors unsure what to expect from their team—even if their team’s acquiescence means failure for the company’s goals, or destruction for the company’s customers or the environment:
…without clear authoritative sanctions, moral viewpoints threaten others within an organization by making claims on them that might impede their ability to read the drift of social situations. As a result, independent morally evaluative judgments get subordinated to the social intricacies of the bureaucratic workplace… For the most part, then, they remain unarticulated, lest one risk damaging crucial relationships with significant individuals or groups. Managers know that in the organization right and wrong get decided by those with enough clout to make their views stick.
I can’t say this is the most readable book in the world, and it took me weeks to get through it; I would recommend stopping halfway through and not bothering to read the second half, which focuses on public relations, marketing, and consulting. But the first half is truly a must-read.
Highly recommended.
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
A narrative of the life of legendary doctor, teacher and public health leader Paul Farmer, a Harvard Medical School professor who embedded himself in Haiti’s poorest region while still in medical school, and traveled the world to push with every lever he could find — policy, international aid, capitalist branding, communist apologism, Christian charity, personal favors, and his own seemingly endless patient care — to make healthcare for the poor as good as healthcare for the rich.
Farmer is undeniably a spectacular person: a Great Man, with the gender in that phrase very much intended. He is astonishing in his brilliance, in his lack of need for sleep, and in his absence of self-doubt. He seems to have twice as many hours in each day as the rest of us; his colleagues, who are also experts in his same field and who sometimes bristle at his eccentricities, understand that he is irreplaceable, and that their whole project wouldn’t even exist without him.
What does this mean for we mere mortals? What can we learn from such a peculiar person? It’s not as though a few steps in Farmer’s direction would do much to close the gap. An average composer is not merely a watered-down Mozart; adopting Mozart’s habits or quirks probably won’t make them a better composer.
At various points it seemed like the core of Farmer’s genius could be all sorts of qualities or tendencies: his refusal to give in to despair, which allows him to find solutions well past the point where most people would give up; the irrational confidence with which he talks his way past cops and gatekeepers; his ability to engage completely with the problem at hand, then move on completely; his ability to think about a problem from first principles, not only when diagnosing a patient’s illness, but when diagnosing a government’s institutional errors.
But halfway through the book, I started to feel inspired. I think just spending so much time in the imagined presence of Farmer, with his hungry mind, his bottomless well of compassion, and his crystal clear purpose, made me feel more capable, and more forgiving of my own flaws. Farmer is not without his foibles, in particular his need for constant praise by others. But he seems to truly know that his best efforts are needed, and worth pushing past obstacles and weaknesses in himself or others.
I left this book having soaked for a while in Farmer’s persistence; he is absolutely patient in the face of obstacles he has no control over (war, street violence, disease itself), and absolutely impatient in the face of obstacles that he and his colleagues actually have the power to make better.
Farmer complains constantly about everything from the shoddy moral accounting that considers some lives not worth saving, to the lack of explanation about escalators at places where poor visitors are likely to be using one for the first time (and tend to topple over). Of course, most of this energy is wasted. I mean, fight the good fight, buddy, but no one will ever address the escalator thing. And yet, plenty of Farmer’s complaints have, eventually, led to tectonic changes in bureaucratic approaches to public health. How?
The biggest reason seems to be that Farmer is so unquestionably useful. Others may have the same critiques that Farmer does, but Farmer’s voice has an undeniable authority. He is, as Steve Martin says, “so good they can’t ignore you.”
Another reason is that Farmer’s litany of correctives is always delivered with charm, usually with an open hand offering help instead of a fist, and always with a bit of poetry in his delivery. “Nobody lays a guilt trip like I do”, he comments at one point, while inscribing a copy of his book to a public health official with a manipulative note that coerces them towards funding more AIDS work in Haiti. But he seems to instinctively inflect his moral urging with a warmth that disarms those whose previous decisions he is criticizing.
It’s also crucial that he has done his homework when he calls for change; this often means not merely reviewing existing literature, but doing firsthand experimental research on a scale that starts almost laughably small. Farmer will take a thorny problem, and ask a series of questions that strip the thorns and branches down to the fundamental trunk. Each question might require months of grant applications and hands-on work with a handful of patients, but everything that he and his crew learn can be walked back up the chain and used to justify broader initiatives. Since all of this work is done with integrity and involves no self-protective political nonsense, it is entirely novel, and eventually the relative absence of dead bodies in Farmer’s care can’t be explained away by his opponents, and his approach becomes national (and international) policy.
Having done this in a short amount of time, but with steady, deliberate progress, he’ll become an expert in the problem and its solutions. There’s a breathtaking chapter where he and his team do this with multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis, or “MDR”, starting with a single patient in Peru, finagling intentional (and unintentional; sometimes basically stealing) cooperation from first-world hospitals, coaxing the occasional high-integrity nurse to share documents that undermine the official narrative, and unraveling what is basically an international conspiracy of willful blindness about the ways that standard TB treatment in poor countries breeds MDR and sets the stage for what could potentially be an apocalyptic global pandemic of untreatable TB.
To get through all of this muck, Farmer must be stubborn and zealous, and he refuses to hear objections that are sometimes worth considering. One of the most fascinating parts of the book is when he and Kidder—the book’s author—visit one of Cuba’s internment centers, where AIDS patients are forced to live. Kidder sees oppression here, while Farmer sees only a social investment that saves lives; he’s unimpressed by the interpretation of “freedom” by educated White liberals in the first world. Moreover, he throws a bit of a fit at Kidder’s insistence that Cubans might not appreciate being forced by armed government agents to leave their homes and live in prison camps, no matter how well-appointed they are. In his totalizing pragmatism, he is ideological; and he will not agree to disagree.
Another fascinating thread is how often Farmer embraces acts of care that don’t scale. Kidder notes that Farmer, like so many phenomenal doctors, seems to abhor utilitarian thinking. It’s as though the calling of medicine requires a certain empathetic madness, a delusion by choice to believe that the odds don’t matter. Farmer bristles when Kidder brings this up; it’s almost as though Kidder is a religious nonbeliever, questioning Farmer’s faith.
When I was growing up in Cambridge, MA in the shadow of Harvard and MIT, I had the incredible luck to be young in a place where the world would come to my doorstep. In high school, I snuck into a Harvard event where Farmer appeared along with Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide had survived a good dozen assassination attempts by that point, and when I shook his hand in the receiving line at the end of the event, his enormous bodyguard had him absolutely enveloped in a protective bearhug. I barely remember Farmer, but that’s how Farmer wanted it; mustering support for Aristide was the focus of the show, and Farmer was always, always focused.
Often, a book about someone impressive is recommended not because the book is particularly useful, but as a proxy for endorsing the work or the accomplishment of the subject. But I found the experience of reading this book subtly perspective-shifting on my own strengths and challenges, and how they can serve as opportunities.
Highly recommended.
Lot Six by David Adjmi
I struggle to get into memoirs. They so often strain under the burden of the memoirist’s completism, or they confuse memories that matter to the author from stories that others will find interesting.
At first, playwright David Adjmi’s portrait of dysfunctional middle class Sephardic Jewish family life felt like a slog. But his voice low-key grew on me until I couldn’t get enough. There is some memoir red meat here—wild episodes of unbelievable misbehavior by others, plus the absurd lengths Adjmi will go to to avoid facing the madness. But more significant than the events themselves is Adjmi’s way of relating them. I was genuinely sorry to lose his voice in my life when the book ended — I feel like I could listen to him narrate something as everyday as buying a can of soup.
Adjmi’s story is no glossy rise to stardom. His shlubby uselessness means when he has revelations, they really sing. At one point, he gets into trouble in school for some completely meaningless infraction, and expects to feel ashamed as usual. Instead, a sudden defiance takes him over, and the sensation is revelatory:
It was almost violent, like a bomb had exploded right there in the room: the very instant I stopped caring what happened to me, my life came jarringly into focus. I’d been dreaming all my life, and now I was certain it was all a dream. In the dream I was powerless. In the dream people were cold and cruel and I had to submit to their rules to feel safe, but I’d never been safe. These two men standing before me with their tweed and worn expressions and bemusement had no purchase on me, and on some deep level I [had mistakenly] believed they had. My reality seemed so colorless and bleak — but it wasn’t reality. They’d devised a reality for me to step into but I could just as easily step out of it. I could build a new reality. I could make it anything I wanted. Once I knew that, and not just knew it but felt it, saw it with bracing clarity — once that happened I could feel some invisible perimeter, some unspecific captivity I lived with and accepted all my life start to melt, and dissolve. And like the desert-trawling Jews in the Bible, my exile was transmuted into freedom.
I’m still working on this revelation, and I’m glad to have Adjmi’s voice with me as I do.
Highly recommended.
Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner
I am moved by the spirit of this book, which longs for school to be a place where students actually know why they’re there.
The authors call for students to be learning what they are motivated and inspired to learn, not what they are coerced into learning. I agree — mostly. But that “mostly” is important, because as much as I think it’s a mistake to deny students choice, I think it’s also a mistake — a real one, with profound consequences — to get rid of educational coercion altogether.
First, let me start by saying how much I agree with the basic idea that inspiration is more powerful than coercion. I experienced this as a child with piano lessons; my parents simply decided that I would take them, and I did so, dreading the lessons, not caring at all about piano music. It wasn’t until years later that I actually heard piano music that made my heart sing; the specific piece was Thelonious Monk’s “Orange Was The Color Of Her Dress”. Hearing that, I suddenly wanted to take piano lessons, and began to appreciate the small amount of facility I had from my years of practice.
Ever since, I’ve wondered, what if I first fell in love with piano music, and then took lessons? What if I practiced my lessons with the specific goal of being able to play pieces that I loved (or even simplified versions)?
All of that said, let me now try arguing the opposite. MIT professor Mitch Resnick, who I used to work for, writes in his book Lifelong Kindergarten about a grad student of his, Jaleesa Trapp. In an interview he prints, she talks about her road to becoming a computer programmer, someone comfortable using computers for her own creative purposes. She tells of a charismatic teacher who essentially ordered her to join the students doing coding, over Jaleesa’s protests. For years prior, she had not identified as someone interested in computers; the intention of becoming capable with them didn’t originate in her. But she does identify that way now, and is (as of 2022) getting her PhD at MIT.
Here’s my question for Postman and Weingartner, champions of student agency: would they like to go back and time and stop this, and allow Jaleesa to instead chat with friends, and accept, indefinitely, that her identity excluded computer programming?
It’s easy to call for a third option: first convince a student that a subject is worth learning, and only then invite them to learn it. But I fear that this will favor the already privileged, and disfavor the underprivileged. So many of the things that I—an upper middle class, cis, straight, White male child—got into were because of older role models who pursued them right in front of me. Poverty and generations of oppression have a way of denying a child those role models. And then, where is the authentic intention supposed to originate?
For Postman and Weingartner and me, culture and privilege worked invisibly to turn us on to pursuits that led us to further power and capability. But for that access to be made universal, the invisible must be made visible; it must be planned, it must be brought forward; it must be owned.
I do find some of their proposals compelling. They advocate that teachers begin any topic by using generative questions, which draw on students’ existing knowledge, interests, and opinions.
And some of their examples really are generative, such as, what makes a good friend? Others, however, are not, and seem much more like the types of essay questions that are typical in social studies classes. For example, drawing on current events (at the time of writing, in the late 1960s), they ask about urban rioting and Native American rebellions, and ask students:
How do we know if this is one of man’s deepest needs expressing itself (‘the language of the unheard,’ Dr. King called it), or if it is a mindless aberration precipitated by summer heat and boredom?
They ask similarly about the Vietnam War:
Is this done truly in the cause of freedom — ours are someone else’s — or is it a mindless madness that is self-propelling?
Now, these could be productive questions, and are clearly fascinating to Postman and Weingartner. But are they fascinating to young people? Young people, after all, have an extraordinary ability to not line up with our expectations. I’ve seen a White teacher show her Black middle schoolers a Malcolm X speech, and the students spend the period staring at their desks in boredom. (I could almost hear her inwardly pleading, “But I’ve read Teaching as a Subversive Activity!”)
All of this raises the question: where does a sense of relevance come from, in learners? Postman and Weingartner seem to suggest that it can only be found in some subject matter; in this, they agree not only with many progressive educators, but also with the traditionalist cultural literacy/core knowledge folks. The active question for them is whether, for a given topic, it can be made to point back, specifically, to the students themselves. “As soon as students realize that their lessons are about their meanings,” they write, “then the entire psychological context of schools is different.” [Emphasis added.] I do love this, and want to see more of it. But if they think this is all that can feel relevant to kids, they are thinking too narrowly.
What if relevance instead is something that is drawn, by caring teachers (in person, or as captured in writing), between learners and subjects. Ancient history, or the Pythagorean theorem, or irregular Spanish verbs, can all be made relevant to most students by a good teacher. But—as we all know—that relevance cannot be assumed. The thing is, it also can’t be assumed about the Vietnam War, or about uprisings among the disaffected, or—to take a more recent example—about detecting bias in media. It can’t be assumed about hip-hop, or TikTok, or other existing interests. Basketball math, taught without passion and insight, will feel less relevant than abstract math taught well—in which case, you have not merely tapped into an interest; you have kindled a new one. The universe of potential interests that could engage students for a lifetime is much, much greater than the supposedly concrete interests they already walked through the door with.
Relevance should be thought of as something that is cultivated through relationship, through an ongoing process of centering and valuing students’ reflections and responses, and through explorations that start as much as possible—but not exclusively—with students’ questions and desires. Those desires can be concrete (I’m thinking of an example from educator Steven Levy’s excellent book Starting from Scratch, where students began an exploration because they were curious about the “Made in Taiwan” labels on their clothing). But—and here is where Teaching as a Subversive Activity is strongest—relevance can also emerge from fundamental questions about being human, such as defining right and wrong, identifying what would make someone their enemy, deciding who deserves punishment, or planning how to get better at the things they want to do.
Recommended.
100 Scientists Who Made History by Andrea Mills and Stella Caldwell
DK Publishing does these coffee-table books well. But here, the content doesn’t fit the scattered format in the way that, say, a book about space does.
When I’m flipping through a page about various planets in the solar system, I already know something about the basic structure of the information: there will be a few pages about Venus, a few about the moon, a few about comets. I might come with a question: “Could there be life somewhere else in the solar system?” and that question can carry me through exploring the pages.
But how do I relate to, say, a page of random facts about 17th century chemist Robert Boyle? I learn that “the Boyle lectures were started in 1682 to discuss the relationship between religion and science. They were revived in the 21st-century.” But there’s nowhere in my mind for this knowledge to land.
If instead the book were structured as a walk through the evolution of our understandings, telling the story of science, I’d be much more interested. Scientists in the past has so few precise tools; how did they develop such complex understandings of what was happening on a cellular or molecular level? Tell me a seemingly impossible problem Boyle spent years bumping up against, and how he broke through—that, I’d care about.
Not recommended.
Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success by G. Richard Shell
Conventional wisdom around career building. I found the episodic advice not especially actionable. There were a few exercises I did find useful: thinking about what you would do if you won the lottery and were already widely respected; ranking six varied capsule life stories by their “success”, in order to identify what you value most (you can rank them yourself here); and seeing if you can use the same phrase in both blanks in the sentence “The more I ＿, the more I like to ＿.” (This last one comes from a Julia Child quote; you can guess what she chose!)
Not recommended.
Ain’t No Makin’ It by Jay MacLeod
I can’t believe I never knew this book existed! A social researcher named Jay MacLeod conducted ethnographic research interviews for two decades with a small group of working-class and poor young men in my hometown of Cambridge, MA, from the 1980s through the 2000s. This book summarizes his findings, with tons of quotes and verrryyyy dated slang. MacLeod has a politically progressive viewpoint, and he hopes that by documenting the ways that children from the American underclass see their lives — often, as devoid of any desirable possible future — he can make the case that it is the boundaries of their class situation, not their choices, that bar them from social mobility as they become adults.
The interviews themselves are a mix of mundane and surprising. Many of the boys are fixated on trivialities, petty loyalties and grudges. The endless hours of these conversations are a slog, and I confess to skipping a few dozen pages of complaints of the “man, some chicks just aren’t with it!” variety. But it’s fascinating to watch as the surface layer of performing for McLeod recedes, and the boys start trying to put language to their view of the world for McLeod to understand. Their voices were incredibly familiar to me from growing up in Cambridge; I was reminded often of guys I knew, whose lives similarly centered around short-term and street-level concerns. Several of them didn’t make it to 30. I miss being able to grow old and wise and boring with one such friend, in particular.
So I appreciate this research, even if the book is exhausting to read. What I didn’t appreciate were MacLeod’s interpretations of his research, which seemed more about his assumptions than about the actual people in front of him. I wondered at times if he missed the story.
For instance, in observing the complexity of these boys’ conversation, MacLeod cites sociologist Basil Bernstein’s work categorizing linguistic patterns in working-class vs. middle-class families. Bernstein categorizes speech patterns as either “restricted” (limited in complexity, with static meanings) or “elaborated” (complex, with frequent reference to the context of their meaning). MacLeod points to these patterns as one mechanism by which he sees class reproducing itself with the young men he’s studying.
So far, I agree. But MacLeod thinks these patterns only matter because they are used as entrance codes by gatekeepers. In his view, the problem is that schools privilege “elaborated” patterns over “restricted” ones, which means working-class children face bias:
The problem is not that lower class children are inferior in some way; the problem is that by the definitions and standards of the school, they consistently are evaluated as deficient. The assumptions of some mainstream sociologists that the problem must lie with the contestants, rather than with the judge, is simply unfounded.
I disagree. As I see it, these kids really are deficient. Are they inherently deficient? My god, no, absolutely not. They became deficient because they were robbed, by our society, of the enrichment and investment they deserve. They may be savvy in all sorts of ways that our schools don’t appreciate, and should. Adults should shift the way we look at kids like this. But this isn’t a problem that can be solved only by shifting the way that we look at them.
I see my own “elaborated” parenting speech as the result of an immense investment that my wealthy family was able to make in my cognitive development, and I would like to see poor children everywhere similarly invested in. This isn’t a matter of morality and virtue. It’s a matter of power, and money. My parents and the other “elaborated”-speaking adults who took care of me had academic degrees that were expensive and exclusive; their intellectual labor would fetch a high value on the market—far more value than a typical private school tuition—and I was the recipient of thousands of hours of this labor.
Many aspects of financial privilege are not just one cultural choice among many—to pretend otherwise does nothing to challenge our system’s malign neglect of poor kids.
At other points, I felt that MacLeod was falling for simple explanatory stories. McLeod references author Paul Willis’s book Learning to Labor, and blames patriarchy for the tendency of the young men Willis studied to reject mental labor and scholastic achievement as feminine, and therefore inferior. But “patriarchy” is not a static or insurmountable force, and its effects are complex, not fixed. For example, take law school and the legal profession. Not long ago, the great majority of law students were men, and most liberal observers would have, correctly, identified patriarchy at play in that fact. But wouldn’t that mean that this major form of scholastic achievement was male-coded, not female-coded? And in recent years, law schools have enrolled a majority-female student population. Has patriarchy reversed? Or, is male-dominant power part of a more twisty and unpredictable system of gender roles in our society?
My point is that McLeod treats these social conditions as though they are fixed, and immune to change—and yet, as he wrote, intrepid action by people was changing them. Why must these boys be mere objects of society’s existing codes? Why can’t they, too, be agents of change?
If we have evidence that a shift in gender assumptions (or the use of more linguistically complex language) might better support poor young men in becoming more successful, wealthy, powerful, and healthy, then let’s specifically endorse doing this!
Most mystifying is that many of MacLeod’s own subjects seem to be ahead of him in prescribing their own solutions for achieving power — but he is unable to listen. The young men he studies are in two self-organized groups, one mostly White and one mostly Black, and the two groups sound very different in their worldviews. In contrast to what progressives might expect of a study of the American underclass, he hears far more optimism and talk of opportunity and personal responsibility from the Black young men. Again and again, McLeod expresses surprise at this, calling it a “paradox”, “confounding”, and a “challenging puzzle to the sociologist”. MacLeod explains:
In low educational tracks and the recipients of poor grades, the brothers struggle in school. They blame themselves for their mediocre academic performances because they are unaware of the discriminatory influences of tracking, the schools’ partiality toward the cultural capital of the upper classes, the self-fulfilling consequences of teachers’ expectations, and other forms of class-based educational selection.
I’m not sure what combination of multi-generational theft, institutional racism, and personal responsibility combined to limit these kids. But I do think it’s notable that MacLeod dismisses their perspective entirely as foolish. But what if these kids aren’t mere dupes? What if they are communicating that they are eager to invest in themselves, but don’t know how? What if they really do prefer to focus on making the most of what they have, rather than seeing themselves primarily through a “deficit” lens? McLeod laments their talk of achievement as indicating that they have “swallowed the achievement ideology”. But given the injustice of their disadvantages, is this really a bad thing? I found myself worrying that MacLeod would rather see kids like these as hopeless than help them seize the opportunities they do have. He never entertains the idea that these boys’ understanding could have value—let alone that it might be a testament to the flexibility and importance of their culture. If the Black adults and children in this community have established shared understandings and expectations of their agency and access to power, isn’t it they who deserve the credit?
What most distinguishes the prospects for a working-class child from those of a middle-class child? MacLeod sees differences only in treatment external to the child’s family and community, and refuses to see these kids as incapable of excellence; he derides any focus on problems with their actual abilities or behavior patterns as coming from an assumption that “lower class children are inferior”. But I think he’s got it the wrong way around. Lower class children aren’t inferior — and that is why it’s so important to acknowledge, with alarm, that they really are behind in terms of demonstrated intellectual ability, beyond what can be accounted for by the structural biases across their many years of school (as evidenced, for example, by the fact that this gap exists in kindergarten).
It takes nothing away from these kids, or their parents, to recognize that this deficit is real, and to see it as indicating that something massive needs to change in terms of the social investment we make in working-class children; on the contrary, it would be a profound act of classist and racist prejudice to assume that this is the best they can do, and that we merely need to shift our thinking to be satisfied with it.
At the core of this difference in perspective is the confusion many people have between claims of demonstrated intellectual ability and inherent intellectual ability. Of course, inherent intellectual ability does exist, to some extent; but even Kathryn Paige Harden, author of The Genetic Lottery, estimates the effect of an individual’s genes on their scholastic achievement at only 17%. The overwhelming bulk of the difference in demonstrated intellectual ability between groups of students must come in environmental differences — some amount of bias, certainly, but also a difference in the investment our society makes in their development, health, and growth, from a young age. I want to propose that we see this as effectively a form of wealth. Lower class children — and their families — simply lack the wealth that more advantaged families possess, in the form of both money and knowledge, both traditional “capital” and the compounded effects of intergenerational human capital.
And that is no coincidence. Lower class families have been stolen from—many quite literally — and their children have been under-invested in by our society, and in the case of immigrants, by other societies. Growing up, I had wealth that every one of MacLeod’s students didn’t, due to all sorts of oppression; some of that wealth came from slaveholding, some from imperialism, some from leeway from bankers that they wouldn’t give other people. Some came to me from my parents’ ability to pay for private preschool and well-educated babysitters. And much of my wealth came in the form of my parents’ knowledge of how to best invest in me long before that, using their own expensive private college educations and techniques their parents had passed to them. In kindergarten, I made friends whose parents assumed they were on the right track by simply sending their child to school; by that point, I had been invested in directly and indirectly with thousands of hours of expensive care, and already as familiar with the alphabet and with addition that these were as familiar to me as my own name. And of course, my ancestry has no complete violent break interrupting the passing of intergenerational caretaking knowledge, social connections, and tradecraft, as do so many families who are only a few generations away from the selling of children away from parents, kidnapping, systematic murder, and ethnic cleansing.
I acknowledge that there’s something uncomfortable here. I’m speaking in terms of privilege and wealth, but ultimately, I’m suggesting that my parents made me wealthy largely by doing a lot of talking to me and reading with me; there was plenty of money involved in getting our family to that point, but poor parents could do a lot of that same investment in their kids, if they only understood how. I think that part of the way poverty is sustained is that poor parents aren’t doing all that other parents could to foster inquiry and complex thinking in their kids. But achieving equity will require actually building the wealth of poor and working-class families, not merely having the right mindset as well-intentioned adults.
To some, it will sound like I’m blaming poor parents. But my parents weren’t morally superior to them; my parents were simply wealthier, in a way that empowered them to pass on wealth to me. Poor children need, and deserve, investment that they aren’t getting. Does it help them to insist, like McLeod, that the problem lies merely with the lens that the system applies when looking at their schoolwork? That they have all they need in terms of intellectual investment already, and if we just stopped trying to push their scholastic measures higher, they’d be fine? I don’t think so. That sounds, to me, like a self-serving excuse to abandon them. Why can’t we take the forms of intellectual investment that the wealthy provide their kids outside of school, and extend that investment to all families?
Not recommended.
The Confidence Game by Maria Konikova
I’ve enjoyed Maria Konikova’s frequent podcast appearances, so I was surprised what a waste of time this book was. It’s the worst kind of popular audience reporting on social science research: it conflates the breadth of human experience into sweeping statements, treating average tendencies on, say, the ability to spot deception as though the mean behavior is the whole story.
Konikova frequently implies that some understanding of social dynamics is well-established, when it relies instead on flimsy evidence. At one point, she argues that those who see the world as they wish it were are more successful than those who see the world accurately — on the basis of a single study that tracked a single swim team. This is really an astonishingly low amount of information to justify a statement about humanity in general.
I didn’t see myself represented in Konikova’s generalizations. Writing about our tendency to retrofit explanations to match our existing feelings, she writes, “This phone has amazing features, we’ll say — even if we haven’t actually evaluated any of them.” This made me laugh out loud; all I do is break down features using rubrics, to get past my mostly useless first impressions!
I suppose another way to look at this is that I do have the tendencies that Konikova is illustrating — I’m just actively trying to counteract them.
Not recommended.
Do It Scared by Ruth Soukup
A guide to overcoming being paralyzed by fear. It’s typical self-help: perfectly reasonable in its anecdotal descriptions, but vague in its prescriptions. Yes, I agree that by keeping my “why’s” top of mind, I can counteract my fear somewhat. I agree that by taking small risks, I can remind myself that failure is not the end of the world.
But that’s all there is here. What I wish for is a book that assumes the reader is already doing that sort of thing, with mixed success, but that they are still held back by fear, and looking to break through.
Not recommended.
Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
I’ve heard business school research derided as a meaningless circle jerk, and this book does nothing to dispel that.
The authors make a big deal of defining “transformational leadership” according to five dimensions defined by researchers Alannah Eileen Rafferty and Mark Griffin in their 2004 paper “Dimensions of transformational leadership: conceptual and empirical extensions”. According to this model, the five characteristics of a transformational leader are:
- vision: “The expression of an idealized picture of the future based around organizational values”;
- inspirational communication: “The expression of positive and encouraging messages about the organization, and statements that
build motivation and confidence”; - supportive leadership: “Expressing concern for followers and taking account of their individual needs”;
- intellectual stimulation: “Enhancing employees’ interest in, and awareness of problems, and increasing their ability to think
about problems in new ways”; and - personal recognition: “The provision of rewards such as praise and acknowledgement of effort for achievement of specified
goals”.
I think this list is precisely wrong. Note how little the agency of anyone else besides the leader figures in here; there is nothing about collaboration, nothing about the quality of communication, nothing about supporting those who point out problems, nearly nothing about decision-making. There is plenty about bestowing various forms of grace upon the staff below, but how would such a leader make good decisions?
Of course, it’s easy to take potshots at someone else’s framework. Here’s my attempt to list a transformational leader’s qualities, if they are centered around growing transformative capacity throughout an organization:
- direction > vision: “It’s vital that we have a healthy process by which we identify what to build next, and which makes us change if the direction is wrong”;
- constitution > inspiration: “You can have confidence that our stated values are real, because we provide real mechanisms to intervene when our action is out of line with them”;
- supportive action > supportive expression: “Rather than merely say encouraging things, we create institutional practices so that staff ideas can be implemented”;
- invitation > stimulation: “Unexpected or troubling ideas will be taken seriously, without regard to whose feathers they ruffle”; and
- quality decisions > recognition: “Important decisions need our best information, no matter who or where it comes from; what matters is the reasoning and the idea, which means we won’t do a lot of associating ideas with individuals”.
Now, I just made this list up; I’m not a researcher. Maybe these authors have a firm basis for their list, one grounded in research?
I went and read the original Rafferty and Griffin 2004 paper. Folks, they did absolutely no tracking of outcomes over time. None. There was nothing where they measured qualities, then saw what the effect was when people did, or didn’t, have those qualities.
They studied exactly one organization — a government agency. They gave employees a survey to fill out; some questions were intended to assess the leadership qualities of their managers (examples: “says things that make employees proud to be part of this organization.”, “commends me when I do a better than average job”, “sees that the interests of employees are given due consideration”), while others questions assessed what the authors call “outcomes” of this leadership (“this organization has a great deal of personal meaning for me”, “‘I seriously intend to seek a transfer to another job in the future.”) Then they note a correlation between these leadership criteria and the “outcomes” of this leadership, and conclude by theorizing that these leadership qualities cause these positive “outcomes”.
Do you see the problem here? If I told you that, in my great wisdom, I suspected that employees who say their managers make them proud to be part of the organization ALSO tended to say the organization is meaningful to them, I would hope you would respond with a shrug — not by hawking “Ben-formational leadership”.
Yes, making employees feel meaning and pride in their work is a thing! But nothing in this study tells either how to do it, or how valuable it is in comparison with various concrete things you could do — like, say, paying employees better, or including them in decision-making. And nothing relates to actual, well, “outcomes”.
Now, it does seem that Forsgren et al. are on the side of the angels in one respect: they deride what they call “servant leadership”, which focuses merely on employees’ “development and performance”, whereas transformational leadership “focus[es] on getting followers to identify with the organization and engage in support of organizational objectives.” But what does that have to do with transformation? They are suggesting that teams of employees who feel proud and recognized within the organization also perform better; they’re probably right. But if you’re an employee hoping for actual transformation, and your managers are reading books like this, I wouldn’t hold your breath.
Not recommended.
Children’s Books
Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley
A Southern gothic coming of age novel centered on a cynical teenager in a small Arkansas town, and a sequence of unlikely events that propels him to take control of his life.
The beauty in this book comes from the protagonist’s observant voice. In John Corey Whaley’s narration, clichés of small-town American life are used to spark profound reflections about people’s lives and their days. Whaley finds poetic resonance within idle banter, with voices that rang true to me of Southern United States culture, and its humor:
As I was waiting in line for corn dog number two, a small boy ran by me with a stick horse between his legs, shouting, “Ride ’em, cowboy!” I laughed. “When I was a kid, I made many a mile on stick horses,” the man behind me said in my general direction.
“Is that right?” I asked, turning slightly around.
“Yep. Till I got a real one, and then it just wasn’t the same,” he said with a laugh, elbowing me in the shoulder.
There is a B-plot, centered around Christian missionary work and Biblical study, which I found less convincing. Whaley is exploring the ways people use religious grandiosity to hide from their regrets and pain. This is a rich vein to mine, but I found this portrait a bit thin.
Most importantly, my 10 year old really liked it — it was her favorite book among half a dozen that she read this year.
Highly recommended.
My Papi Has a Motorcycle by Isabel Quintero and Zeke Peña
A slice of life picture book that recounts the author’s memories of growing up in the largely Latino city of Corona, California.
There’s no dramatic question driving this as a story; what drives it instead is a pervasive sense of love, safety, and joy that infuses every page. The protagonist loves spending time with her father; she loves her city and its characters; she loves her community’s past, and loves its future.
Peña’s masterful art perfectly captures the texture of this world, from its architecture to the dogs running in the street to the wind rippling through the protagonist’s hair. With a light touch, he plays with layout, setting the characters in multiple temporal places within a scene; placing imagined elements alongside real ones; and finding endless ways to illustrate movement and speed.
There’s something timeless here, and yet at the same time incredibly specific to one place and time.
Highly recommended.
My Weird School #1: Miss Daisy is Crazy by Dan Gutman and Jim Paillot
A chapter book at about a 2nd grade reading level, in the irreverent vein of Captain Underpants and Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Entertaining, if a bit small-minded; there’s a baseline assumption that kids hate school and reading, which is played for laughs. The central conceit is that the teacher pretends that she doesn’t know any math or vocabulary, which defuses the students’ oppositional attitude to school and drives them to teach what they know to her.
Not recommended.
Press Start: Game Over, Super Rabbit Boy! By Thomas Flintham
An early reader chapter book targeted to kids who like video games. Clearly influenced by the Captain Underpants and Dogman series of books, but without their irreverence or inventiveness.
When Super Rabbit Boy dies in his video game and the child playing the game restarts the level, Super Rabbit Boy is confused to find himself back in the same place again, seemingly able to anticipate the movements of enemies. This is a great premise, in the spirit of Pixar’s scenarios or Wreck-It Ralph. But that’s it — this setup is never developed further.
There’s a point where the child playing the game gets frustrated at dying at the same place over and over. This leads to the brilliant plot twist that… eventually he beats the level. Again, that’s it. No lesson learned, no insight, no communication with other people required.
Not recommended.
Okay. So, this got me thinking. What would be a better version of this book?
I call this “Sasha Dies on Level 6”:
Sasha Dies on Level 6 by Ben Wheeler (not a real book!)
Our protagonist, Sasha, keeps dying on level 6. A smug older kid, Rob, makes the offhand comment that everyone can beat that level, you can’t call yourself a gamer if you can’t beat it… but our hero tries and fails again and again, sinking deeper into shame.
Finally, Sasha mentions to a friend that she hates that game. The friend says “Oh, but you and I had so much fun playing it the other day! We kept dying on level 6!” Sasha is confused. “Wait, why is that awesome? …I don’t like being bad at video games.”
You can see where I’m going with this. Do you like hard things and easy things the same? In different ways? Shouldn’t things be easy for you, if you’re good? Does success mean that you run out of challenges? If you’re not as good as someone else, how does that feel? Who gets to decide who qualifies as “a gamer”? And anyway, what the fuck does Rob know that you don’t? There’s like a million video games…. Rob hasn’t played 99% of them. You haven’t played 99% either. What makes him the expert?
Then Sasha goes home, play the game, and dies on level 6. Her mom asks, “What are you doing?” And Sasha calls back, “Dying on my favorite level!”
I recommend that someone write this book.
Magic Tree House Fact Tracker: Space by Will and Mary Pope Osborne
A decent introduction to space overall, but it gets some major things wrong.
Why must histories for kids leave out all of the grisly details? This isn’t a picture book for toddlers — it’s aimed at ages 7–10. They mention Galileo; but why omit that Galileo was sentenced to death for his heresy? Why omit that the sun will eventually swell up and consume Mercury, Venus, and Earth? Why omit that the Soviet Union sacrificed the dog Laika, the first mammal in space? Why omit that several astronauts saw dancing fairy lights in space? Why omit the Challenger and Columbia disasters? Why omit the Feynman report on the fatal tendency for scientists with inconvenient warnings to be told to shut up?
I guarantee that not only can 7–10 year olds understand this sort of stuff, they are legitimately interested in it. It’s almost as if we’re afraid that kids will be too interested in the world, and in history.
And what about the questions we have, those that are the most intriguing? Is it wrong for individuals to buy and sell moon rocks? Should we have planted an American flag on the moon, or a flag of Earth, or something else? Why did humans visit the moon, and then stop visiting for 50 years? Who should space belong to? How much man-made space debris falls to earth, and could it hurt someone? Should we look for alien life, or would finding it mean one of us wouldn’t survive the encounter? Could stars like the sun, which contain mind-boggling complexity, be in some sense alive?
These are questions we don’t know the answer to! Let’s enlist kids in answering them.
Not recommended.
Girls Who Code series: How to Code a Sandcastle, and How to Code a Roller Coaster
Two picture books in a sort of updated Eric Carle style, which take familiar activities and reinterpret them as algorithms. I appreciate the effort at an organic and familiar introduction to coding concepts, but the computer science ideas aren’t well integrated into the scenarios.
No one has gotten this right yet. What would a better attempt look like?
Not recommended, but we should keep trying!
Comics
Discipline by Dash Shaw
A lightly fictionalized story of a Quaker community from which a young man departs to enlist in the Union army during the Civil War, with text drawn from archival letters.
Dash Shaw has always played with form in his graphic storytelling; each of his books reworks the comics medium to suit his story, pushing images and text into unfamiliar layouts and juxtapositions. In Discipline, he takes this formal exploration further than ever.
I can’t recommend this book as an accessible read, though there’s nothing particularly difficult in it. In parts of this book I was on the verge of tears, and I wasn’t sure if it was because of the pain of the characters themselves, or the yearning I feel when I experience the boundaries of art pushed wider and deeper. Something is birthed in this book’s form: an expansion of the vocabulary of comics itself.
Highest recommendation.
Everything is Beautiful, and I’m Not Afraid by Yao Xiao
A collection from the webcomic Baopu. The serial format means there isn’t a sustained narrative, but the author frequently touches on her relationship with her mother, her acceptance of herself, her yearning for connection and love, her gender conformity and non-conformity, and the pain of being rejected in all sorts of racist, phobic and legal ways.
It’s incredibly sincere stuff, which can be hard for me; I had to get over my urge for more of a layer of cool around the yearning, fewer direct references and more oblique ones. But I did get over it, and loved the book’s clamorous call for change.
Highly recommended.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Ultimate Collection vol. 3
The issues collected here come from the early years of the explosive popularity of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a time when its creators were overwhelmed and brought in collaborators to take over whole issues. That made for a tremendous diversity of visual styles and story formats, which has been a hallmark of TMNT storytelling ever since.
Here, you can contrast original creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s gritty homegrown style with that of more polished artists, and watch Eastman and Laird’s art mature in real time. The volume’s highlight is the three-issue story “Return to New York”, beloved for its extended action sequences. Eastman pushed himself to improve his visual plotting for this arc, and his layouts coherently convey each character’s relative position and movement, providing a specificity that rewards attention.
Highly recommended.
The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor
A story about the frontier experience of Chinese-Americans in 19th century California, and a story about the human needs for hope and faith that cause people to create myths.
The art and dialogue are generally simple, but every now and then there is a profound moment that crystallizes the way that racism inserts itself into relationships, the ways that White privilege lead to fickle allyship, or the ways that traditions evolve when adopted by new practitioners.
At the center of the book is the titular myth, made up by the protagonist and clearly under the influence of America’s Paul Bunyan myth. In imagining her own hero, she mixes ancestral influences with brand new ones from her new, young nation; in this American mishmash there is no pure ownership of tradition, no firm lines that make an element of culture belong entirely to one person and not at all to another.
I’ve never been a fan of the trope in comics and television where characters hallucinate imagined characters or remembered friends as though they are completely real. But that gimmick aside, the mythmaking here is rooted in the characters’ necessity, and that basis is effective and moving. The plot culminates in a crisis during which the characters yearn for hope, and they immediately cry out for the new myths to be told to them.
A beautiful ode to the imagination work that is necessary to build community and identity, and the place of Chinese-American imagination in this country’s work.
Highly recommended.
Mister Miracle by Tom King and Mitch Gerads
A postmodern take on the New Gods, a superhero universe that has (awkwardly) existed within the DC Comics universe since Jack Kirby created it in the 1970s.
I think it’s generally believed that New Gods failed to sell well over time because it was too divorced from human existence; Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman all make for interesting characters because of the tensions between their extraordinary heroism and their human relationships, but the New Gods lived on alien planets, fighting mythical wars against each other for eternity. What are the stakes?
Tom King takes the idea of superheroes’ human/superhuman tension and wrenches the two sides impossibly far apart, making each a non sequitur that clashes with the other. In his telling, the steady flow of dirty diapers and marital bickering do not stop just because there is a war of deistic genocide underway.
This ironic contrast would get old if it were King’s only trick, but he uses them instead as adornment for what is really a traditional story of a married couple struggling to hold onto joy and a sense of purpose as their marriage ages.
There are some balls that King drops along the way. There’s a several-issue arc that digs into Mister Miracle’s growing rivalry with his brother Orion; but this is resolved by beating people up, a resolution which does nothing to develop, or resolve, the character relationship.
An unusual comic, sometimes disorienting, always intriguing.
Highly recommended.
Don’t Go Without Me by Rosemary Valero O’Connell
A few years back I read Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, a graphic novel about a manipulative young woman and her jilted girlfriend’s struggle to stand up to her. The book was a mixed bag, but the art was beautiful and brilliant, with small experiments with the comics form sprinkled amidst a story that was comparatively grounded.
The artist was Rosemary Valero O’Connell, who both wrote and drew this book, a triptych of stories that touch, in very different ways, on memories of love and searches for love. Each story is very different in form, and each is strengthened by its connection to the others. The whole is enigmatic in the best way: relatable and not inscrutable, but also disorienting and often visually overwhelming.
From the consistently excellent independent comics publisher Shortbox, which publishes many complete, standalone volumes at this 30–40 page length. I love this size; it’s longer than a typical comic book, long enough to seem like a complete work, but short enough to read all at once. I find myself reading most of these at least twice over the space of a few months, which makes for a different sort of intimacy with a book than reading more pages, once, and never again.
Highly recommended.
Monsters by Barry Windsor-Smith
Barry Windsor-Smith is one of my favorite comics artists and writers. His classic issues of Marvel comics — the standalone stories Iron Man #232, Uncanny X-Men #s 186 and 198, are all-time favorites of mine.
There have been some common themes to “BWS” stories, whether written by him or by collaborators like comics legend Chris Claremont. One theme is the circular structure of fate, where causality can wrap around from the future to the past. Another is the irrepressible nature of human identity in the face of institutional evil, and the ability for humanistic values to transcend oppressive systems. A third is the ability for dreams to be more real than physical reality.
These themes come together in Monsters, which Windsor-Smith spent nearly a decade writing and drawing. The result is a haunting, disturbing, and beautiful book that draws directly on his work for Marvel, and investigates it again.
The exploration of body horror and institutional evil are clearly inspired by the work Windsor-Smith did in his Weapon X, a telling of the origin of Wolverine that beguiled readers with its circular form. Also present in both Monsters and Weapon X is the updating of the Frankenstein myth.
In another thematic connection to his past work, the power of death to be transformational— to be, potentially, a good thing — echoes his X-Men stories in which the weather superhero Storm explores suicide. This was a controversial direction to take a popular series sold in supermarket checkout lanes, and Windsor-Smith essentially told this story twice, revisiting it with his own slightly altered version of the character in his book-length masterpiece Adastra in Africa.
The result, Monsters, is a breathtaking masterwork, but a flawed one. There are transcendent themes and sequences, and several unforgettable characters and scenarios.
The portrait of the family at the center is finely drawn, with Windsor-Smith returning to key scenes multiple times and bringing them to life in varied ways each time. But several characters are never fleshed out beyond a surface level. We get frustratingly little time with one of the titular monsters, and never learn what he is actually capable of.
I also found Windsor-Smith’s panels hard to scan visually, which was a surprise. Comics have long-established visual vocabularies of how placement is supposed to translate to reading order. You can see this in, say, comics pioneer Will Eisner’s work. Notice how he is careful to guide the reader’s eye from the top-left to the bottom-right; even the positions of the same characters moves downward, leaving no ambiguity about the order of events or speech:
In contrast, here is a sequence from Monsters that I found hard to scan:
Smith is expecting you to follow the balloons as the bleed from the bottom of the first panel, which form a connected cluster, and only then to move your eye upward to the bubbles at the top-right.
I don’t mean to nitpick; as you can see, this art is truly phenomenal; note the mixture of different techniques, as Windsor-Smith seamlessly integrates abstract background shapes, precise foreground crosshatching, and white ink overlay in the hair. That’s why it’s so jarring to have the immersive reading experience interrupted so frequently by layout.
All of that said, I cried at the end.
Highly recommended.
Sara by Garth Ennis
A neat and satisfying war story, with art that conveys the discomforts and visceral terrors of war. The artist’s faces, in particular, are superb; the lead character Sara’s hypnotic eyes, fixed on the horizon, help make her an unforgettable character.
I did think there were some mistakes. For someone born into Soviet communism, Sara’s voice reads to me as too modern, too free of the lens of Soviet thinking. I also found the action hard to track at times.
But the attention to detail, and the portrait of the women at the center of the story, are tremendous. There’s something unforgettable in Sarah’s dedication—dedication which both does, and doesn’t, make sense. Of course she would use her violent expertise to protect her immediate unit; but she makes clear that she takes no pride in killing and dying for her oppressive government. In that contradiction, Ennis has produced a character scenario that maps directly to the inscrutable moral ground of war, with its disorientation of meaning and purpose. Sarah is her own rock, her own center of gravity; her brilliance with a sniper rifle has its own power, one whose meaning is ultimately divorced from any political ends.
From the independent publisher TKO Studios, which is doing impressive work!
Highly recommended.
Naomi: Season One by Brian Michael Bendis and David F. Walker
Superhero comics have been incorporating more people of color and queer characters over the last decade or so, in a welcome trend that was announced by Brian Michael Bendis’s new Spider-Man, Miles Morales, in 2011. A few other characters who have found sustained success, but many have been junior versions of existing characters, such as new Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan, and Iron Man suit inventor Riri Williams AKA Ironheart.
Naomi is a major new DC comics character, also created by Bendis, and her origin stands alone. Bendis worked for years on the character, and has written that when he almost died of a staph infection in 2017, he lay in bed thinking he had to pull through so he could finish bringing Naomi into the world.
Bendis felt an urgency with this comic that I felt from the first issue. Bendis is careful to show that before Naomi became a hero, she was already special: curious, inquisitive, values-driven. Bendis’s dialogue is fun as ever, and his patented grid-of-characters-all-answering-the-same-question is wonderful in the hands of artist David Walker.
Highly recommended.
Witch Boy books 1 and 3 (“Midwinter Witch”) by Emily Ostertag
This graphic novel series, in the 5.5x8" format popularized by Raina Telgemeier’s blockbuster Smile series, follows an adolescent boy in a wizard/witch community who goes against the grain.
Only boys may learn shapeshifting, and only girls can become witches; but Aster is drawn to witch magic, to the shock of those around him. It’s a brilliant premise for an allegory about not only trans identity, but transgressive identity and exploration more broadly, and Emily Ostertag allows the social world around Aster to respond in a variety of ways that illustrate the power of a welcoming invitation to an outsider, and the crucial perspective institutions can gain from those who have entered from an unusual direction.
Ostertag’s pages are clean and straightforward, with a cartoonish line drawn over layouts that are carefully composed and detail-rich. Her images might seem at first glance intended for especially young readers, and I suspect my middle-school kids didn’t take to these books for that reason.
But look at how palpable the scene below is — how clear it is that the shadows fall unevenly over the hanging mugs, how Aster is leaning lightly on the fridge, how the paper bag is made of thick, tough paper, how Juniper is in the middle of specific work that she is focused on. Look at the clues that Aster is relaxed, but Juniper is a bit stressed. Look how different the level of detail is at the center of the frame than at the edge. Everything has been pitched for maximum legibility — not just every line, but the places where the lines fall short and don’t connect.
The Midwinter Witch is the third book in the series. It continues to gently expand the books’ scope, but I wish Ostertag were fleshing out this fictional world’s rules and history more.
Book 1: highly recommended; book 3: recommended.
Homunculus by Joe Sparrow
A story of raising an AI like a child, told with sweetness, a memorable visual style, and creative use of comics’s unique ability to jump in time from panel to panel. Joe Sparrow has said he loves “little stories happening on the periphery of a bigger world”, and part of the fun here is what you surmise from the clues Sparrow metes out through the AI’s narrow view of the world.
Published by Shortbox.
Highly recommended.
Sentient by Jeff Lemire
A small and simple story of space and artificial intelligence, told with heart. It suffers from the AI storytelling trope where the AI turns out to be humanlike after all; Lemire is stuck, along with basically every other sci-fi storyteller, ascribing human qualities to AI in ways that don’t hold up to scrutiny. For example, the AI’s self-doubt is shown through stuttering, verbal pauses, and self-corrections, and its awareness must be transferred entirely from one physical location at a time to another. But if you can look past those quibbles, the story’s close-up focus on the human characters is exquisite, as they struggle through their overwhelming pain to assume leadership and build community. The art complements the tone perfectly, and is done justice by the oversized book format.
Published by TKO Studios.
Highly recommended.
Black Hammer vols. 1–3 by Jeff Lemire, Dean Ormston, and Dave Stewart
Jeff Lemire’s Black Hammer overlaps conceptually with the brilliant Watchmen HBO series. It’s an enjoyable remixing of decades of comics characters from superhero comics, and starts with an intriguing mystery.
There are dozens of little references to past artists, characters and story lines, both well-known and obscure. Part of the fun is the sense of inside baseball, like a character who clearly recapitulates Superman’s (best-forgotten) episode as an urban vigilante called “Gangbuster” in the 80s.
That said, there are so many godlike powers that character decisions have few consequences, and the wackiness of the tone in some sequences clashes with the pathos of others. But I did feel a thrill at the end of the second volume, anticipating the final page and its payoff.
Vols 1–2: recommended. Vol 3: not recommended.
She Would Feel the Same by Emma Hunsinger
A story about a breakup, and the lingering questions it leaves behind.
Full of life, from the dialogue to the layouts to the fast-moving pen. A great example of how a small personal story, told with introspection and a light touch, can feel rich and meaty.
Published by Shortbox.
Recommended.
Faith, vol. 1 by Jody Houser, Francis Portela, and Marguerite Sauvage
Faith, A.K.A. “Zephyr”, is one of my favorite characters from the wonderful, short-lived Valiant Comics of the early 90s. She was the first character I ever encountered who was, herself, a fan of comics and comics culture, and that identity is leaned into heavily in this revival. But I wish there were more done with the scenario; none of the situations have especially lasting consequences. Still, it’s a fun trip, with spirit, and a character who brings much needed body diversity into comics heroism.
Recommended.
Daredevil Vol. 1 by Mark Waid, Paolo Manuel Rivera, and Marcos Martin
A fun, rollicking take on Daredevil, in contrast to the self-flagellating Catholic guilt of takes like Kevin Smith’s. Waid has said that he wanted to lean into the “man without fear” catchphrase, and challenged himself in each issue to make Daredevil do something that others wouldn’t dare. Some of these experiments are compelling, especially when Waid gives Daredevil a bit of flirtatious swagger.
Recommended.
Daredevil Vol. 2: No Devils, Only God by Chip Zdarsky and Lalit Kumar Sharma
…And here, seven years after the Mark Waid run above, is the more brooding Daredevil, the one who is compelled to punish himself even harder than he punishes others. Interestingly, in contrast to the first volume by Zdarsky, this one features a more prominent role for romance. It gets more deeply into political and police corruption and organized crime, and though the plot and scene writing are a bit circuitous and wordy, Zdarsky finds lots of clever touches.
Recommended.
Nemo by Alan Moore
Set in Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman fictional world, where all European fantasy and horror fiction from before 1900 is simultaneously real.
Moore is one of my favorite writers, but in recent years his writing has lost urgency and curiosity. He still sees possibilities few others can, but there isn’t a shred of soul on the page, no sign that anything these characters are experiencing brings him raw pain or joy.
Nemo follows the Nautilus submarine of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with a crew of other LXG regulars, in a caper through a fantastical Antarctica. But the grandiosity and action feel empty. I’d so much rather Moore wrote about how these characters get up in the morning, what they regret late at night, or how differently they imagined their adulthood when they were younger.
What if a younger Alan Moore had been handed this writing assignment, long before all the lawsuits he brought and fielded, and the long list of professional grievances he has nursed? That’s a question to hold on to, for myself.
Not recommended.
Food Baby by Luchie
Cute style, but I didn’t really understand the scope of this book. There are too few recipes for it to be a useful reference, and the recipes are an awkward blend of universal and peculiar-to-her preferences, including hard to find spices. The instructions are sometimes confusing, and unnecessarily complicated.
This and Temple (next review) are some of the few Shortbox books I haven’t liked.
Not recommended.
Temple by Jack T. Cole
For fantasy stories to work, they need an aspect of awe, balanced with relatable characters to bring the magical and miraculous onto the personal level. There have been some successful attempts to dive only into the awe side of things; the video games ICO and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild come to mind. But these work because in their minimal and wordless storytelling, they make precise choices about their few story beats so that they reverberate with meaning.
Temple, on the other hand, seems like a prelude to a story, but not really a story itself. Fantastic things happen, but they have no consequences on character terms.
Not recommended.
Immortal Hulk, Vol. 5: Breaker of Worlds by Al Ewing, Joe Bennett, Ruy José
Immortal Hulk is a wildly popular comic with a brilliant premise: it reconsiders the Hulk’s essential invincibility through the lens of the horror genre. Being essentially unkillable is a common quality of many superheroes—but if you think about what that might mean for surviving an exploding bomb or being crushed under a mountain, the consequences are grotesque.
Here, the premise is put to good use in a few scenes, but much else feels routine, or ponderous. Everyone calls the Hulk a cosmic force of destruction, but the story needed more beats that actually turn on this.
Not recommended.
