My 2024 marathon of books
I read more books in 2024 than in any other year of my life—over 200 of them. I made a study of picture books in particular, mapping their pace, learning what makes certain ones memorable and others drag. I’d like to write a picture book of my own; and besides, I just love picture books as a medium. Once I started telling people what I was doing, their recommendations flowed like a spring of fresh water! It seems that everyone has a picture book, or several, that they hold dear.
Friends who told me their favorites: thank you, and please accept my apologies if I missed the point of a book you loved! Every reading of a book creates a new “text”, in that moment, with that reader. Sometimes it’s the reader who needs to change to make a more effective text, not the book.
I also read more poetry than in a typical year. I have always felt myself to be outside of poetry, assuming it was written for someone else. I often feel not sure that poetry wants me. But the poetry books I read this year made me feel, more than ever, that poetry is mine, and ours, and for the people—that poetry is our birthright. Every one of us deserves the true chance to love poetry. When our young students love poetry, and feel invited to write it regularly, I think our education system will have succeeded.
The veteran children’s book writer Pat Zietlow Miller has said that to become a picture book writer, she had to read 1000 picture books. I suspect my cross to bear is not the difficulty of matching her, but rather to push myself to write—precisely, to write finished drafts that I actually show others—rather than merely to read so as to prepare to write.
Greatest of thanks to the invaluable Minuteman Library Network of Greater Boston, and all of the hundreds of library workers who make it work.
What “recommended” means
My recommendations are not judgments of a book’s worth. They’re simply the confidence with which I, based on my brief, personal experience with them, would expect that someone else would have a rich experience reading it. I know that my “recommended” level isn’t as high as “highest recommendation” or “highly recommended”, but I really do mean it—when I say “recommended”, I would buy someone that book as a gift.
A note about format
This year, I tried to read multiple books by several authors and illustrators. I’ll start by responding to their work, then move on to broader categories.
Contents
- Books by:
• Katie Yamasaki
• Ian Lendler
• Carson Ellis
• Christian Robinson
• Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen
• Carole Boston Weatherford
• Holly Thompson
• Becky Chambers
• Dan Santat
• Peter H. Reynolds - Poetry books
- Children’s fiction books
- Children’s nonfiction books
- Fiction books
- Comics
- Nonfiction books
The books I recommend most highly from this year
picture books:
- Place Hand Here by Katie Yamasaki
- Everything Naomi Loved by Katie Yamasaki and Ian Lendler
- Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson
- Mama’s Nightingale by Edwidge Danticat and Leslie Smith
- Press Here by Hervé Tullet
- The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak
- Olive All at Once by Mariam Gates and Alison Hawkins
poetry books:
- The Language Inside by Holly Thompson
- Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischmann and Eric Beddows
- Cast Away: Poems for our time by Naomi Shihab Nye
fiction books:
- The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers book 3) by Becky Chambers
- The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers book 4) by Becky Chambers
comics:
- A First Time for Everything by Dan Santat
nonfiction books:
- An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
- The First Dinosaur: How Science Solved the Greatest Mystery on Earth by Ian Lendler
Past years’ lists
See my writeups from 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.
Books by Katie Yamasaki
Katie Yamasaki is a friend of mine, but before this year I’d only read one of her books, the wonderful Fish for Jimmy. I’m delighted to find that her other books are also so wonderful. They all mix her unique painting style with her sense of social justice, her attention to the inner lives of children, and her belief in the their creative imagination.
Yamasaki’s layouts integrate realistic representational elements and elements that are impressionistic, magical or symbolic. The conceptual connections she draws between these on the page are subtle and powerful, without feeling heavy-handed; the focus is always on people and their imaginative experiences.
Social justice is a theme of many of her stories, and you can sense it as a purpose that drove Yamasaki to create these books. Again, she approaches this from a humanistic direction, building understandings from the bottom-up. She starts with people’s experiences, their love, their work to connect and to find meaning. She presents unjust aspects of the world, but allows the reader to find their own way to appreciating those injustices, rather than instructing them directly.
All of her books truly cultivate the humanity of the reader.
Place Hand Here by Katie Yamasaki
Place Hand Here was inspired by a letter between an imprisoned parent and their child, where the parent included an outline of their hand for their child to touch, to feel connected to each other. It also draws on Yamasaki’s experience as a muralist. Here, the hand outline is painted on a wall, and various people in the urban neighborhood around the mural visit it, each placing their hand there to feel in contact with other people and places and times.
There’s a moment here, a page spread with no words, that I found deeply moving. This is a book that could make a reader rush to make art, and that grows our creative imaginations.
Highest recommendation.
Dad Bakes by Katie Yamasaki
A story about a formerly incarcerated dad which foregrounds his dedication as a father. He begins his day by rising early to do a shift at a bakery that employs formerly incarcerated people. Then he comes home, gets the rest of his sleep, and then bakes again, this time with his daughter.
It’s playful and intimate, simple but with rich visual details in Yamasaki’s gorgeous art. The text is brief and lets the images conjure these characters’ world. This is more a slice of life than a story, one that holds up a vision of personal value based on something accessible to anyone: spending time together.
Highly recommended.
When the Cousins Came by Katie Yamasaki
Light and sweet, exploring the ways that jealousy and status among children mix with intimacy and connection. This is a mix I’ve experienced so many times, as a child and since. It ends with a hand-written note by the characters—a lovely touch. But the real pleasure here is how each page is so different, each layout unique; and how Yamasaki understands that joy, longing, inclusion and heartache blend together in unpredictable rhythms.
Highly recommended.
Shapes, Lines and Light by Katie Yamasaki
A picture book biography of Yamasaki’s grandfather, architect Minoru Yamasaki, best known for two designs that entered history with painful associations: the World Trade Center twin towers, and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project.
Telling the whole biography of a creative person in picture book form is difficult, but Yamasaki pulls it off. She takes a broad view of Minoru’s whole life and work, weaving images of his late-career designs into pages showing his youthful inspirations. I always want to dig in to the nitty gritty process details of famous work, and I would have appreciated more focus on the trade-offs he made with his designs—his path involved decisions, not just destiny. Katie closes the book by introducing herself into the story and reflecting profoundly on her own complicated relationship with Minoru’s legacy.
I’m so glad that this unique, personal book exists. And, I’m curious to know how readers are connecting with it. Who is it for, in the eyes of the publisher? Do they imagine it primarily being read in an educational setting? For pleasure? Is it primarily appealing because of Katie’s lens on her grandfather, or as a book about architecture, or as a generally inspiring book about a creative career?
Recommended.
Books by Ian Lendler
First, let me start with a book that Yamasaki and Lendler collaborated on. What a superteam! This is also how I learned about Lendler, whose interests overlap heavily with mine.
Everything Naomi Loved by Katie Yamasaki and Ian Lendler
A picture book about gentrification, a topic it would seem impossible to build a picture book around. And yet, Yamasaki and Lendler find ways to be optimistic and inspiring, while not shying away from the pain of displacement. They avoid abstractions or policy-speak, and keep the focus on the characters themselves. Another book might have presented gentrification as nothing but a litany of tragedies; but Yamasaki and Lendler find ways to present hope, without minimizing the pain.
Throughout, Yamasaki makes subtle use of non-realistic elements. These make organic sense, whether they show Naomi in multiple locations within one scene, or blur the edges between in-world artwork and ex-world representations of sound. Yamasaki’s expressionistic visual touches invite the reader’s imagination and creative interpretation, while always serving the story.
The text here is simple and unadorned, allowing meaning to be found in Yamasaki’s depictions of the generosity and creativity of her characters. These characters, themselves, make art out of loss, which allows them to enshrine memories, provide continuity, express resistance, and assert their community’s value.
Each time I read this, I cry at the end.
Highest recommendation.
The First Dinosaur: How Science Solved the Greatest Mystery on Earth by Ian Lendler
I’ve been looking for a book like this ever since I was a young dinosaur obsessive with a dozen of the British Museum’s plastic scale models. Lender tells the story of how the world came to understand that dinosaurs existed, in all of its fits and starts. He doesn’t need to do anything fancy to convey what is wonderful about this story, or to make it relatable to young readers; he simply steps away from all we know now, and imagines how things looked and felt at the time. That includes all sorts of times evidence didn’t fit people’s theories, and times they were absolutely certain, but proven wrong.
Throughout, Lendler has a ear for story and mystery. Addressing why the first dinosaur tooth discovered was believed to be a fish tooth, he invites the reader to ponder the question—which persisted for millennia—of why so many fish teeth, fish skeletons and seashells were found in places high above the sea:
Fossilized turtle shells were also found in the Stonesfield quarry. In fact, fish skeletons and fossilized seashells were being found lodged in rocks all over the world. Priests in France noticed seashells inside the stone blocks used to make their cathedrals. The pope puzzled over seashells buried in the hills of Vatican City. There were seashells under the dry, desert sand of Egypt.
These fossilized sea creatures weren’t just found underground. They were on top of mountains as well. The Rocky Mountains of North America are full of seashells. One seventeenth-century explorer traveled to South America in search of gold. After weeks of hiking up the Andes Mountains, he finally reached the peak, where he dug into the ground and found … seashells. He was 13,000 feet above sea level!
This, of course, brings to mind a very simple, but very important, question:
How the heck did sea creatures get on top of a mountain?
Around the world, scientists and philosophers knew this as the Seashell Problem. Until it was solved, the discovery of dinosaurs (and the origins of all fossils) could go no further. It drove some of the smartest people of the time to despair.
I love how Lendler recruits the reader into the overwhelming size of this mystery. In his hands, science doesn’t feel polished and inevitable, it feels fresh, accessible, and urgent.
The visual design is also terrific, with punchy prose complemented by pull-quotes, images, and little watermarks that break up the text.
Lendler happily levels with the reader, calling a classic work of geology “so dense, so difficult to understand (and so badly written), that no ordinary person read it.” How many science teachers would admit this to students, even if they felt it privately? This willingness to speak the truth clearly to young people is so rare, I forget to miss it.
Highest recommendation.
One Day a Dot: The Story of You, The Universe, and Everything by by Ian Lendler, Shelli Paroline, and Braden Lamb
A simple telling of the history of the universe, with a focus on the emergence of life, and humans, on Earth. It spans all the way from the big bang to the present human flourishing, and brings the reader back around to the question of how the big bang started.
The first few pages left me feeling a bit skeptical; I worried that the metaphor of dots—stars, planets, cells, etc.—would get tired quickly. But the writing and art won me over, and I appreciated how much ground the book covered in a way that felt coherent. There are no specific characters in this book, possibly excepting a mouse-like creature meant to represent the first mammal, who appears in four pages. But the voice of the text, and the shape the book takes overall, make it feel more compelling than a mere recitation of facts. And the last page brings it all together in a way that I think will spark the imagination of every reader.
I don’t think this could be a child’s favorite book, but it’s incredibly informative in a narratively compelling way. I wish there were many more books like this, that give a quick but engaging, memorable and meaningful introduction to a topic. (I also appreciate the subtitle’s clear homage to Douglas Adams.)
Highly recommended.
Nia and the New Free Library by Ian Lendler
A DIY fable with an elaborate premise: the town library is carried away by a tornado, and Nia, who loved the library, decides to rebuild it from scratch, starting by recreating the lost books from memory. She gets others to chip in not by asking for permission, but by just starting to do it; the flaws in her execution spurs others to recommend fixes, and she recruits the complainers as fellow builders. The town ends up coming together and building an amazing new library.
The page-to-page writing isn’t the most compelling, but the overall story and message are truly powerful. Many picture books call on kids to make things and solve problems and believe in themselves, but this one shows specifically how making mistakes — but, like, making them — is a crucial step towards building the future that you want to see.
Highly recommended.
The Stratford Zoo Midnight Revue Presents: Macbeth by Ian Lendler and Zack Giallongo
This graphic novel series features animals in a zoo who, each night, break out of their cages and stage a Shakespeare play, heavily adapted to be digestible for children: Macbeth (played by a lion) doesn’t murder, he swallows people whole, so they can be released alive from his belly later; Lady Macbeth doesn’t go insane and commit suicide, she just rubs at bloodstains (er, ketchup stains) so much that the suds overwhelm her.
It’s an ambitious project, and it basically works, though I’m a little unclear who it’s for. Purely as a story, many Shakespeare stories are not very good, and Macbeth is especially flimsy.
The problem, as I see it, is that the best things about a play like Macbeth — the poetry, the shocking violence, the twist about being born cesarean — are denied to the reader of this book. In their place, we are eased into to the play’s plot, with lightly mischievous humor. It’s valuable that a reader could come away thinking of “Shakespeare” as something they have access to. But if Macbeth isn’t reciting beautiful lines while bathed in phantasmagorical levels of blood, I’m not sure there’s anything left.
Recommended.
An Undone Fairy Tale by Ian Lendler and Whitney Martin
Could be a clever premise for a book: the illustrator isn’t done illustrating it, and they’re begging you not to turn the page too quickly! But the concept doesn’t seem to have clear rules; for instance, since the illustrator hasn’t drawn a sword yet, a character might be holding a noodle. But… didn’t the illustrator have to draw the noodle? There is no system of established rules to follow to the point of absurdity.
Not recommended.
Little Sid: The Tiny Prince Who Became Buddha by Ian Lendler and Xanthe Bouma
A picture book retelling of the life of young Siddhartha Gautama, and his transcendent awakening. I love spiritual philosophy for kids — they can totally understand it, and more books should attempt it. However, the story here is muddled and confusing.
The story turns on the moment that adepressed Sid, seeking meaning, nearly falls off a cliff; while he dangles, he eats a strawberry within reach, and because it might be his last, he finds it spectacularly delicious. He is happier immediately—and permanently.
I get the point, that treating the present as precious is a way out of suffering. But the strawberry episode feels muddled to me, because it’s hard to enjoy something while I’m in a panicked state! This is the same problem with Fight Club’s freedom-by-having-your-life-threatened; isn’t it more likely that he would be permanently traumatized, than set free?
The permanence of this revelation also feels unrelatable, and will feel unrelatable to kids. I’ve had moments of pure focus, and then ten minutes later I’m back at arguing with, say, some fool who credits the Minneapolis Lakers’ championships to the Los Angeles Lakers.
Not recommended.
Books by Carson Ellis
I love Carson Ellis’s picture book Home, and I always enjoy his art, which often has satisfyingly gritty textures (I’m trying to find the right word—I mean the kind of uneven, earthy texture you get when you use the side of a colored pencil tip on textured paper).
What is Love? by Mac Barnett and Carson Ellis
A story of philosophy for kids, in which the narrator goes on a journey to learn what love is. He asks various people, and they give him answers that pertain to their slice of the world: the carpenter says love is building a house; the soldier says love is a blade.
This pattern is most interesting when it is broken, when the answer isn’t obvious and the metaphor isn’t too clean a match.
There is a sweet delight here, though it feels like an uneven snack rather than a rich full-course meal (maybe that’s what love is to me?). And while I usually like Carson Ellis’s art, here it seemed flat and muddy.
Recommended.
Du Iz Tak? By Carson Ellis
It’s difficult to categorize this book, which is to its credit. Nothing magical happens, and yet its world exists somewhere between fantasy and reality. The characters vary from real creatures — such as a spider and a bird — to fantastical ones that blend human and insectoid features. There is a humanlike home within a log, a violin played by a moth, and even expressive eyes on a twig.
And then there is the nonsensical language the characters speak, which sounds just the tiniest bit like English when you speak it aloud with a bit of expressive flair. Some readers will find this confusing and obscure, but I warmed to it, and enjoyed the reward of going with it, and allowing myself to catch the gist without knowing precisely what each word means.
I did wish Ellis did more with this wild premise. But I appreciated how hallucinatory the pages were, with rules growing and shifting as the story went on, never settling into any clear limits on what is possible.
Recommended.
In the Half Room by Carson Ellis
There is really just one idea here, but it’s a good one: everything in this room is half of something: half a chair, half a flower, half a cat. That’s it. But Ellis’s art has a distinct magic to it as always, and I think the absurdism here would intrigue and delight many kids.
Recommended.
Books by Christian Robinson
In contrast to Carson Ellis’s art, Christian Robinson’s makes more use of solid colors, cutout shapes, and collage, and can have something of a pop art feel. Like Ellis, Robinson has collaborated with author Mac Barnett.
Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña and Christian Robinson
CJ, a little boy, travels across the city with his grandmother, sharing observations along the way and interacting with a variety of people.
This is a much loved and much awarded book, but I had never read it. I was struck by the loose and alive feel, the way characters come in and out of focus organically, and the balance between CJ, a little boy, and his grandmother.
There were some moments that didn’t quite click for me, but I loved the overall lesson — to notice and connect to those around you, and to pass this knowledge to the next generation. The message doesn’t feel too on the nose, because of the delight with which the grandmother delivers all of her lines.
This is a book that could awaken a child to some of life’s most important dimensions, and Robinson’s art pops with life and color.
Highest recommendation.
Twenty Questions by Mac Barnett and Christian Robinson
Twenty of Robinson’s illustrations are accompanied by questions that prompt the reader to imagine, speculate, and tell their own stories.
It’s a simple premise, well done. I did wish that some questions did more to invite the reader’s interest; I can picture a kid flipping through the pages, and an adult saying “No, no, don’t you want to wonder about that one longer?”
Barnett and Robinson are not afraid to be risqué or indelicate; there is some of Roald Dahl’s boundary-crossing spirit.
Highly recommended.
Leo: A Ghost Story by Mac and Christian Robinson
Ghosts are a fertile ground for storytelling and worldbuilding. They have an intimate but ambiguous connection to living, which can accommodate a wide variety of approaches. There are few rules that have to be consistent across all ghost stories.
Here, Barnett builds a world through a story about Leo, a ghost boy. For the first half of the book, that world grows and grows, with looseness and imagination.
But then it stalls out, stuck in a drama around Leo having allowed a living playmate to assume he is an imaginary friend, not a ghost. This doesn’t really work; it’s clear from the way Barnett has written the character that his playmate won’t mind. So the book ends with her accepting him, which really she already did half the book ago.
Recommended.
Books by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen
Mac Barnett is a wonderful (and wonderfully prolific!) children’s book author, and he has several recurring collaborators who illustrate (and co-conceive) books with him. Barnett and Klassen are also amateur historians and critics of children’s literature; they have an excellent Substack where they break down classic picture books. Their book Extra Yarn is one of the most widely beloved picture books of this century; I read it to my kids at least 20 times.
Reading Barnett’s books this year, I had the delight of realizing he dedicated a book he did with Klassen to another of his collaborators, Christian Robinson:
…and he also dedicated one of his collaborations with Robinson, to Klassen!
That’s just incredibly sweet.
The Wolf, the Duck & the Mouse by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen
A mouse is swallowed by a wolf, and is surprised to find a duck already in the wolf’s belly, living a comfortable life.
I loved this book, which grows the rules of its world on almost every page, with art that matches the fabulist form perfectly. It’s full of delightful surprises.
However, the ending just doesn’t work. We are set up for a big reveal, but that reveal was already accomplished earlier.
(I’m about to spoil this book now.)
The book has already made clear that the mouse and duck enjoy life inside the wolf; they’ve already gotten the wolf to swallow cheese, wine, candles, a record player, etc. So it’s not news that they would choose to continue living inside the wolf.
It could have worked better for them to be less sure at first, and less settled; then the threat against the wolf could have created the beginnings of a sense of solidarity among the three of them, and the story could have ended with their asking if the wolf knows where to find cheese and wine and candles, and they could have closed with a feast.
Highly recommended.
Square by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen; Triangle by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen
At first, these books — two out of a series of three by the all-star team of Barnett and Klassen—felt flat to me.
I think I get what they are going for: a light touch of absurdism, and stories that manage to be readable for young readers through their minimalism and brevity. But this minimalism left me cold. Square is a story about a perfectionist named Square, and an accidental artistic discovery that he makes, despite himself. Square almost becomes a story about the misleading allure of perfection — except that Square is only saved because his work actually is judged to be perfect.
Triangle, at fist, was even more elusive in its meaning; it felt like just a sequence of events, without any sense of completion.
Then, I read Triangle to a two year-old, and I appreciated it much more. This kid loved the references to the shapes of passing objects: big squares; medium squares; small squares; etc. And he found the simple story beats delightful.
On reflection, I had to admit that I was reading at an adult’s pace, with adult expectations. These are books written at an even simpler level of complexity—and intended age—than Barnett and Klassen’s books Extra Yarn and Sam and Dave Dig a Hole. And I can see they have an appeal that comes to life when read slowly, with some call and response, to a young child.
Recommended.
How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney? by Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen
The pitch for this book must have been a no-brainer — what a fun concept! Does Santa squeeze into a narrow cylinder to fit through the chimney, or through your sink faucet? Does he flatten himself and slide under your door?
But as I read, I kept waiting to feel into it, and I never did. I don’t think I’m too old for the magic of Santa, or for this type of humor; maybe this is one of those concepts that just doesn’t work when you’re actually holding it in your hands?
Not recommended.
Other books by Mac Barnett
In addition to the artists above, Mac Barnett has collaborated with many other artists.
A Polar Bear in the Snow by Mac Barnett and Shawn Harris
A slice of a polar bear’s daily life. Harris creates most of the illustrations as collages of paper, felt, paint and ink. Much of the delight comes from being able to see the craft process in the images themselves. Scissor cuts act as motion lines; the slight translucence of the edges of torn paper evoke light through a dusting of snow.
The joy of this book comes from its absence of story, from just watching the polar bear play.
Recommended.
Telephone by Mac Barnett and Jen Corace
Dramatizes the traditional game of telephone, where people repeat a message audibly, accumulating small errors and misunderstandings. Here, each character changes the message wildly. Usually, this lines up with the character’s own tastes or lens—but this pattern is inconsistent. The final reveal is well done, the art is gorgeous and delightful, and there are some nice touches; for example, a background scene that repeats visually with subtle variations, encouraging the reader to flip back and forth.
Recommended.
Hi, Jack! (A Jack Book) by Mac Barnett and Greg Pizzoli
An early reader book, along the lines of the simplest Dr. Seuss books, that is a bit more transgressive than most. Jack is a misbehaving dog who sometimes steals things, and puts lipstick where it doesn’t belong. The story isn’t moralistic; Jack is legitimately out of control, in a way that might make some parents uneasy. That’s the fun of this book.
The characters aren’t as compelling as those Mo Willem’s Elephant & Piggie books, but I can definitely see a child wanting to reread this, and wanting to read the sequels.
Recommended.
Books by Carole Boston Weatherford
Weatherford’s work is ambitious, and I enjoyed all three of her books that I read, though I also found them unfocused and in need of editing down.
Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom by Carole Boston Weatherford and Michele Wood
A picture book biography of Henry Brown, an enslaved man who concocted and carried out a daring scheme to ship himself to freedom in a wooden box.
We need more books that give full portraits of the lives of enslaved people, as this book does. I found Weatherford’s treatment of family separation under slavery particularly powerful. In her telling, Henry falls in love with a woman named Nancy and marries her, securing a promise from her enslaver that he will never sell her. But then the enslaver goes back on his word, and “She and my children change hands like seasons, / Each master worse than the last.”
But too often, Weatherford uses archaic terms and constructions that won’t be meaningful to children. White southerners “raise the militia” and pass “black codes”; Black people are made to “pull suckers from foliage” or be “put in irons”; Henry “buy[s] some tokens to take to my loved ones in jail”, and people are “in packets” (I still have no idea what these last two mean). I appreciate exposing children to new vocabulary and I don’t want history watered down, but we should be careful to make sure we are communicating to children in terms they will understand.
Other episodes were more confusing than illuminating. For instance, Weatherford tells of the “savage beating that many of them got / For having been baptized”. I know that some enslavers violently suppressed the independent practice of Christianity by the people they enslaved, but I think this just doesn’t work as a passing mention; it needs its own book.
Similarly, Weatherford mentions “our black overseer”; this could be bewildering to a young reader without more context. And at one point, Henry is ordered to “stuff [an enslaver’s] pockets with silver”. I’m not sure what this means—is it just a euphemism for demanding a bunch of money?
But Henry’s journey inside the box is harrowing, with excellent and horrifying details. And his life after gaining freedom is full of additional detail and complexity.
Recommended.
Unspeakable: the Tulsa Race Massacre by Carole Boston Weatherford and Floyd Cooper
An incredibly ambitious project, to make a children’s picture book about one of the most horrific acts of genocidal violence in our history, one that only recently has had anything resembling national recognition.
Again, I struggled with Weatherford’s use of terms the reader likely won’t know. For instance, she introduces the Tulsa Black community as consisting in part of “Exodusters”, without explaining that term’s combination of “exodus” and “dust”. And she uses terms that adults use too often to avoid being clear, like “assault” and “deputize”.
But this is a crucial episode in American history, and we need more books like this to help young people understand the prosperity and health that many Black communities have had, and the ways that White supremacy demanded that this success be destroyed.
Recommended.
Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library by Carole Boston Weatherford and Eric Velasquez
A portrait of Arturo Schomburg, the Harlem Renaissance figure who was an early historian, curator and researcher of Black American life.
This has much more text than a typical children’s book, several thousand words. It seems designed to be read to children, likely in a school or library setting. It’s a great length to help, say, a third grader prepare a Black History Month report. The text aims to be comprehensive, rather than to distill Schomburg’s life into a simpler and more digestible story.
So, while this does work overall, I think it could have been edited to be shorter, to omit more episodes of his life, and to focus more on a few themes that might resonate more with a reader. But this portrait is deep and rich, and the beautiful art makes the portrait all the richer.
Recommended.
Books by Holly Thompson
I took a picture book writing class with Holly Thompson through Grub Street, and discovering her books was a delightful side benefit.
The Language Inside by Holly Thompson
A young adult novel in verse, about Emma, a White teenager raised in Japan, who comes to live in the United States for the first time. Emma experiences culture shock as she struggles to figure out who she is, and who she wants to be. Oh, and she’s plagued by severe migraines, and her mother has breast cancer. It sometimes seems like YA novels are required to have protagonists with a litany of ailments and oppressions that they are suffering; but like anything, this can be handled clumsily or with finesse, and Thompson absolutely handles it with finesse. Emma’s problems are never glorified; Thompson’s focus is on what Emma does about them, how her thinking shifts about them, and how her relationships with others change them.
Reading this, at first I was wary of the poetic verse, unsure if I would find it exhausting. I struggle to sustain my attention through lengthy poetry, which can become an impenetrable slog. But I flowed through Thompson’s verse feeling open and natural, even when she was describing conflict or strain between characters.
Poetry is not only the medium here, it is a subject: the characters write and read it to each other. And I came to love reading this extended poem, appreciating the way the medium allows Thompson to directly capture and transmit the flow of Emma’s thoughts and associations, with no unnecessary words, using whitespace and allusion in place of paragraphs of description.
Highest recommendation.
The Wakame Gatherers by Holly Thompson and Kazumi Wilds
A gentle story about a girl with both Japanese and White American ethnicity, going to the beach in Japan to collect wakame seaweed with her two grandmothers.
Thompson includes some complications of this mixed heritage, including reflecting on each grandmother’s disparate experiences in World War II, and the girl’s need to translate between each of them. This is all handled with grace and a light touch.
As a kid, I loved books that dove into the details of some world, such as seaweed harvesting, and here Thompson nicely balances those technical details with family story.
Highly recommended.
One Wave at a Time by Holly Thompson
A sweet book, which I can imagine being hugely valuable to anyone experiencing grief. I didn’t feel that either the art or the text was fully developed into the form they were meant to have. Still, this book could be important to the right person, in the right moment.
Recommended.
Twilight Chant by Holly Thompson and Jen Betton
A picture book in the evergreen vein of “all these animals are doing their nighttime routines, so are you, now go to sleep”. The simple poetic text is designed to coax the reader to recite it with rhythm; I found myself concocting a tune. The illustrations are charming and full of well-composed sunset scenes, with a wide variety of physical viewpoints.
Recommended.
Books by Becky Chambers
At a wedding a year ago, one of the brides’ aunts and I bonded over our shared love for Octavia Butler’s writing. She recommended Becky Chambers, and I devoured Chambers’s A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first book in her Wayfarers series. This year, I read books 2, 3, and 4, and I wish there were more. She has quickly become one of my favorite writers.
The Wayfarers series takes place in a multi-species universe in which humans are one of the most recent entrants. It’s a universe like Star Trek in its inter-species politics, but with much more focus on the politics—not so much the legislative debates, but the more subtle power relationships between species trying, collectively, to grow from an era of imperialistic exploitation to one of mature coexistence. Chambers finds all sorts of angles to explore here, from prejudice to communication across wildly different media to contrasting sexuality to orientalism. She treats everything with a light touch, keeping the focus on characters and their decisions, and never letting the worldbuilding distract from story.
Please note that these books each stand alone, connecting to each other but not requiring any knowledge beyond the book’s own content. If you are curious, but you only have one sci-fi read in you, please try the fourth book, The Galaxy and the Ground Within. I absolutely promise that you’ll love it.
A Close and Common Orbit (Wayfarers book 2) by Becky Chambers
A smaller book in scope than Angry Planet, but deeper in its character studies. Follows two stories in parallel, both dealing with the validity of AI assistants as sentient, sovereign beings. I wished the plot were as developed as in the other books in the series. A heist sequence made me remember Leigh Bardugo’s heist-centered Six of Crows fondly, and wish that Chambers had developed this episode more fully.
Chambers only thinly explores questions about the nature of AI consciousness. She takes a page from other “soft” sci-fi treatments of AI (e.g., the doctor in Star Trek: Voyager), and ignores that software-based consciousness can be manipulated with duplication, indefinite pausing, etc. She’s much more interested in AI entities as a metaphor for outsider experience, particularly queerness; and about the journey required to feel at home in your own body, on your own terms.
Recommended.
Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers book 3) by Becky Chambers
The first twenty pages of this were a struggle for me; in contrast to the previous book, this one dances rapidly among half a dozen protagonists. But then I caught on to her weaving of the protagonists into each others’ stories, and that inside-outside dynamic became illuminating. This is one of the most elegant accomplishments in sci-fi worldbuilding I’ve ever read, with a level of attention to culture I found breathtaking.
One of her protagonists is a technically superior alien ethnographer basically liveblogging her exploration of human society. Chambers uses this as an effective tool for exposition, but also for critiquing ethnography, the politics of charity, and the uncertainty principle of development economics.
She also paints a compassionate and astute portrait of adolescent development, and where the seeds of true maturity originate.
Highest recommendation.
The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers book 4) by Becky Chambers
In Ursula Le Guin’s essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (please go read that right now—it’s short, and I promise you’ll think about it for the rest of your days!), she explains why stories of masculine violence so often trump stories of feminine caretaking:
It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats…. No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.
She specifically complains about the types of sci-fi that treat violence as the key element in the history of the world, and which relegate women’s work to off-screen. Alluding to 2001: A Space Oddysey, she writes:
Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care.
Le Guin’s own sci-fi writing constitutes an attempt to reclaim the central place of these acts of creation, collection, and nurturing. Becky Chambers’s writing is another, and nowhere is this as clear as in this, the fourth book of her Wayfarers series.
The Galaxy and the Ground Within takes place on a planet that serves as a way-station for interplanetary travelers, one slightly reminiscent of the station in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Deep Space Nine’s best episodes centered on the aftermath of a nearby war of subjugation and ethnic cleansing, and the hard, slow work required to rebuild trade, and trust, between the two peoples. In Galaxy, the subjugation is farther in the past, but the long-term effects of dispossession and discrimination are still very much present. Chambers make it clear that the politically powerful have little interest in ceding power to remedy this deep, historical wrong; the healing and rebuilding have to be done by people.
And of course by “people”, I mean various alien beings, some with insectoid features, some with oodles of long, hairy, gangly legs, some for whom the air that others breathe is toxic (and vice versa). What is amazing about this book is how little Chambers is distracted by the technical details of the world she has built, and how focused she is on a story about caretaking, and its transformative power. This is not a book about spaceships and which alien species eats which bizarre food—or rather, it is, but only because Chambers uses everything to tell a story about motherhood, and romance, and generosity, and imagination, and history being made by the people.
It’s also funny—I laughed out loud during the conversation about cheese. Just trust me.
Highest recommendation.
Books by Dan Santat
A First Time for Everything by Dan Santat
A memoir of growing up Asian in a very White American town, and the ways that a school trip to Europe helped Santat find himself.
I devoured this in one sitting, laughing out loud and crying. It’s similar to Vera Brogsol’s Be Prepared in its blend of realism and cartoonish exaggeration, and also in Santat’s structuring his storytelling with a free-flowing openness to the unexpected.
The growth that Dan experiences over the course of the book feels entirely earned, and the pride that he develops feels rooted in something real — something that I think a reader will pick up on, and look for in themselves. It’s also a believable love story, one that emphasizes trust and generosity of spirit as the most attractive qualities.
Highest recommendation.
Oh No!: Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World by Mac Barnett and Dan Santat
and
Oh No! Not Again!: (Or How I Built a Time Machine to Save History) (Or at Least My History Grade) by Mac Barnett and Dan Santat
These books are both light-hearted sci-fi romps with gorgeous, oversized illustrations by Santat. The stories aren’t especially deep or rewarding, but both books work, and are full of delightful details that align in tone and form. Publisher Little, Brown went above and beyond in allowing for production touches that have Barnett’s fingerprints all over them; for instance, the cover illustrations are completely different under the dust cover; and the inside of the dust covers double as a movie-style poster for the book, if you unfold it.
Highly recommended.
Drawn Together by Minu Le and Dan Santat
A grandparent and a grandchild, separated by age, culture and language, bond over their shared love of drawing. It’s a beautiful premise, but the actual story doesn’t illuminate anything about these characters; they are merely types. The bulk of the book is an abstract romp, as the two of them, in the form of drawn avatars, battle a dragon using weapons that resemble their drawing implements. There’s even a moment where the “distance” between them take the form of a physical foe, and must be conquered. I get what Le and Santat were going for, but I need actual character development, not metaphors alone.
Not recommended.
Endlessly Ever After: Pick YOUR Path to Countless Fairy Tale Endings! by Laurel Snyder and Dan Santat
A choose-your-own-adventure-style picture book that makes all the most common mistakes of such books, starting with decisions that have no connection to story. The very first choice is between two different coats to wear, with no reason to think either matters. This sort of arbitrary decision makes the branching feel like a chore, rather than engaging with my agency.
And then, the illustrations themselves don’t reflect the choices! I chose to wear a red cape, and turned to the proper page. There I was, walking down a path—but I wasn’t wearing the red cape I chose! Because of course the illustrations need to serve multiple paths, some of which don’t involve having made this choice.
Is the storytelling text good, at least? Well, the first ending I reached was one where I stumbled upon a funeral wake, for a dead woman. I accidentally jostled her, and she woke up — she wasn’t dead after all! Did I like, break a spell? No, the mourners were just mistaken that she was dead. I wish I were making this up.
I did love Dan Santat’s art, though he made a few strange decisions — for example, the dead woman looks a lot like the protagonist, but there’s no sign this was intentional.
Not recommended.
The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat
I think I get the original impulse that led to this book: what if you took an imaginary friend, and looked at the world from their perspective? It’s the old Pixar trick, and it’s neat to think of imaginary friends, themselves imagining the children who will be their playmates.
But the storytelling here doesn’t dig into that premise. Who is Beekle as a character? What does it mean that he “does the unimaginable”? What does it mean that he’s “unimaginary”? It seems like there might be a message in here about finding friendship where it finds you, rather than where you planned to find it, but I have to squint to see it. Sequences like the one where Beekle meets someone who actually does want to be their friend, and receives a name, feel wasted.
Not recommended.
Books by Peter H. Reynolds
The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds
A story about how creative work can start with something simple and accessible. Young Vashti, convinced that she can’t make art, is encouraged to just draw whatever she is moved to draw. So she draws a single dot, then keeps drawing more: different sizes; different colors; many in a row, the outline of one; a giant one using negative space; etc.
I found the story and art itself uninteresting; the art style evokes Quentin Blake by way of a Hallmark card, and the lettering has a cloying, cutesy feel. But this book does something incredibly important: it invites the reader into making their own art. Many schools have thrown “The Dot”-inspired art festivals, where students make oodles of artwork in the spirit of Vashti’s dots. It’s legitimately inspiring.
Highly recommended.
Our Table by Peter H. Reynolds
A parable that pits screen time against face-to-face family time, using the kitchen table as a metaphor. This is a book to read once in order to prompt discussion, not a book likely for children to ask to reread. But it works.
Recommended.
Going Places by Peter H. Reynolds
A slightly fantastical story about a group of children, each tasked with assembling the same invention. But some of them toss the instructions, go off-script, and use the components to bring their own visions to life!
I love this tying of creativity to disobedience. But I wish the level of technology they’re dealing with were more down to earth. The two protagonists literally build a working, flying airplane; and then they win the big race and are heroes. I wish they weren’t such “Mary Sues”, and I wish the reward weren’t the first place ribbon.
What I want kids to know is that when they create something themselves, it’ll probably seem less impressive than the work of kids who follow the instructions to a tee. It won’t win the big race, because they’re starting from scratch, not starting a few steps behind the finish line. But their creations will be authentically theirs.
I once had a 7 year-old student who was delighting in making designs in 3D. He started to design a gun—a very toy-like one. Should I have allowed him to continue to design this? I have the highest respects for advocates of children’s agency who would say yes.
When we invite children to be agents of their own destiny, we have to accept that they will be beginners, and that they will use immature judgment. And we have to help them appreciate the joys, and struggles of being beginners. We should not make promises to children that we have no ability to keep—and that trap them in the same narrow definition of success that caused the problem in the first place.
Not recommended.
Poetry books
Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischmann and Eric Beddows
These poems are meant to be recited aloud by two speakers, each speaking the text in one column. When text on one line is in both columns, it is spoken simultaneously.
This is a brilliant format which translates clearly into performance, without requiring a lot of dramatic experience, and there have been many classrooms where they have performed these.
Fleischmann makes creative use of the two voices, sometimes using the two to express alternating points of view, other times having them speak as one. One of my favorite effects is when he has one voice keep saying what the other just said, as the first voice moves on; it’s like singing in round, and the effect casts a spell.
Each poem picks up on distinct qualities of its subjects: royal entitlement for a queen bee, hope and transformation for a caterpillar in a chrysalis, literary erudition for book lice. The poems vary widely in feel, and Fleischmann finds many clever angles to explore. Only one felt flat, the one about house crickets whose “sun” is the oven’s pilot light, a joke that can’t sustain the whole poem.
Highest recommendation.
Cast Away: Poems for our time by Naomi Shihab Nye
A book of poetry intended to appeal to all ages. Nye takes as her overarching theme the topic of trash, waste, and the things we discard; many of the poems were written after a few hours of walking around somewhere, collecting litter. They range far and wide, and often have a punchy cleverness that made me grin, plus a depth of yearning for humanity to be better that she somehow makes entertaining to explore, not preachy. Or rather, she writes like the greatest of preachers, aware of the resistance we feel to being preached at, and speaking both from that place and to it.
I started this book skeptical and beleagured; found myself snapping photos of many pages to reread later; and by the end, I didn’t want it to end. I now love the mind and heart of Naomi Shihab Nye. You should read her poem “Jerusalem”, it’s a poem I feel I’ll reread a hundred times, always understanding something a little bit different.
Highest recommendation.
A Second Spanish Reader edited by Stanley Appelbaum
A side-by-side book of Spanish texts—many of them poems—with English translations. But the texts mostly predate the 20th century, and their phrasing and vocabulary are archaic. Even the English translations are hard to parse at times! Not the right book for this intermediate Spanish reader.
Not recommended.
Love That Dog By Sharon Creech
A middle-grades novel in verse, which doesn’t have a strong reason to be in verse. I found the writing thin and tiring.
It keeps harping on the same joke: the narrator has been assigned to read some famous poem, which goes unnamed; but the narrator’s complaints about it clue the reader in to which poem it was. So there is a lot of, say, “so you have miles to go before you sleep, do you? Why are you writing this stupid poem, shouldn’t you like, focus on getting to the place you’re going to sleep?”
Not recommended.
Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reverso Poems by Marilyn Singer
I guess “reverso” poems are poems that take on a different meaning when read bottom-to-top, line by line. I appreciate the concept, but I don’t really think these work. Often, the reverse order doesn’t actually alter a line’s meaning. It felt like they Singer scratched the surface of what this conceit could enable.
Not recommended.
Tap Dancing on the Roof: Sijo Poems by Linda Sue Park and Istvan Banyai
These poems loosely follow the style of Korean sijo poems, a structure I’m not familiar with. A core element of sijo, according to Park, is putting a surprising twist in the final line.
Park’s approach to subject matter, and twists, feels familiar to me from Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. But these poems don’t grab me like Silversteins do. It’s hard for me to imagine them staying with a reader, or inspiring them to want to write their own. I usually enjoy Banyai’s art, but it didn’t come to life for me here.
Not recommended.
Children’s fiction books
Mama’s Nightingale by Edwidge Danticat and Leslie Smith
A picture book about children of undocumented immigrants finding ways to transcend America’s policies of family separation, and to connect with their loved ones.
Too often, picture books about important social issues are dense with text; many are really designed to be appreciated by adults, not loved by children.
This book is the exception. It centers on a daughter wishing for her mother to come home from immigration detention, and finding her own voice as a writer in advocating for her mother. Danticat writes with gentle efficiency, and understated intensity.
I don’t think I could read this book to a child without crying, which is a gift.
Highest recommendation.
Press Here by Hervé Tullet
This clever book invites the reader to engage with it in a variety of physical ways, and then the next page appears to respond to the reader’s action. It’s a simple concept, very well executed. I can imagine some ways it could have taken these ideas even further, but I can only imagine those ways because this book so quickly expanded my imagination about what a picture book can be!
Highest recommendation.
The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak
Brilliantly simple and well-executed. The page filled to the brim with weird sounds provides a WOW moment — it feels, for a second, like it will be impossible to actually read the whole thing aloud.
I love how this breaks the fourth wall, and uses the picture book reading dynamic itself. It’s easy to imagine this being a child’s favorite book.
Highest recommendation.
Olive All at Once by Mariam Gates and Alison Hawkins
Mariam is my incredible sister, and this is her… maybe ninth published book? She’s had a lot of them!
Olive All at Once is about feeling multiple feelings at the same time. The protagonist, Olive, has overlapping feelings about other people’s birthday presents (joy, jealousy); the first day of school (excitement, fear); her grandparents visiting, and everything else.
The lesson is that Olive can contain all of these feelings, and they can all be valid, even if they sometimes seem contradictory. But we aren’t simply told this, either by an omnipotent narrator or by Olive herself; instead, Olive and the narrator build this understanding with some light verbal sparring, as Olive corrects the narrator’s binary thinking. This is a delightful device, which gives the book some tension, and makes it a story, rather than just a description.
This makes for an effective and compassionate lesson in socio-emotional learning, told through a character who is brought to life through her distinct voice and Hawkins’s punchy, crisp, expressive art. I could imagine this being a kid’s favorite book.
Highest recommendation.
Laxmi’s Mooch by Shelly Anand and Nabi Ali
A little girl is teased for having hair on her lip, and together with her parents and friends, comes to appreciate it and even feel proud of it.
The art is superb, and anchors the story with a tone that balances whimsy with seriousness. Importantly, the women in Laxmi’s family are beautiful with a variety of different body types and different hair textures. I appreciated the supportive, cheerful voice of the parents, and the clever, simple ending.
I’m not sure how rereadable this book is, but it immerses the reader in a sense of joy around body diversity.
Highly recommended.
Chill, Chomp, Chill! by Chris Ayala-Kronos and Paco Sordo
An picture book for very young readers about Chomp, a dinosaur child struggling to control his anger. When he feels ashamed, he wants to explode; but instead he learns to “chill” and regulate his emotions before re-engaging with others.
There’s not a lot of nuance here, but the book works, thanks largely to Paco Sordo’s bright, expressive illustrations. These are a joy, even when they show what Chomp should not do. By staying playful even when Chomp is too angry, the art implicitly validates his feelings, rather than shaming him (and the reader) further. Ayala-Kronos and Sordo know it wouldn’t help readers if they made it easy for Chomp to chill; Chomp has these explosive feelings inside, and we get to see how glorious it might be to let them out!
There is a bit of “back matter” on the dust cover’s extra-long back flap: nine illustrations of things that Chomp can do to chill, from going for a walk to listening to music. This is simple but effective.
This book, as straightforward as it is, could be helpful for a child learning to inspect their own emotional state, and to recognize opportunities to make different decisions in the heat of the moment. I could imagine a school counselor rehearsing this verbally with a kid: “I feel like stomping! Should I stomp? I feel like chomping! Should I chomp?”
I did wish a few of the triggers that Chomp experiences were more compelling and relatable, though. One explosion comes after Chomp doesn’t get to use his preferred color of LEGO block, and another comes after Chomp inappropriately uses his teeth to catch a ball, causing it to puncture and deflate. I’m not saying no kid has ever blown up because of the color of LEGO blocks, but come on, “the other kids took all the wheels” is right there, and 100% of kids would nod in recognition.
Highly recommended.
Rex Wrecks It! by Ben Clanton
Rex’s friends make cool structures. But Rex always smashes them to smithereens in a flurry of chaos, making his friends upset. Will Rex ever learn? Can anything be done to change this dynamic?
This is a simple story that isn’t especially deep, but the illustrations are delightful, especially when Rex destroys things, which is wonderfully often. It’s a quick, satisfying read, and I imagine a lot of requests by kids to immediately read it again.
Highly recommended.
The Rabbit Listened by Cori Doerrfeld
A child is upset; various animals come and propose solutions, but that isn’t helping. Finally, a rabbit comes, and doesn’t try to solve the problem—instead, the rabbit just listens.
With the rabbit listening, the child is able to find their own way to the various solutions that the other animals suggested, and is able to feel hopeful and whole again.
This is a simple concept, and Doerrfeld nails it. It helps that the different animals who come to offer help are such distinct characters, and that their methods of help reflect the personalities we traditionally ascribe to each animal (or, in some cases, their physical characteristics.) The book fits together neatly, and satisfyingly.
Highly recommended.
Your Name Is a Song by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow and Luisa Uribe
After a girl’s name is made fun of in her first day of school, her mother teaches her to celebrate the powerful sounds of different names, encouraging her daughter to feel proud of hers.
The start of this book has some confusing pacing and wording, but the pages about names are a delight. One standout moment: the mom celebrates African-American names invented by parents, explaining that “Made-up names come from dreamers. Their real names were stolen long ago so they dream up new ones. They make a way out of no way, make names out of no names — pull them from the sky!” This is an important corrective to the casually racist tendency to mock patterns in Black American names.
Crucially, this book actively resists an assumption that adults too often lazily pass on to children: that some people have ethnic culture, and others don’t. The protagonist makes a point to find music and rhythm in everyone’s names—including those of her White classmates and White teacher.
I do wish Thompkins-Bigelow were clearer with the reader on how to say some names. For example, I imagine readers really wanting to say “Bilqis” correctly, but the book only tells us it’s pronounced “bil-cKee-SS” —which I struggle to interpret (my own attempt to transliterate: “bil-KEESE”). And the pronunciation of my own name is written “BEN-juh-men”, a pronunciation I’ve never once heard. (The last syllable is definitely “min”. Do you say “vitamen” or “cumen”?)
The ending is better than expected: it could have ended simply by having the protagonist return to school, but instead we get to actually see her bring the book’s concept into her classroom, and use what her mother has taught her—in an inclusive and beautiful way. And the end matter breaks down all of the names in the story, with origins from Cambodian to Arabic to Igbo to Irish to African-American.
Highly recommended.
Border Crossings by Sneed B. Collard III and Howard Gray
A picture book about the role of the US-Mexico border in animals’ lives and seasonal migrations. This is an exercise in perspective-shifting, framing the border as something arbitrary, recent, meaningless to animals who have been living in the area for millenia—and dangerous to them.
It’s told simply and well, with efficient text and just a touch of story woven through. The artwork is nearly photo-realist, without being too flat or stiff, and the compositions make artful use of perspective and metaphor. Gray uses darkness and light in striking ways that I seldom see in children’s picture books.
This is a book to be read aloud by a teacher or librarian, not so much a book that might be a child’s favorite. But it’s powerful, and so well done that I could imagine children wanting to reread it.
Highly recommended.
Nick and Tesla series: High-Voltage Danger Lab, Secret Agent Gadget Battle, and Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove by “Science Bob” Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith
A middle-grades chapter book series about siblings who use technology to solve mysteries. The tone is wacky and absurd, somewhere between Captain Underpants and Percy Jackson, but each book involves realistic gadgets that Nick and Tesla assemble, accompanied by instructions for assembling your own at home.
When I first started reading these books, they struck me as hokey and thin. But the writing is witty and legitimately funny. Yes, the plots might be resolved by, for example, throwing rotten tomatoes at the bad guys to make them slip and fall. But I found myself coming to enjoy the mild, you-know-no-one-will-get-hurt danger. And the prose has a catchy, quick-moving delight, where a character might say “rendezvous” and then stop to admire the sound of that word on their tongue.
Here is the kids’ mad scientist uncle, who is constantly misjudging human communication, explaining why the police accused him of making crank calls:
“Exactly. I collected tracks — blatantly fake — that led to that skull in the attic. Also fake. So I called the police to say that I’d found Bigfoot.” Uncle Newt said, raising his hands and curling his index and middle fingers twice. “But they took it totally the wrong way. I guess that’s what I get for using air quotes over the phone.”
As for the invention/make projects, they are a mixed bag. They are generally simple enough that I could imagine an intrepid kid building them, but some require wishful thinking to believe they’d work in practice, and often they include specific items that are no longer findable by that name (such as Radio Shack parts numbers).
The gadget glove, in particular, is well-designed; much of the impressiveness comes from the execution of the idea using common components, rather than technical complexity.
Highly recommended.
That Flag by Tameka Fryer Brown
A picture book that uses a story of two friends to teach readers about the Confederate battle flag, why people still fly it, and how it causes pain.
It’s an ambitious project, and Brown makes it work incredibly well, by creating a small cast of characters to represent different voices in today’s dynamic around the flag. Brown does provide glimpses of White people flying the flag with overtly racist intent; but she focuses much more on White people who fly the flag with disregard for the pain it causes. That puts the focus on casual tolerance for racism, and makes the book less easy for an apologist for the Confederate flag to dismiss.
The main characters are Keira, a Black girl, and Bianca, a White girl, whose friendship is strained after their class visits a museum of Southern history. There, Keira realizes that Bianca’s family—which flies the Confederate battle flag out of what they call Southern pride—has not made a break with the South’s White supremacist past.
Using these characters allows for major concepts — the privilege to ignore history’s evils, the burdens that alignment with oppression place on the daily congeniality of the oppressed — to be depicted on the human level. And the final message is one of hope for change, and a loving invitation for friendship and solidarity.
There is one page I might change. Several pages tell a broad-strokes version of the history of racist violence and the movement for Black freedom in the South, carefully balancing the more harrowing aspects of this history with the need to allow child readers to absorb it. I think this is navigated elegantly, staying vague where necessary, without sugar-coating the intensity of the overall story. But then there is a present-day incident that spurs the book’s climax. That event is the shooting (and presumed murder) of a Black couple in their home by a group of White men. I don’t want to sugarcoat White supremacist violence for kids, but I think this distracts from the book’s message, and makes it too easy for apologists for the Confederate flag to see this story as confusing them with overtly violent White supremacists. It also might unnecessarily dissuade some already wary teachers or parents from reading the book to their children.
Highly recommended.
Big by Vashti Harrison
A simple story about a girl who is made fun of for being big, and who goes from absorbing these insults and internalizing them, to rejecting them and finding pride.
The story is told with symbolic text and imagery. There can be a risk in this approach, of the problems and solutions feeling impersonal; but it works well here, and the symbolism allows for a mid-book sequence that is unique and which makes breathtaking use of the design language that Harrison has established up to that point.
The ultimate message — that hurtful words can be returned to sender — seems likely to remain with a reader long after they read this.
Highly recommended.
Pouch! by David Ezra Stein
A simple story about a young kangaroo whose desire to explore the world is in tension with his desire for comfort, leaving him whiplashing between venturing into the world and rushing back to his mother’s confirming pouch.
The illustrations are playful and expressive, and the book has a sweet message told with clarity and a light touch.
Highly recommended.
Bulldozer Helps Out by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann
A simple story that gently subverts the macho associations that kids have with construction vehicles. There’s an unexpected, very satisfying reveal that I won’t give away. The art isn’t spectacular, but it works here to anthropomorphize the vehicles without making that aspect distracting.
We need more children’s books like this, that emphasize a place within masculinity for proud caretaking.
Highly recommended.
Kitchen Dance by Maurie J. Manning
A loving portrait of two parents dancing together in the kitchen as they do morning chores, quietly observed by their children. It’s not really a story, which limits its potential for being reread, but it’s suffused with joy, the artwork feels kinetic and alive, and the vision of female beauty and romantic love represented here is wonderfully accessible. A welcome tool in the fight for healthy messages around bodies and romance, and one that will infected readers with happiness.
Highly recommended.
The Mysteries by Bill Watterson and John Kascht
I read this through once, and felt very unsatisfied. Is that it? Is this really all I get after so many years of wishing for new writing by Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes?
Then, my way back to the library, I read through it again, and it was like reading a completely different book. What Watterson and Kascht are saying here is subtle and profound, and they say it so neatly, with just a few fresh strokes of humor, that I completely didn’t get it the first time.
Part of what’s tricky is that the images themselves are intentionally unsatisfying. The book is all about these “mysteries”, and yet we never actually see one. (In this disappointment, the reader’s experience recapitulates the experience of the foolish subjects of the book, themselves.) Just about everything that Watterson and Kascht do show you is mundane — often aggressively so.
In playing the everyday off of the supernatural, Watterson and Kascht are pushing the reader towards an appreciation for the intangible and the timeless. They remind me that some of the same superstitions and supernatural beliefs that I’m so proud to have grown out of are ones that still retain immense power.
When the people capture some of these “mysteries”, put them in a box and study them, they find them disappointing and flat, like mystics who learn that childbearing is a mere molecular process. They let art about the mysteries rot unseen in museums, thinking the trembling of an artist before a mystery has nothing to teach us today. This book leaves me wondering, can I see the mysteries under a microscope, but still feel awe for them?
Highly recommended.
I Am the Subway by Kim Hyo-eun (translated by Deborah Smith)
Starts by reciting facts about the Seoul subway, with charming art. So far, so straightforward. But then, as people run to make the train, a spotlight is put on one of them at random: his name is Mr. Wanju, and he begins to tell his story:
I’m running late again, I don’t want to miss my train.
Dashing past other people, through the ticket stile,
I take the stairs three or four at a time,
all the way to the platform!In school I could win the relay race
even when my team was coming last.
These days, my lovely daughter makes me late for work.
At the end of the day I always leave first,
to run home and see her smile.
And so, this book expands into something special, full of hairpin shifts of focus and personal details. We get a little one-page comic showing a mother’s busy day:
…and that’s the first, and last, time there are word balloons in the book.
These shifts could feel arbitrary or abrupt; instead, they feel organic, and they evoke a diversity of possible stories, and possible types of stories, among the subway’s riders. This joins a profound empathy together with a sense of the immense scale of all of the stories present in even a single subway car.
Highly recommended.
Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall
A boy works up the courage to dive off the diving board, with patient support from his dad. My favorite parts were all of Jabari’s invented detours and delays — he forgot to stretch, he needs to take a little break, etc. A child will recognize Jabari’s psychological evasions, and the refrain that helps him embrace his fear, “I like surprises”, is legitimately useful—I’ve said it to myself a few times since reading this!
We live in a society where, unfortunately, persistent White supremacy makes Black children sometimes feel their bodies are unwelcome in swimming pools. That Jabari’s family is Black, and that we see their swimming pool as a place they play, teach, and grow, makes this book extra valuable.
Highly recommended.
The Whispering Town by Jennifer Elvgren and Fabio Santomauro
A picture book about a Danish family during World War II who harbors Jews in their cellar. What’s special is seeing the entire town quietly conspire to help—it’s a portrait of a community embracing a collective duty to protect and care. The art is a bit generic, but it works.
Highly recommended.
Invisible Things by Andy J. Pizza and Sophie Miller
A playful consideration of all the significant things in our world that cannot be seen: feelings, phenomena like echoes, physical things that are hidden or transient. Pizza and Miller give each a distinct design, and these designs are truly wonderful, and kids will enjoy recognizing them. (There’s the occasional British slang that won’t be familiar to American English speakers, such as a “niff” for a stinky smell.)
Each page approaches the topic in a different way, sometimes showing the invisible thing as it manifests in different places, sometimes inviting the reader into the creative process of associating an illustrated avatar with a particular concept.
There isn’t a story here, but I could imagine this being a child’s favorite book.
Highly recommended.
What is Given From the Heart by Patricia McKissack and April Harrison
A sweet story about poverty and generosity, which frames charity as something powerful and inspiring, not shameful. My favorite part was when James Otis, the main character, considers which of his few possessions would make a good gift, and which would seem less special to someone else. This involves empathetic imagination: he realizes that his blue ribbon, to someone else, wouldn’t fill someone else with pride, because it is the memory of how he earned it that gives it value for him.
At times, McKissack uses colloquial terms like “shotgun house” and “it rained frogs”. I appreciate the use of phrases that the characters might have used in their place and time, but these could confuse a child, not to mention a parent.
Recommended.
Over the Shop by JonArno Lawson and Qin Leng
A sweet story without words, with memorable art reminiscent of Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County or Kay Thompson’s Eloise. I do think a few words would have made the story clearer; some story beats are hard to follow, and I found myself scanning over some images, unsure what I was supposed to be picking up.
Recommended.
Bathe the Cat by Alice B. McGinty
A wonderful premise: A family needs to clean up the house, but their cat keeps rearranging the letters on the list of tasks. So instead of mowing the lawn and scrubbing the dishes, they’re mowing the dishes and scrubbing the lawn!
I love the artwork and the rhythmic, Seussian text. I also appreciated that this is a family with two dads, a family of color, and also an interracial family. All of that said, there are some clumsy lines I stumbled over, like “Must I read this list once more?”, and I wish the conceit of obeying the rearranged letters could have paid off more at the end; instead, they just correct the letters and the story ends.
Recommended.
Lucy Lopez: Coding Star by Claudia Mills and Grace Zong
There are several books out there which, like this one, tell of a young person taking a coding class, finding it frustrating, but prevailing and being proud. Lucy Lopez has some warmed-over elements. But it does something that very few coding-related books for kids do: it depicts coding as a medium of meaningful creative expression.
The prose is cloying in places: forming the “Let’s Have Fun Club”, “because earning badges was the most fun thing in the entire world”; vowing to make “the best animated name in the history of the world!” You get the picture. But other elements are brilliantly observed, like Lucy’s seesawing between pride in her work, worry that she won’t be good enough, and downplaying her interest in coding out of sensitivity for her sister’s existing identification with it.
I wish more coding concepts were integrated into the story; instead, they are mostly introduced as literal classroom activities that the character does, which makes their place in the story awkward and stiff. There is also some strange wording, like calling computer programs “codes”, something I have never heard anyone say (as in, “all your codes have worked great!”).
In the climax, Lucy decides her final project will be a game in which the player assembles a bouquet of flowers for their sister—and then she surprises her sister with it, as a peace offering after they got into a fight. I totally teared up. How many books about coding do that?
Recommended.
King of the Sky by Nicola Davies and Laura Carlin
An Italian boy feels out of place in his new home in England, until a neighbor gives him a homing pigeon, and through using the pigeon he comes to feel he belongs. The whole thing doesn’t quite fully take form. But I loved the art style, which mixes textures and levels of detail, and which has a naive, childlike simplicity. The story and art together are more than the sum of their parts.
(After writing this, I realized that I had read and reviewed this back in 2017! It looks like I felt similarly then; it may be telling that I forgot it so completely.)
Recommended.
The Lost Package by Richard Ho and Jessica Lanan
Gorgeous watercolor artwork and a compelling story, if one that did not stay with me afterwards.
Recommended.
Narwhal and Jelly: Narwhal, Unicorn of the Sea! by Ben Clanton
A comics-storybook hybrid intended for young readers, in the vein of Mo Willems’s brilliant Elephant and Piggie book series. Clanton doesn’t quite reach the heights of Odd Couple comedy that Willems does, but the interpersonal dynamics are crisp and legible, and there are a few surprises here, such as a completely blank two-page spread that makes sense in the context of its story.
Recommended.
I Am Stuck by Julia Millis
A simple story about a turtle stuck on its back, who eventually finds a possum to keep them company. It closes with “Getting stuck isn’t so bad / when you are here.” The unadorned artwork keeps the book flowing quickly, and the social-emotional messaging is applied with a light touch.
Recommended.
The Mitten by Jan Brett
A folk tale about animals taking refuge in an abandoned mitten, whose excellent knitting holds it together as more and more of them squeeze in.
The story isn’t especially memorable, but the illustrations are ornate and lovely, with additional related scenes added to the margins.
Recommended.
Diary of a Wombat by Jackie French
A wombat’s daily life is told from its own point of view, in terms that make sense of its animalistic behavior. There are a few beats that could be clearer, but the core idea works well and is hilariously extended by the art.
A schoolteacher told me this was by far the most popular book in her school. In a gentle way, readers get to use text and images together to play detective, and to deduce what REALLY happened.
Recommended.
The Wall at the Center of This Book by John Agee
Each page depicts the same location, with a wall at the center separating the left page from the right. The only variable is time, as the protagonist’s assumptions and prejudices about one side give way to events that defy his expectations.
This is fun, though it felt unfocused; the peril that appears on this supposedly “safe” side seems arbitrary, and some of the secondary beats distract from the overall story rather than enhancing it.
Recommended.
Life on Mars by John Agee
About the simplest that science fiction can get. As an astronaut walks around Mars looking for signs of life, but finding none, a curious Martian creature trails behind him silently. It’s fun to know more than the astronaut does; I can almost hear child readers shouting to the astronaut, “Turn around!” There’s a simple twist at the end, that a reader can feel satisfied figuring out before the character does.
Recommended.
Windows by Julia Denos and E. B. Goodale
This book is a quiet, beautiful meditation on the feeling of walking at sunset among houses with lit-up windows. Beyond the vibes, there isn’t really any story here, nor any particular insight into the titular subject. Why a book about windows? I’m not sure, except that it’s a chance to evoke some vibes, and the vibes are strong!
Recommended.
A Moon for Moe and Mo by Jane Breskin Zalben
A sweet tale of two Brooklyn boys, one Jewish and one Muslim, making friends at the legendary Sahadi’s shop. There’s not much depth here, but the illustration is unique and memorable and the book is short and sweet.
It’s notable that there is an asymmetry in what the author has the children say; the Jewish child wishes his Muslim friend a blessed Ramadan, but the Muslim child only says “Happy new year”. I can’t help but wonder if the author or publisher felt it would not be acceptable to some people for a Muslim child to bless a Jewish holiday. Is this a matter of Jewish touchiness about non-Jews blessing Jews, or Muslim touchiness about Muslims blessing non-Muslims? Or just an insignificant detail?
Recommended.
The Big Cheese by Jory John and Pete Oswald
John and Oswald have a bestselling series of these picture books: The Bad Seed, The Good Egg, The Sour Grape, etc. It’s easy to see why this book does well: the story is effective, the art is joyful and humorous, and the text has advanced vocabulary (“emanated”, “preoccupied”, “Gorgonzola”) that is used with plenty of context, so the meanings are clear even to readers encountering the words for the first time.
I don’t imagine this being a child’s favorite book, but it’s enjoyable.
Recommended.
Tadpole’s Promise by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross
A cute story with an arresting and irreverent turnabout at the end. The art has a loose style that works well in some places, less well in others. This book is formatted to be read while turned 90 degrees, so the pages flip upward. But I didn’t think the unusual form helped the story; there was often nothing happening on an entire page.
Recommended.
El Pez que Encontró el Océano (The Fish That Found the Sea) by Alan Watts and Khoa Le
A Spanish version of a story by the philosopher Alan Watts, one that he used to tell his children, which was only published decades later.
The fish protagonist suddenly realizes that there’s nothing holding him up, and he starts to plummet, flailing wildly. But then he realizes that the support he needs is all around him—that he’s not alone in a void, but buoyed constantly by water that holds him and by his own power.
I appreciate this fable, though I find this sort of metaphor abstract and difficult to connect to—as I also find “Footsteps” and similar portraits of God told in secular friendly ways. It’s all fine to say that something continuous surrounds us and supports us constantly. But, like, does it? I find it more useful to envision a web of concrete social relationships, both current and past, providing structure on which I can stand, and which I can hold.
Recommended.
Snap! By Anna Walker
A primarily visual story about a frog trying to get past predators to find its friends. The story is intentionally minimal, with onomatopoeias punctuating the frog’s narrow escapes. I like the art, which reminds me of Christian Robinson and Eric Carle; I’m sure they share influences. Is there a name for this style, which many children’s book illustrators use?
Recommended.
Blackout by John Rocco
A blackout in a city leads to spontaneous forms of togetherness. The art style has a throwback quality with echoes of Maurice Sendak; it’s a bit stiff and over-polished for my tastes, but the pages are vivid. I enjoyed the warm message of connection, but I’m not sure enough is done with the premise.
Recommended.
Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman
The first of three books I read that each deal with chance as fickle and unexpected—even, maybe, subversive.
Fortunately, the Milk is an absurdist romp in the tradition of Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein and Norton Juster. There are Neil Gaiman touches here and there, and plenty of clever setup that lets him reprise elements of the plot in cute ways. The artwork does a good job of reflecting the spirit and tone of the text, although the final image, which I think is intended to acutely suggest that the tall tale you’ve read was real, doesn’t quite fit with the text or other images.
The length is unusual; it’s longer than nearly all books you would read to a child in one sitting, but too short to really be called a chapter book. That places it in the realm of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, intended primarily for kids to read to themselves.
Recommended.
Fortunately by Remy Charlip
A simple book where good fortune and bad fortune alternate, evoking the classical fable where a farmer at war time experiences wild swings of good and bad luck. The situations here are light and casual, though I wished at times they felt less random and cutesy; for instance, the final stroke of good luck is that the character lands in a surprise party for him. Still, most kids would enjoy this, and the art is distinctive and memorable in an unpolished way.
Recommended.
Fortunately, Unfortunately by Michael Foreman
Yet another elaborate yarn in the tradition of folktales where good and bad luck alternate. The art is expressive and playful, and the scenarios are delightfully outlandish, even though I think Foreman doesn’t understand the core elements that make this storytelling tradition engaging:
- the good luck must actually be good
- the bad luck must actually be bad
- and the swings of luck should grow out of aspects of the previous instance of luck.
That is, it’s satisfying when the hero out-fences a pirate, only for the defeated pirate’s pipe to fall onto the gunpowder! That unintended cause-effect connection is what makes the genre engaging. But being dropped by a tornado onto a lake isn’t especially “good”; then learning that dinosaurs live by the lake isn’t especially “bad” (and doesn’t interestingly undermine any aspect of the previous good luck); and then the lake being in the crater of a volcano that erupts and throws the hero into the sky doesn’t feel like a consequence that pays off what came before.
Not recommended.
Becoming Vanessa by Vanessa Brantley-Newton
Vanessa, a young Black girl with an expressive sense of style, feels out of place in her new school: her classmates and teacher find her too loud, too showy, too eager. All of that, any child can relate to.
There’s also the problem that… her first name is too long. Huh?
I appreciate the story of affirmation, but I found this unfocused.
Not recommended.
I Love You, Stinky Face by Lisa McCourt and Cyd Moore
A cute book in the tradition of Runaway Bunny, where a mother promises her child that she would still love and take care of them even if circumstances were very different; in this case, if they were monstrous.
It’s a sweet way to give a caregiver the chance to tell a child that they can count on them, and I can imagine this eliciting giggles. But it felt monotonous to me after like the 5th scenario. Some scenarios are very similar to each other, and after the final scenario the book just ends, with no attempt at a twist or a coda.
Not recommended.
Doll-E 1.0 by Shanda McCloskey
A girl is given a very girlish and unsophisticated talking doll, and is offended at the limited vision of femininity that this doll suggests. So she makes some changes!
Great premise, and I do appreciate the spirit of creative reclamation here. But I wish McCloskey didn’t treat technology so much like magic; her various hacks vary wildly in their difficulty and meaning. The first thing she does to mess with the doll is to download and install a software update for it, which is all the way at the “totally doable” (but also, inconsequential?) end of the scale. But the last thing she does is add on an expanding robot arm of her own design, which works perfectly on the first try.
Not recommended.
Knight Owl by Christopher Denise
Lovely art, with a light-hearted story about a small owl who wants to be a knight. The problem is that the book keeps telling us that Owl is truly “a real knight”—it can’t decide if it’s about defying such exclusive and fixed definitions of identity, or if it’s just about an outsider whose extra pluck means he deserves to be inside the exclusive club. Either of those could have worked; I can imagine a metaphor here for, say, immigrants (my grandparents, for example) who want to slam the door behind them.
Owl eventually proves his worth by coming up with an unusual alternative snack to offer a violent creature (OK, I’ll spoil it: he offers a dragon pizza, instead of eating yet another knight). But that idea doesn’t come from any outsider perspective Owl has, and it isn’t teased earlier in the book, so it feels arbitrary.
Not recommended.
The Electric Slide and Kai by Kelly J. Baptist and Darnell Johnson
I’m incredibly glad there are books telling the stories of Black families, and showing family traditions around dance, intergenerational intimacy, and community-building. But this book is way too wordy and long (over 1200 words), and its approach to drama and resolution are shaky. It’s as though the publisher, Lee & Low Books, didn’t take the responsibility to edit this book seriously.
The main character, Kai, has a problem: everyone else in his family is known for their dancing, while he… wait for it… trips himself and falls over whenever he dances.
Guys. That’s not a real problem, and kids know that. You know what is a real problem? Other kids making fun of you for dancing awkwardly.
The same goes for how he eventually does learn to dance. In real life, you know what helps you dance better? Dancing a lot, spending time with people showing you how to dance, having a good time. Instead, Kai is just told to have his heart in the right place, and is told generic things about dance. I think this type of resolution-through-revelation doesn’t do justice to the work that kids do growing up, the practicing in a mirror, the labor of it all.
Not recommended.
A Sky Without Lines by Krystia Basil and Laura Borràs
I appreciate the concept here: a boy whose older brother has crossed the border into another country imagines various ways he could go under, around, or through that “line” to visit him. Finally, he imagines meeting his brother in the sky, because the sky has no lines.
The adult in me nodded inwardly at the elegance and poetry of the central metaphor and the book’s simple, repetitive structure. But the child in me, faced with such minimalist text and artwork, was left cold. I yearned for more story, more character context. The page that stood out to me was one where the boy remembers his brother teaching him how to remove the shoelaces from his shoes, so he wouldn’t have to tie them. I wished for more of that!
Not recommended.
Be a Friend by Salina Yoon
A picture book about a boy who only communicates in mime, and feels alone. His loneliness is resolved when he meets a girl who acts as a mirror to him, echoing his every move; she is exactly the companion he always needed.
I appreciate Yoon’s celebration of friendship, but the story would be richer if our lonely artist’s new friend had a different unique quirk, rather than one that is merely in service of his; there’s a Pygmalion quality here, a sense that this girl exists for him instead of encountering him as an equal.
Yoon could also do more to sell the reader on the boy’s passion for mime. Get us a bit obsessed with mime, along with him! Contrast this to, say, Ian Falconer’s Olivia, where Falconer shows Olivia’s obsession with the theatrical dance methods of Martha Graham — and turns the reader on to them in the process.
Not recommended.
The Year We Learned to Fly by Jacqueline Woodson
I gather that the concept behind this book was to take the traditional Black American folktale “The People Could Fly” (the lead folk story in the collection by that name, edited by Virginia Hamilton), and to reconceive it as a story for and about kids, set in the present day.
It’s a lovely idea, and I love Woodson’s artwork and her layouts. But the story itself takes a long time to get off of the ground, and it includes some distracting choices. For example, the mother has a refrain she tells her kids when they complain about something (say, being bored): “Surely somewhere, someone is bored”. I puzzled over these lines, unsure how Woodson intended me to read them.
Not recommended.
The Fate of Fausto by Oliver Jeffers
A demanding jerk travels around, demanding that others bow to him. Eventually he dies, and no one misses him, because the trappings of power he extracted are ultimately meaningless, and cannot compare to the power of caring.
I appreciate the message here, and the final image, of a world that need not bother to even remember this valueless conqueror, is profound. But I didn’t feel the mechanism of his getting his way by stamping and screaming quite worked. I didn’t feel convincing, even within the rules of the story.
Not recommended.
Meerkat Mail by Emily Gravett
A book about a meerkat who leaves home, but keeps finding situations that don’t work for him better than home did, and which force him to move on. Eventually, the meerkat returns home, appreciating it anew.
The format of this book is delightful, with postcards on every other page that the meerkat protagonist sends back from his journey around the world. But the story, and the actual content of the postcards, are lackluster. The problems he finds with the places he stays make sense at the start, but as the book goes on, they begin to feel arbitrary. For example, the meerkat leaves Madagascar because it’s too dark! (He arrives at night time, you see.)
I don’t know, maybe I missed the point—is the idea that he actually wants to go home, but can’t admit that to himself? If so, I needed that to be made more clear.
Not recommended.
Dino-Mike book 1: Dino-Mike and the T. Rex Attack by Franco Aureliani
An early-reader chapter book with occasional pictures about a boy who knows a lot about dinosaurs, who gets embroiled in a time-traveling caper involving a dinosaur smuggler and a real-life T-Rex.
The story is very simple, and the twists and surprises mostly consist of superpowers provided by a high-tech hoodie that he is given. The fact that resolutions come from deus ex machina gadgetry, and not from character strengths, makes the already thin plot unsatisfying. Still, for a dinosaur-obsessed kid, this might be fun.
Not recommended.
Everyone… by Christopher Silas Neal
A picture book about how everyone has feelings, and it’s okay to cry. I appreciate the intention here, but there’s no story, not even one implied by the illustrations. Instead, there are declarations of fact with nothing to anchor them. I have trouble imagining a child responding meaningfully to this approach. For example, take the declaration that “When you cry, you’re not alone.” How does that actually comfort a child reader, when they find themselves crying later? Who is with them? In what way?
Not recommended.
The Wonderful Things You Will Be by Emily Winfield Martin
A sweet, simple, songlike book, in the voice of a parent telling a child that they’re excited to see them grow up, excited to see them explore the world, excited to learn what they will be interested in.
I like the variety of future possibilities. And yet, the whole thing seems very pastel, very devoid of surprises. For a book about a young person’s agency, these scenarios seem surprisingly stage-managed by adults. For the text: “Will you tell a story that only you know?”, we see children putting on a play with sets and costumes. But these sets and costumes appear to have been made by adults, and the subject appears to be a fable—also something probably handed down by adults. For “Take care of things much smaller than you?”, a child has made a pair of tiny mini pants for a squirrel—funny, but could we really not conjure something that a child could actually do, in real life?
The artwork is also very cutesy, with the children almost all having exaggeratedly rosy cheeks; they look like old fashioned dolls. They also appear to be White, with few exceptions.
It’s not a bad way to get a child thinking about the future, but it feels like a missed opportunity to engage more deeply with children’s understanding of the world, their identities and their senses of themselves.
Not recommended.
Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin and James Dean
The first in the bestselling Pete the Cat series, this book keeps things very simple: Pete keeps stepping in different things that color his shoes that color. Strawberries: red! Mud: brown! But is he stressed about it? No way.
The laid-back vibe is cool, but I wanted more; it felt empty. Even the accompanying song (available for free online) felt lackluster. Kids might enjoy the book’s repetitive nature and folk-style art, but if I didn’t know this series was a hit, I wouldn’t have guessed readers would find it memorable. Maybe kids just want things simpler than I think they should!
Not recommended.
How to Catch a Unicorn by Adam Wallace and Andy Elkerton
This is a colossal bestseller, and I was curious if there is something to learn from it. For starters, the title is compelling — it feels transgressive to imagine trapping something as precious and saccharine as a unicorn. It even carries an edge of danger.
But the story itself is thin and forgettable. None of the action comes from character qualities. The unicorn enters the human realm for no particular reason; neither is there any reason why the pack of kids decide to catch it.
Then follows a series of traps set by the kids, nearly all of which are just variations on the same familiar: a lure under a net or cage, that will be dropped onto the unicorn. A few times, a zoo animal comes to the aid of the unicorn by disrupting the trap, but often they do nothing, and there is nothing to gather from looking at the scene except that it is yet another failed attempt to catch the unicorn.
The rhymes make for clunky storytelling; Wallace doesn’t realize that rhymes work best when they create a sense of anticipation. For example, here there is no reason to anticipate that he unicorn will shrink its size (is that even a thing?), nor a reason to anticipate a mention of butterflies:
Now I’m off to see more friends.
It’s time to shrink my size!
But it sure is hard to see in here
with all these butterflies!
If you wonder if the illustration shows a thick cloud of butterflies, or if the size or the butterflies matters at all in the plot—no, and no.
The good thing is that this book makes me want to try writing a better version of it.
Not recommended.
Benji, the Bad Day, and Me by Sally J. Pla and Ken Min
A story about two brothers, one autistic and one not, who both have hard days at school and need comfort once they’re back at home. The older brother, who is not autistic, feels like he doesn’t get the accommodation and support that his younger brother does. But when his younger brother hears him crying, he comes over to comfort him.
The resolution here is sweet, but I didn’t think the page by page writing quite clicked. For example, the list of things that went so bad for the older brother, like “they ran out of my favorite pizza”, doesn’t sound believable. It’s anodyne, as though Pla is avoiding more familiar reasons to be upset, that might trigger painful memories in child readers.
My favorite part was when the boy’s mom condescendingly warns the older brother not to disturb his younger brother’s elaborate blocks setup; little does she know that the older brother worked on it too. Now that’s the kind of thing that drives a sibling crazy.
Not recommended.
My Baba’s Garden by Jordan Scott and Sydney Smith
A memory by the author, of his childhood relationship with his Polish grandmother. She brought many old world ways when she moved to Canada after World War II, and spoke little English.
The artwork is uneven, sometimes vivid and evocative, but sometimes muddy and bland.
On my first read through, I was puzzled at the narrative, which felt uneven and not fully realized. Reading the author’s note, I realized that every single detail was taken from his life, and that made sense of the narrative problems. His deep associations with these details make it hard for him to see the narrative from a reader’s perspective, and to distinguish story beats that will be meaningful to others.
The proximity to the subject can also leave a writer with a false sense of having painted a full portrait. This leads to miscommunication. For example, at some point the boy asks his grandmother why she picks up worms and puts them in her garden. She gets her finger wet, and runs it in lines on his hand, a cryptic response whose meaning seems either mystically poetic or perhaps intended literally but just related poorly. Reading Scott’s author’s note, it becomes clear that he knows exactly what his grandmother meant: that worms dig holes in soil that allow water and oxygen to reach plant roots.
There’s a decision he should have made here, either to provide that explanation within the story, or to exclude the episode, or to somehow communicate to the reader that there was a pattern of explanations that felt cryptic at first, but which eventually revealed his grandmother’s wisdom.
Not recommended.
The Foggy Foggy Forest by Nick Sharratt
A picture book with a simple concept: on each right facing page, you see the silhouette of a figure. Turn the page, and the figure appears on the left, under proper lighting.
Some of these are fun, like an ogre doing yoga, or a witch with a gas engine-powered broom. But the art style isn’t to my taste, and the book doesn’t build on its premise.
Also bizarrely, absolutely all of the people are White — in that pinkish hue that old picture books use. I imagine that this didn’t even feel like a choice to the illustrator; one legacy of White supremacy is the subtle, dangerous notion that White is the default state of a person—even for fantastical characters like fairies. But this is a choice, and it’s a bizarre and harmful one. Some children of color might read this book and not think about that. But all children—including White children—will absorb, incrementally, that Whiteness is expected, and that fantasy is yet another realm where people of color don’t belong.
I’m not saying, by any means, that I’m immune to this sort of subconscious White supremacy. We all need to realize how awfully it stinks, and work to uproot it from our mental foundations.
Not recommended.
The Big Ideas of Buster Bickles by Dave Wasson
Youngster Buster Bickles has creative ideas, but his classmates don’t appreciate him. You know who does? His super-genius inventor uncle—who has just invented a machine that makes dreams real! Finally, someone who not only will tolerate Buster’s ideas, but actually relishes the wildest ones.
It’s fun to see Buster’s wacky ideas come to life. Wasson plays them cartoonishly, so that they have no problematic consequences; but that also means his ideas don’t ultimately matter much. They’re props, not actually valuable in the story except as punchlines.
The problem here is that no one learns anything, and there’s to payoff to the premise. Yes, Buster’s zany ideas save the day, but not because they were particularly clever or interesting.
Not recommended.
One by Kathryn Otoshi
A parable about standing up for yourself and others, featuring anthropomorphized colors.
To make this sort of abstract story work, the concepts have to align in crisp, solid ways. Here, they felt muddled — especially when the colors all turn into numbers, the meaning of which escapes me.
Not recommended.
Grumpy Monkey by Suzanne Lang and Max Lang
The monkey is grumpy, and various animals try to console him—each in a manner that reflects their animal nature.
The problem is, there’s no point to the animal interactions here. The monkey is in denial about being grumpy, and none of the interactions matter or do anything fun or interesting to challenge this.
The very last two pages show another monkey friend taking a different approach—just sitting and being with the monkey, reframing being grumpy as something it’s okay to feel together. That works, but it’s not much of a payoff for the book as a whole.
Not recommended.
The Stuff of Stars by Marion Dane Bauer and Ekua Holmes
A visually striking telling of the cosmic history of the universe.
I expected this to be a compelling book about how we—and everything around us—are made from atoms that were formed by fusion inside stars. But instead, that stellar fact never gets talked about, and the whole concept of “the stuff of stars” is never explained!
The art is beautiful, but it often seems arbitrary, like any given page could be reshuffled to pair with any given text, and the book would be the same.
Not recommended.
The Leaf Thief by Alice Hemming
A squirrel sees leaves disappearing from its tree, and thinks they are being stolen by a thief! But the thief is only the wind.
I totally get the concept, but it’s just not that compelling an idea, and not much else is done with the concept. Why should the squirrel care about leaves on tree branches? Do leaves matter at all to squirrels?
Great art in a throwback vein, meant to look like certain children’s books from the ‘40s.
Not recommended.
Letters to a Prisoner by Jacques Goldstein
I appreciate the vision here: to tell a story of the power of sending letters to political prisoners. But the symbolic fable that’s spun here feels outlandish, where I would hope it would feel grounded. And the artwork, in a cartoonish style common in France, feels wacky where I would hope it would feel weighty.
Not recommended.
Swimmy by Leo Lionni
Published in 1964, this is a parable about many tiny fish organizing together to be larger and stronger than a fish that was attacking them. The art is beautiful here, and the overall concept is memorable, but the story doesn’t build on the initial concept.
Do the fish experience any of the joys and sorrows of bottom-up decision-making? No, they are basically just commanded to assemble by “Swimmy”, an unfortunately-named fish who, for no clear reason, is a different color than all the other fish. Does Swimmy have to learn to think in terms of “we” rather than in terms of “I”? Nope.
Lionni doesn’t explore any complexities or implications of the world he’s created. The whole thing really could have been a single image. (Of course, this idea is featured on posters and t-shirts, perhaps thanks to Lionni?)
Not recommended.
Cozy by Jan Brett
The artwork here is beautiful and memorable, but the storytelling feels unfocused. It immediately starts using unfamiliar words without explaining them, which gets in the way. What is a “tussock” or a “triple carry”? Why does the owl call the musk ox “Oomingmak”?
The storytelling feels torn between presenting a realistic portrait of animals in the arctic, versus an anthropomorphized one where animals relate to each other in ways they wouldn’t in real life. And then it takes a turn that feels way out of step with the book so far: a team of huskies arrives, commanded not by a human but by a sea otter.
Not recommended.
I am Small by Qin Leng
The concept is that Mimi, the protagonist, feels bad about being small — but then comes to appreciate aspects of it. And then she is surprised by her parents with a younger baby sibling, and she promises them that they will get bigger — showing that she identifies, finally, with her small-but-growing size in a healthy, prideful way.
But the execution doesn’t work. First of all, the problems with being small don’t feel especially compelling. This is a waste, because kids care about injustice — they are ready to feel righteous indignation! But instead, these inconveniences, like having trouble seeing the options at a bakery, seem inconsequential.
Then, the shift to good aspects of being small doesn’t come out of action, or character — other people just start saying they’re jealous of Mimi ‘s small size, for reasons that don’t make much sense.
Finally, the reveal of the surprise baby sibling is undercut by the questions that this raises.
Not recommended.
Ravi’s Roar by Tom Percival
Another book about being too small, one that does a decent job of showing why a child would feel ashamed and frustrated when trying to do what older children do. When Ravi feels wronged, he turns into a tiger and wreaks furious havoc—a striking metaphor for an angry tantrum.
However, the resolution comes too easily, showing the world as adults wish it were rather than how children actually experience it. For instance, a man taking tickets for a large slide turns Ravi away, but he is kind about it. That’s a missed opportunity, because plenty of adults cruelly or ignorantly brush children off without considering their feelings. Kids know this, and it’s a bit cowardly for adults to pretend otherwise.
In another example, when Ravi runs with his family to catch a train, he is the last to make it, and that he has to sit with his dad and their dog. Clearly—at least, to me—the issue here is that he doesn’t get to sit with his older, cooler, bigger brothers. But we’re told the problem is that he didn’t get a “comfy” seat, and that the dog farted.
Rave’s aggressive transformation is compelling, but again, there are missed opportunities. Ravi is shown as completely oblivious to the way he is alienating others. But in kids I’ve observed, and — ahem — been, this kind of destructive disruption is more often intended to alienate others, even if that intention isn’t understood by the child themselves. I think this could have been suggested better by the art and text.
Ravi’s complex feelings immediately resolve themselves by his saying sorry. This happens fast, and I think it could have benefited from even one more page of his being conflicted, and not knowing what to do.
I also think it’s a mistake to say that that one time was the last time he ever turned into a tiger.
The art is wonderful, though, with a superb balance of precise layouts and loose, expressive lines.
Not recommended.
The Big Bed by Bunmi Laditan
A book about a little girl who wants to snuggle in bed with her mom — and to kick out her dad!
This is cute, but I didn’t find it compelling. Of course I’m familiar with the types of rivalries and impulses that make kids feel things like this from time to time, but I didn’t think this was handled with much insight here.
Not recommended.
Miriam at the River by Jane Yolen and Khoa Le
A poetic retelling of the story of Moses’s sister Miriam floating him down the river. Khoa Le’s art is breathtaking, with the motif of flowing shapes carrying over from plants in the water to other elements like hair, trees and leaves.
A challenge in retelling and old and familiar story is to make it have the immediacy of the moment, rather than seeming inevitable. But the poetic form and omnipotent standard poetic voice here do the opposite:
Sage, bulrush, papyrus, reeds, / all I need to hide my brother / from the Pharaoh’s men, / and hide me from prying Egyptian eyes.
Don’t get me wrong, these lines have an attractive poetic rhythm to them. But they don’t have drama or immediacy. Miriam is 7 years old, enslaved, risking her life to keep her brother from being murdered. That should be riveting!
Similarly, the book alludes to Miriam’s being a prophet (the first ever!) and again, I wish this were made to feel more fresh. What might it actually be like to channel mysterious messages? I did love one such moment: when Miriam gets a vision of the Red Sea parting, it is described only in colors and shapes, and she doesn’t know what to make of it. Yolen’s text reads:
Father says prophecy is a cloudy glass, / a muddy River, a curtain pulled a bit aside.
A retelling of a familiar story is a chance to tell aspects that people may not have imagined, and to answer questions they may have wondered. Yolen and Le don’t do much to use this opportunity visually (say, to show how the Pharaoh’s section of the Nile might be delineated from the section of the same river, where Miriam sets Moses afloat), but they do give Pharaoh’s daughter a page from her perspective:
She has no child of her own. / She will hear a baby’s cry, / draw him from the river. / She will be mother to a slave, / who will capture her heart, / until another water parts.
However, we then are told she will call him “Moses… for he was drawn from the water”, with no explanation for what the name actually means.
Finally, in the postscript note, it’s quickly mentioned that much of this story doesn’t actually come from the Bible, it comes from midrash, which is commentary that various rabbis have made and added over the centuries. I think that’s a much more significant fact about this story than people might think. For instance, from my quick research, it seems that in all traditional tellings and in Exodus itself, it is Moses’s mother who places him in the river, not his sister Miriam. I like the deviation from the storytelling here, but I wish the author let the reader in on the revisionism she’s engaging in.
Not recommended.
Children’s nonfiction books
I am interpreting “nonfiction” loosely here. Is factual education the overall purpose of a book? It’s OK if there are some invented characters who frame the story, or help the author make the information personal.
Weeds Find a Way by Cindy Jenson-Elliott and Carolyn Fisher
A nonfiction book about all of the ways weeds manage to survive and thrive, just about anywhere: by spreading their seeds prolifically; by irritating animals who might eat them; by breaking apart easily when you try to uproot them.
This could have been a rote recitation of facts, but instead each page is laid out uniquely, incorporating the text in interesting ways. The art is inspired, organically blending representational, symbolic and expressionistic elements. The text, as a whole, brings the reader into appreciation for the persistence and pluck that weeds show.
Weeds are something that every child sees regularly, and having read this, the lens with which children look at their world — down to even the cracks in the sidewalk — will change subtly.
Highly recommended.
Outside In by Deborah Underwood and Cindy Derby
A fresh take on the classic trope of trying to convince children that nature is relevant to them. Underwood and Derby’s thesis: as humans spend more and more time inside, the outside finds all sorts of ways to be part of our inside lives. We bring it in deliberately, via flowers and plants, food, and pets; and it finds its way in on its own, via sunlight and bugs and temperature. This angle is unexpected and imaginative, and Derby’s watercolor art brings it to life in unique and unexpected ways, with images that are simultaneously representational and abstract.
Highly recommended.
Someone Builds the Dream by Lisa Wheeler and Loren Long
There’s no story and no character development here, just a repeating cycle showing a physical project being planned, then executed. The message is that we shouldn’t lionize top-level designers and politicians, at the expense of the workers and tradespeople who painstakingly build the darn things.
This book places blue-collar work squarely in the same realm of vision and dream as architects and planners; the riveters and steamrollers are dreamers, too, and deserve just as much pride as the people whose names are mentioned first.
The images and rhyming poetry are just right — they carry your eye and ear through the pages, always keeping the focus on the point being made, and reinforcing it with enough detail to be rich and thorough, but not too busy. The visual style—subtly reminiscent of Diego Rivera, socialist realism and the Works Progress Administration murals of the 1930s—stays warm and accessible, while managing to make every fold of fabric and rolling hill beautiful.
Without a story, I’m not sure that this could be a child’s favorite book. But it’s hard to think of how this concept could have been executed any better. This is a perspective-altering read — or rather, for a child, a perspective-building one.
Highly recommended.
The Hike by Alison Farrell
A group of kids explore the wilderness. There’s no real story here, but the set of characters gives a sense of momentum and continuity.
Farrell integrates writing and artwork in a variety of ways, making each page fresh in its blend of storytelling text, voice balloons, and labels. She labels not just the names of plants and animals, but “porcupine climbing a tree”, “hollow tree”, etc.
Throughout, we see the characters writing and drawing in notebooks, and at the end we get a few pages of raw notebook, full of observations.
A child could read this ten times and notice something new each time, and yet it doesn’t feel overwhelming or over-stuffed.
Highly recommended.
Kid Scientist: Insect Experts in the Rain Forest by Sue Fliess and Mia Powell
This isn’t a story book, so much as simplified telling of how entomologists might conduct a scientific field study, starting with hearing a tentative claim from an observer, then forming a hypothesis, investigating in person, taking notes, collecting specimens, examining them, reading related literature, writing up and announcing their findings. Throughout, these young scientists collaboratively build understanding.
The production here is hasty: the characters are interchangeable, and their images are copied and pasted, rather than redrawn. That said, the scientific inquiry here is meaningful, with a variety of details and observations used to form the scientists’ final conclusions. After reading this, I really do better understand what entomologists actually do. It’s rare to find so clear a portrait of what adult work consists of. I’d love similar books on many more professions, and what they involve in their daily work.
Finally, I appreciate that this book depicts a diverse group of kids. That has become standard, thankfully, but it’s still worth stopping to appreciate—especially that this group includes a child with a topknotted turban, who is presumably Sikh.
Highly recommended.
Hands-On Science: Motion by Lola M. Schaefer and Druscilla Santiago
I liked this much more than Schaefer & Santiago’s Matter, another book in the series. Their approach — where you interact with the book as though you are using it to conduct various experiments — really works here. Of course, this can’t compare to a live experiment, but it has its own merits, in engaging a child’s imagination, and stimulating them to create manipulable mental models.
I would have appreciated more distinctions, such as the difference between acceleration and momentum; but by keeping the scope very narrow, they make the book accessible.
The final page was a wonderful touch: it shows kids playing outside in ways that invoke the physics phenomena the book has presented, and invites the reader to keep these concepts in mind while going about their lives. This sets learners up to transfer their knowledge to new contexts, to form new understandings.
Highly recommended.
Mysterious Patterns: Finding Fractals in Nature by Sarah C. Campbell and Richard P. Campbell
I’m curious why this book’s publisher chose to focus the title and the cover on fractals themselves, when the book is very much about the intellectual journey of Benoit Mandelbrot in defining and exploring them.
The story is told well, with a procession of examples of increasing complexity. Campbell struggles a bit at the end — totally understandably — to articulate why the discovery of fractals matter. And the human element of this story could have been emphasized more. But this is excellent explanatory writing, and communicated a solid understanding of the basics of its topic in a way that everyone can understand. It’s the sort of book I wish everyone would read, a testament to the pedagogical power of an effective picture book.
Highly recommended.
How the Sea Came to Be: And All the Creatures In It by Jennifer Berne and Amanda Hall
A picture book about the history of the world, focusing entirely on the oceans. This is very much an educational book, not a storybook. It covers a lot of ground with a small number of words, using illustrations that artfully bridge detail and abstraction.
About halfway in, a page appears oriented sideways, making you turn the book 90 degrees to read it. This trick fits the topic perfectly, because it’s talking about the extensive vertical depth of the oceans, and bringing focus down, down, down into the ghostly deep sea.
Berne’s use of rhyming text here allows her to pack in lots of animal descriptions, without it feeling exhausting. There are a few hiccups (my tongue stumbled over “Oh, the oceans they shimmer with such wondrous lives!”), but the rhythms mostly feel natural and are a delight to read.
I do wish the book closed with more of a sense of what to learn next, beyond just appreciating the sea and its history and diversity.
I didn’t find the back matter particularly compelling; there are lots of definitions of obscure terms, and an awkward four page-wide gatefold map of the Earth’s eons that doesn’t need the breadth.
Highly recommended.
How to Eat in Space by Helen Taylor and Stevie Lewis
A picture book about an appealing topic that can pull a child into interest in innovation and space technology. This jumps right into the action, maybe too fast—we immediately see an astronaut eating something, but what it is, and how the packaging works, isn’t clear.
Does a good job of introducing facts in the context of an unfolding explanation. It’s not quite a story, but it has shape.
The text frequently teases the next page (“For a taste of home, you can always… [turn page] GROW YOUR OWN SALAD.”), giving the book a sense of momentum rather than making it feel like a list of disjointed observations.
The artwork is warm and keeps the focus on whatever the text is discussing. And the back matter is written in a more entertaining style than most.
Highly recommended.
Ada’s Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer by Fiona Robinson
A phenomenal integration of clear explanation, relatable storytelling, and evocative art. Robinson’s designs and layouts bridge representation and symbolic expression, helping communicate aspects of the story visually, and freeing the text to be brief.
The book is a crisp 30 pages (many biographical picture books are longer), and feels even shorter. There are details of Lovelace’s life that I missed, but I appreciate Robinson’s discipline in cutting a huge set of topics down to a digestible size.
My favorite part is the way Robinson explains a version of Lovelace’s programming logic, by using interlocking spirals of color. I’ve never seen this approach, and of course it is wildly simplified, but I think it’s just complex enough to push at the boundaries of a young reader’s mind.
Highly recommended.
Ada Lovelace: First Computer Programmer (Computer Pioneers series) by Amy Hayes
At first glance, I thought this book was a hastily designed, generic book about Lovelace. And it does have some phrasing here and there that seems dashed off, like that Ada’s mother was “a strange woman for her time”.
But the text is full of surprising facts that are usually skipped over elsewhere. For instance: a young Ada wrote in her journal that she didn’t like math, and her mother made her go back and rewrite this, promising to work harder and make her mother happy.
Another: that Charles Babbage’s initial impetus for creating the Difference Engine was that he and a friend kept finding arithmetic errors in astronomical tables; frustrated, he supposedly said aloud “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!”.
One more: that Babbage showed off his model of the Difference Engine to guests as a novelty, but Lovelace spent extended time examining it and learning how it worked. That’s a valuable anecdote, because it helps show something that each of us can learn from Ada: to examine extraordinary creative work around us with attention, and not merely to pass it by. This — and extended discussion of Ada’s unusually thorough, expensive education — also unpack the imposing, alienating label of “genius”. Ada wasn’t of another species from the rest of us, but she went beyond just being an obedient student, and eagerly dug in and asked endless questions at times when other people just smiled and went on with their lives.
There are other passing explanations that I appreciate, such as telling the reader that having a governess was like homeschooling, using a paid professional. I never thought of it that way before.
Highly recommended.
The Blanket Where Violet Sits by Allan Wolf and Lauren Tobia
In the tradition of Charles and Ray Eames’s Powers of Ten, this rhyming picture book the starts by talking about a little girl sitting in a field, and zooms out to describe the planet, the solar system, the galaxy, and beyond.
Part of what makes this book work is that it does not follow a pattern monotonically. Instead, it zooms out, then back in, then back out further. This provides looseness, and breathing room for an aside that imagines someone looking back at us.
The adults with Violet, who are not described verbally but who seem to be her parents, include one person who appears male, and one whose gender is less clearly signaled—they might be male, or nonbinary, or non-gender-conforming female. That we get to see this scene of queer domesticity, with the adults holding hands and looking at each other lovingly, is a subtle bonus.
The rhythm of the text, and the rhyme scheme, work together satisfyingly, feeling neat and elegant.
All that said, I confess that something in this book left me a bit cold. It feels thin, more like a quick snack than a meal; maybe the issue is that there is no drama or tension, no story, no point where it sets up an expectation and then upends it?
Highly recommended.
Calling All Minds: How To Think and Create Like an Inventor by Temple Grandin
A wonderful book with a unique voice and infectious enthusiasm, that is difficult to recommend; it’s a bit sprawling in length, focus and practicality.
Grandin has a unique voice that makes this book much more engaging and immersive than your typical book about making things. Her attention bounces from topic to topic rapidly, which can be disorienting, but it also means that every time she takes an aside and spends a few pages detailing the life of some inventor, you can feel her enthusiasm and interest.
The book is also full of casual and irreverent wording that editors wouldn’t allow, if the author didn’t already have such a strong personal brand. In recent years, I’ve read a few books and articles by autistic people or those who work with, and love, autistic people. I’m coming to appreciate the ways that autism focuses writers on interests directly, and ignores formal tropes.
Here she is, explaining how to turn an inflatable origami box into an effective water bomb:
One last paper project we really loved as kids was water bombs, which I highly recommend if you want to extremely annoy a big sister or brother like I did when I was about seven years old. Believe it or not, regular printer paper will make a really good water bomb. The secret is coloring one side of the paper completely with crayons. The wax from the crayon will work as a seal and keep the water from saturating the paper. (Remember, wood fibers are broken down to make paper, so adding water will break down your paper unless it’s wax coated.) You could also experiment with using candle wax or ChapStick.
This isn’t wildly different from guidance a kid could get from a typical book, but there is a frankness here that thrills me. Grandin’s tone is that of a conspirator; I can imagine a child smuggling this book out at recess, and sharing it like samizdat with a confidant.
This touch of mischief extends to every topic Grandin discusses. On innovation, she’s as delighted to express disgust at stupid patents as she is to appreciate clever inventions (she particularly loves the fine illustrations that accompanied old patent filings). She revels in the fact that as a child, computer pioneer Grace Hopper took apart all of the clocks in her parents’ home — six clocks! That kind of anecdote is a bit dangerous, something some parents might not want their kid using as a model. Which is why this book is special.
What doesn’t work as well are the 25 do-it-yourself projects Grandin includes. These types of project instructions are very hard to get right; I have published a few of my own in Make Magazine, and I’ve tried hard to identify components that people will have on hand, to explain clearly about alternatives, and in the case of specialty items, to be very specific about how to find them. But most instructionals in Make and elsewhere don’t do this, and about half of Grandin’s involve something obscure, such as “E6000 glue” or “flexible crafting metal or super duty steel strapping coil”. It’s not enough to tell the reader to find these online, where picking one variety of unfamiliar item out of many can feel like a crapshoot.
I also disliked that many of her stories about inventors talk only about the successful final invention, and not how the person got started. For instance, she talks about Palmer Lucky, inventor of the Oculus Rift virtual reality glasses that were acquired by Facebook, tinkering in his garage to create the first Oculus. But, what on Earth did that process look like? How did he even know what kind of components he needed? This is true in the case of non-electronic inventions as well. Yes, let’s applaud the hydraulic jack; but what does day 25 of inventing the hydraulic jack look like? This is related to the problem with the impressive DIY projects: we are made in to spectators standing back and cheering someone else’s achievement, rather than being made into tinkerers ourselves.
Still, this is a special book, one that I could imagine the right child reading and rereading as a sort of Bible. It’s an orientation towards a world of making things on your own and on your own terms, ignoring the crowd, and becoming part of the tradition of people connected by a passion for creating lasting innovations.
Recommended.
Glitter Everywhere!: Where It Came From, Where It’s Found & Where It’s Going by Chris Barton and Chaaya Prabhat
A brilliant project that takes some big swings, but is too wordy and meandering.
We don’t need 70 words on the distinction between the linguistic origins of “flitter” and “glitter”, or 70 more on why the author decided to use the full name of the inventor of glitter, rather than just his first name. We don’t need to hear that the founders of various glitter manufacturing companies don’t do much public speaking about their businesses.
Still, there are tons of great details here, and taking something familiar and telling you it’s history is illuminating. One detail I loved was that some churches, to signal they welcome LGBTQ worshipers, dab congregants’ foreheads with a mixture of ashes and glitter.
What’s more, this book goes beyond the typical environmentalist prescription, and instructs the reader not only to choose better options, but to approach labels with skepticism:
The back matter also includes a long, illuminating discussion of the research processes behind the book.
This is a book I could see being used outside of a purely educational context; it’s legitimately intriguing, and I think demystifying an object that appears in kids’ lives and lending it political, economic and environmental salience is powerful.
Recommended.
Fascinating: the Life of Leonard Nimoy by Richard Michelson and Edel Rodriguez
A picture book about Leonard Nimoy, one of my favorite people from my hometown of Cambridge, MA. Goes beyond the typical biographical picture book, with brief but memorable excursions into Nimoy’s photography, his Judaism, and the silent pain from the Holocaust in his parents’ generation.
It’s not really a book written for children; it’s really more for parents. But I can imagine several unique moments lingering in a child’s memory.
I love this anecdote, about how acting gave Nimoy the power to be someone else:
Ace Vacuum Cleaners was hiring door-to-door salesmen. “You offer a cheap Electrolux for ten dollars,” the boss told him. “But once you get past the front door, you have to talk the housewife into spending one hundred dollars for a fancy machine.”
The first few women slammed the door in his face. The next two let Lenny demonstrate the product, but they didn’t buy anything. Maybe he was too quiet and honest for this job. Then he had an idea. Lenny pretended he was on stage, playing the part of a confident, and slightly shady, salesman. Soon he had a pocket full of money.
Recommended.
My First Coding Book by Kiki Prottsman
A simple introduction to coding logic that makes clever use of pop up features, like flip-ups that reveal something below them, and sliders that let you do a simple form of coding in the book itself.
Some of these features are better done than others. The page on conditionals, for example, muddies the concept by allowing you to move in any direction, rather than simply following the conditionals.
Recommended.
If the Rivers Run Free by Andrea Debbink and Nicole Wong
The very first page here tells you the book’s message in a nutshell:
Not every book needs to work this way, but I appreciate the directness here, and the illustration that makes everything clear at a glance.
The text is written in rhyme, a choice which requires more of an author than they sometimes realize. It’s not a matter just of the rhymes themselves, but of the rhythm of all the words. Try reading this page aloud; it’s awkward on your tongue, right?
Still, the core idea here is compelling, and it goes beyond familiar narratives of reversing pollution, to deeper concepts: humility in the face of nature’s power, rather than the hubris to think we can deny it.
This is a perspective-altering book, one which counters the assumption that cities have rendered nature inert and a luxury, and re-centers nature at the heart of the urban ground beneath your feet.
Recommended.
Beautiful Noise: The Music of John Cage by Lisa Rogers and Il Sung Na
The text of this book repeatedly asks, “What if you did cool thing X? Then you’d be like John Cage.” I’m not convinced that this approach works. But it’s fun to learn about Cage’s experiments, to see the unusual marks on his music staffs, and to have your sense of what’s possible expanded — even if there’s not really a story here.
Recommended.
Hombre de los Gatos by Karim Shamsi-Basha, Irene Latham, and Yuko Shimizu
This is the Spanish version of the book The Cat Man of Aleppo, a true story of Alaa Ajaleel, a Syrian man who began caring for the city’s abandoned cats. Shimizu’s art is alive, expressive, and perfectly suited to this book’s tone of realism with a dash of dreaming. And the layouts are delightful — look at all those cats!
It’s tricky to get this tone right, but Shamsi-Basha does a nice job of balancing the sadnesses of war with the joys of helping. There is only the barest skeleton of a story: Alaa found himself feeding more and more cats whose owners fled Aleppo or died; donors eventually helped him rent a building to make an operation of it; it was a success and made him, and local children, and — of course — the cats, happy.
It’s really just a premise, not a story, but the warm focus provides a gentle way to expand a child’s vision of the world, including of war. I found myself balking a bit at the absurdity that so many people will donate for cats before they will donate for humans. But on the other hand, in the immortal words of Slavoj Zizek, CUTE LITTLE ABANDONED CATS!!!
Recommended.
The Day the River Caught Fire: How the Cuyahoga River Exploded and Ignited the Earth Day Movement by Barry Wittenstein and Jessie Hartland
A challenging topic for a children’s book, done well. The flattened two-dimensional art style is uniquely loose and memorable. I would have liked more attention to the actual changes that were necessary to clean up the river, and it’s hard to imagine this being a child’s favorite book. But as an informative read, it’s entertaining and does a good job of telling the broader story.
Recommended.
River of Dust: The Life-Giving Link Between North Africa and the Amazon by Jilanne Hoffman and Eugenia Mello
A brilliant idea for a picture book: bring to life the intercontinental winds that carry mineral-rich dust from the Sahel region of Africa, across the Atlantic ocean, all the way to South America.
The wording in some parts could have used editing. “What do I carry?” asks one page. The answer: “Precious cargo needed by all life on Earth:” I brace myself for a list of the precious cargo: probably minerals, maybe bacteria, maybe even seeds? But no; it’s “plants”, “trees”, “animals”… Then I reread the previous page, and realize this is a list of “all life on Earth”, not a list of “precious cargo”.
The art is effective, though I felt on many pages that I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. Was the entire image made up of the special dust? Or just part?
The text could also do more to communicate just what makes this dust so important. The book’s back matter gets into this, but it’s left vague in the story text itself. The back matter also doesn’t get into how scientists figured out this spectacular phenomenon. Still, the topic is intriguing, and it makes for a quick read with beautiful art.
Recommended.
The Fire of Stars: The Life and Brilliance of the Woman Who Discovered What Stars Are Made Of Kirsten W. Larson and Katherine Roy
A picture book biography of Celicia Payne, who discovered that stars consist mostly of hydrogen and helium. Her story is told in parallel with glimpses of the process by which stars are formed. Many pages show a stellar process at the far left, with an episode from Payne’s life filling the rest of the spread.
For instance, in the opening page spread, the left side has italicized text, reading:
Wrapped in a blanket of sparkling space,
an unformed star waits for its bright future to begin.
And the right side has standard text, reading:
Cecilia kicks and cries.
Until her mother
sets her down
so Cecilia can feel with her own tiny toes
the cold and crackly snow,
which isn’t soft and warm like she expected.It’s the first time Cecelia learns
things aren’t always as they seem.
This is a wonderful idea, but I don’t think it quite works. For one thing, it’s unclear how you should read it aloud — do you really read both parts in the order they come, as disjointed as that is? Do the italics indicate that you should shift your voice, your mode? Do you skip the star formation, and then come back and read that?
For another thing, the steps in the star formation don’t match up meaningfully with the events in Payne’s life that they accompany. And the author focuses the narrative on a specific discovery that Payne made about the makeup of existing stars, which has nothing to do with the birth of a star happening in the other half of the book.
Payne’s discovery isn’t given much attention elsewhere, either. She had examined records of the light spectrums produced by various stars, which provide strong clues to the elements they contain, since different atomic structures produce different frequency bands of light when the atoms are excited. That’s a very visual topic, which is ripe for illustration! I’m surprised that we get no direct treatment of it, outside of this oblique textual reference:
Through her careful calculations and hours of observation,
the rainbows of starlight share their secrets with Cecilia.
I know that it’s challenging to explain scientific research in a picture book. Others had misunderstood the evidence before Payne, and she found ways to better understand what was going on; most of the actual work involved compiling notes. But without at least some effort to convey her discovery process to the reader, Larson must resort to metaphors like a “lightning bolt” of understanding.
I worry that presenting innovation as sudden and heaven-sent sends the wrong message to readers. Doing the opposite—showing a reader that they can follow along with an insight, even in a rudimentary way—would work against the sense so many children have that science is someone else’s business, exclusive of them. And it would demonstrate to the reader that they too are capable of profound understanding.
There are good parts, too, and the art is beautiful and expressive throughout. In one brilliant layout, Larson and Roy cleverly use the same lecture hall illustration to double for two separate episodes in Payne’s life: the public talk that inspired her to study physics, and her later experience as the only female student in physics courses.
Recommended.
Just Right: Searching for the Goldilocks Planet by Curtis Manley and Jessica Lanan
This beautifully illustrated book starts with its text short and clear, its ideas carefully presented. It begins with relatable questions, and slowly opens up in scope.
But then halfway through, this discipline collapses, the storytelling stops, and the pages become full of diagrams, explanations and new vocabulary.
What’s worse is that the vocabulary is unnecessarily obscure. On the Kepler space telescope, we see “solar power array”, with no explanation. But an “array” is just a sequence of similar things; if you’re not going to define “array”, why not just say “solar panels”? Same with “high-gain antenna”; why not call it, I don’t know, an “direction-specific antenna”—or better yet, “antenna always pointed at Earth”? Don’t get me started on “avionics”.
There are many places that wording could be tweaked to make the concepts more accessible. Explaining spectroscopy, Manley writes that “some stars show signs of chemicals that only planets can have.” (But then, how do the stars show signs of those chemicals?) When we start to see specific exoplanets, we are told facts like “Size: 0.75 x Jupiter”. Why not (“9 times as wide as Earth”?) And the back matter is mostly a wall of text, together with a dense timeline.
The text focuses only on explaining astronomical ideas, but the lively illustrations also tell a wordless background story of a child of color who becomes fascinated by the question of life existing elsewhere in the universe. This provides a bit of character to keep the book from being too abstract.
And the book closes by returning to its starting form, with illustrations of what life on other planets might look like, and questions about what we might want to tell other creatures, if we ever do find them.
A mixed bag, but with lots to intrigue, inform and delight a young reader.
Recommended.
All the Ways to Be Smart by Danna Bell
A great message about “smart” looking like many different things. I did find the message muddled by fantasy elements which undercut the clarity of the message, like “smart” meaning being good at “riding dragons”. There are no developed characters here and no story, which limits the rereadability. But it’s a message every child should hear.
The artwork is memorable, with a slightly florescent orange ink that really pops off the page.
Recommended.
The Extraordinary Book That Makes You An Artist by Mary Richards and Go Suga
A book of art-making activities, with punchy, pop-art visuals. I didn’t always love its Yellow Submarine-esque style; the visual design has a sameness that makes it hard to mentally grok the core ideas.
The activities vary in complexity and accessiblity. Some have a “rest of the f****** owl” quality, such as “Draw a self-portrait”, which basically consists of the idea that you draw a self-portrait.
But the best introduce a specific constraint on form or materials, and give step-by-step instructions that anyone could use to generate something artistically intriguing. And the book includes a paper portfolio container at the end, a neat bonus for after you’ve worked through the activities.
One nice touch: many activities mention specific artworks that used that technique, encouraging the reader to look them up, for inspiration and a sense of artistic fellowship.
Recommended.
How to Explain Coding to a Grown-Up by Ruth Spiro and Teresa Martínez
Part of a series by Spiro and Martinez called “How to Explain Science to a Grown-Up”. The conceit in these books is that the protagonist, a seemingly pre-teen child, is demonstrating for the reader how to explain various scientific ideas to the (naturally) less science-savvy grown-ups in their lives. This clever framing lets the authors present information in basic terms, without appearing to condescend to the reader. It also supports humor, and this is handled deftly by Spiro’s text and Martinez’s gorgeous, expressive, pitch-perfect artwork.
There isn’t a lot of depth or story here, and it’s hard to imagine this being one of a child’s favorite books. But it certainly presents a lot of basic information in a way that children can digest; it provides grounding that a child could build on later; and it invites the reader into an identity as someone knowledgeable about computers.
Recommended.
I’m Trying to Love Germs by Bethany Barton
A cute and clear introduction to microbes, pathogens, protazoa, bacteria, viruses and fungi, with a few clever interactive tricks (e.g., pretending to zoom in and out) that make the book less dry than it might otherwise be.
Recommended.
American Ballet Theater Presents: Boys Dance! by John Robert Allman and Luciano Lozano
What’s valuable here really is just that this book exists. The execution isn’t particularly memorable, and in particular, I think there were a few significant mistakes: there is no variation at all in body type, and the cheeks are illustrated with a cutesy rosiness that I think undermines the purpose of convincing skeptical readers. The best part is the back matter, where a dozen or so professional male ballet dancers reflect in the first person on their careers and identities.
Recommended.
Count on Me by Miguel Tanco
A book about a girl passionate about math, who notices it everywhere. The best part of this book is the excellent back matter, which purports to be the protagonist’s own notebook, and explains various math concepts and patterns—with few numbers involved.
But the actual use of math in the story itself is shallow, and fails to engage me as a reader. Yes, a wavy slide is sort of like a sine wave; yes, buildings look like rectangles; yes, trees have a fractal pattern. But none of that is interesting on its own. Instead, I’d be curious to know whether a wavy slide is faster or slower than a straight one. I’d be curious to know how tall a building could be relative to its width, and still stand. And I’d be curious to find out if some trees’ branches basically think they’re trunks, and will turn into trunks if you plant them, demonstrating that their growing instructions repeat identically after each branching.
Instead, Tanco’s handing of “math” involves hand-waving and an abundance of meaningless symbols. It’s sort of like if a book on appreciating jazz showed a child noticing notes colored blue, and calling out “Hey! Blue Notes… that’s jazz!!” The reader isn’t actually experiencing passion for math, they’re just being assured by Tanco that it is there.
All of that said, I do appreciate the overall message of this book: that math is something already present in the world, and exciting to explore and observe, rather than something artificial that is forced on you by adults. There aren’t many books like it.
Recommended.
Boys of Steel: the Creators of Superman by Marc Tyler nobleman and Ross MacDonald
A short, straightforward picture book retelling of young Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster creating Superman. The art is crisp and delightful, though the story is a bit flat. But it’s always wild to revisit a time when no one had fully conceived of superheroes, and to see the Superman proposal be rejected for years before finally landing at DC.
The text epilogue is also a decent introduction to IP rights and lawsuits, as it summarizes the many suits Siegel and Shuster brought against DC in an effort to assert their rights as creators.
Recommended.
Adventures in Art: Marc Chagall: Life is a Dream by Brigitta Hopler, translated by Catherine McCreadie
Doesn’t exactly work as a book to read aloud, but it’s a lovely way to look through some of Marc Chagall’s most famous paintings, and to introduce his child-friendly style to a young person.
Recommended.
Fungi Grow by Maria Gianferrari and Diana Sudyka
A beautiful and clear introduction to fungi, with distinctive painted illustrations full of personality and flair.
Gianferrari decided to add informative paragraphs in small text to most pages, in addition to the much shorter main text, which I think can make the reading experience fragmented. I suspect that this could have been massaged into a single text, by dropping some details and consolidating others, and the result would have been better.
Some interesting aspects of fungi were missed here, such as how they occupy a completely different branch of the family tree from plants. (Some fungal spores can thrash around to propel themselves through water; that is so incredibly weird!) But I did appreciate other details I didn’t know, such as the black fungus that thrives at the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown site, absorbing and using the gamma rays still bouncing around there, a (in my opinion) nuclear mutant monster fungus that is plotting to destroy us all.
Recommended.
We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom and Michaela Goade
I appreciate what this book sets out to do — to translate the Standing Rock protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline into terms that a child would understand.
It is narrated in the voice of someone unnamed, who asserts the identity of the people fighting to protect nature. This strikes a wonderful balance between specific and general: it emphasizes the continuity of native people, their continued presence, their continued connection to duty and tradition. But it is inclusive enough that any reader could feel the “we” applies to them.
I felt the handling of the pipeline tipped too far into abstraction and symbolism, however. Lindstrom and Goade depict the pipeline, and corporate pollution, as an evil “black snake” that poisons the land. But that symbolism means that the mechanics of the actual protest, and the politics and economics behind the project, are all left out, to being discussed in the back matter only.
This is a “Wonderbook”, a book with a small built-in computer and speaker that can read the book aloud. This could be done better. The main “story mode” is too slow, for one thing; the first actual words from the story itself, beyond the title, the dedication, etc., aren’t read until 55 seconds in. The author also sounds pessimistic and tired — she could have used some more voice coaching.
And the other mode, “learning mode”, is generic to many Wonderbooks, rather than specific to this one. That means its questions are largely irrelevant: they assume you’ve finished the book, even if you turned it on halfway through; and they ask who your favorite character was, even though the book barely has characters at all.
Recommended.
Pluto! Not a Planet? Not a Problem! by Stacy McAnulty
A cute approach to informative nonfiction for kids, this book personifies Pluto as a plucky runt who is proud of its place in the solar system. It packs a lot of information into a very accessible form, told with clarity.
This is also a “Wonderbook”, a book with a small built in computer that can read the book aloud. As with We are Water Protectors, the story doesn’t begin for 55 seconds — a storytelling crime no self-respecting child would tolerate in a live human reader. Weirdly, the narration departs from the actual text in a few places. The narrator takes his performance in a pretty hokey direction. And the “learning mode” is just as crappily generic as in “Water Protectors”.
Recommended.
Over and Under the Snow by Kate Messner
A walk through the woods at wintertime, showing what is happening above the snow, and also showing what is happening, simultaneously, below.
I love the peaceful vibe here, and the delight in glimpsing scenes that are normally hidden. However, many of the pages are basically the same — above the snow, the child slides around on skis; under the snow, an animal sleeps, in an area represented by a grey circle. I yearned to see more connections and parallels between above and below. A few illustrations show burrowing tunnels, or show animals sheltering in tree roots or natural hollows; these would be interesting to examine from above as well.
The artwork is vivid, but Messner misses the chance to communicate more specifically about what’s going on in some images.
Finally, the last page shows constellations of animals. That’s neat, but seems contrary to the book’s focus; and also, they’re not real constellations.
All that said, I think the central concept is memorable, and the illustrations of slumbering animals will appeal to children.
Recommended.
Over and Under the Waves by Kate Messner
An illuminating book that connects what you could experience above the ocean waves, with what is happening below. The text is full of detail about the animals without being too wordy, and the art matches it nicely. There isn’t much poetry to the writing, but it’s effective, and the illustrations where you can see the ocean surface and the depths in a single image are memorable.
Recommended.
Working Cotton by Sherley Anne Williams and Carole Bayard
A semi-autobuographical story of a Black family in the American South spending a long day picking cotton, beginning in the cold, dark morning before the sun is up, and ending after the sun goes down.
Williams doesn’t treat her characters as mere objects of others’ action, but as agents of their own lives, who share humor, song, food and expertise. Bayard accompanies this with expressive painted artwork that brings their play, as well as their exhaustion and sweltering, to life. That this tireless daily work is thrust specifically onto Black people — and even to young children — is not explicitly named; but the injustice of it is very much present. Williams seems to be inviting readers ready to process it to do so, while ensuring that readers who are not ready—perhaps because their caregivers judge them too young—will at least gain context to inform their readiness later. A short author’s note provides more information to support discussion.
The story is brief and thin, and ends abruptly, and I can see adults reading this book aloud struggling to provide a sense of closure to the children they’re reading to. Children may have questions that adults can’t answer: for one thing, they may ask if this is still happening today.
A note about dialect: parents attempting to read this to children may also feel at a loss to know how to read aloud some of the speech patterns in the story’s text. As a White parent and sometime teacher, I would be cautious about reading this book aloud to children, because of the ways that Black American vernacular has been used in racist ridicule.
I’m glad this book exists, even if I’m not sure how well it works as a reading experience.
Recommended.
Hidden Animal Colors by Jane Park
Simple, but well done. The text is very short, and the use of rhyme teases each reveal. If the scope of the book were wider, I would have liked a bit more about iridescence, and maybe even color patterns that animals with a greater diversity of color receptors in their eyes can see. Not to mention polarity, which many animals can see distinctly, which we non-polarity-seers can only imagine as new kinds of color!
Recommended.
Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann
This book made a splash when it was published, on the strength of Rohmann’s gorgeous, nearly photorealistic artwork, which was enhanced by the book’s oversized format.
Fleming uses a storytelling trick to get through the lengthy series of life stages before the bee is ready to fly; she repeatedly asks the reader if the honeybee is ready to fly, and answers no by showing the next stage instead. It’s a simple way to build a thin scaffold of story, but effective.
Recommended.
My Story, My Dance: Robert Battle’s Journey to Alvin Ailey by Lesa Cline-Ransome and James Ransome
A wonderful life does not always mean a given book about it will be a good read.
This biographical picture book is wordy and confusing, too focused on listing events and people and not enough on telling a story. Some beats are confusing, such as a poem Robert recites at church, at six years old:
My name is Robert Battle
And I stand six feet tall
And I just came to say
Happy Easter Day
What’s weird is, his “six feet tall” claim is never explained. (In the accompanying picture, it’s clear he isn’t six foot tall six year old.) Is this a supposed to be a wonderfully ambitious claim? A symbolic expression of pride?
Worse is that there are key moments in Battle’s life that could be involving and affecting for readers, but which aren’t given their due. For example, when a young Battle’s dancing began to gain attention, he learned of auditions for prestigious high school dance program, in the big city of Miami. But he was afraid; he didn’t think he was good enough. And at that point in his young life, he was so relieved to have found a caring teacher, he couldn’t imagine wanting to leave that behind. But his teacher could imagine it! She knew his ambition, and refused to allow him not to audition. She pushed him away, into the unknown—knowing he was ready, knowing the world would be dazzled, before he knew. Long before he knew.
What a story! By which I mean, what a story in Robert Battle’s life. But what about, in this book? Well, here’s how the book tells it:
The New World School of the Arts in Miami was holding auditions for high school students, and Robert was not going.
“I’m gonna stay here with you,” he told Miss Munez, feeling she was the best dance teacher he could ever have.
Robert finished his rehearsal, but Miss Munez was waiting.
“You’re going to the New World School of the Arts and I don’t want to talk about it.”
That’s not bad, but I don’t think this telling does the story justice. How about this take, at the same word count:
Robert’s dancing drew the attention of a famous ballet school in the big city.
“I’m gonna stay here with you,” he told Miss Munez. She was the best teacher he could ever have. He couldn’t imagine leaving.
But Miss Munez could. She saw the fire in his dancing.
When rehearsal ended, she told him: “You’re going.”
She knew he was ready — long before he knew it himself.
In a book of 2500 words—pretty long, for a picture book—there should be plenty of room to give the most powerful episodes in Battle’s story full turns.
The week I read this, a friend was saying that she loved her experience as a young ballet student. It shed her of her perfectionism, and taught her that the greatest form of praise is for a teacher to care enough about your work to critique it. She sees it as a rare gift that she was guided, with such constant feedback, in the direction she most needed to grow. For her, ballet is about the endless process of learning more, about staying humble, about keeping the perspective of someone with much to learn.
That’s not everyone’s experience; ballet has problematic and abusive versions. But! There’s something profound there, right? Something universal? Something unexpected, even controversial—since it’s nearly the exact opposite of the direction education has moved in the last decade?
I wish the Ransomes, and Battle, had explored aspects like this.
Not recommended.
Hands-On Science: Matter by Lola M. Schaefer and Druscilla Santiago
Like Schaefer and Santiago’s book Motion, this book invites the reader to manipulate the book as though they were conducting experiments on the items it depicts. For example, turning a page might represent opening a freezer door; tilting the book might represent pouring from one test tube into another.
This doesn’t work as well as it does in Motion. Ultimately, what does the reader learn about matter? Not very much — and what they learn comes in wordy explanations, anyway, rather than growing out of the pseudo-interactive elements. I appreciate this attempt at conveying physics/chemistry information, but in this case, I don’t think they’ve cracked it.
Not recommended.
Plant a Pocket of Prairie by Phyllis Root and Betsy Bowen
The format of this book is simple: on each page, the author invites you to plant something native to prairie lands, and then on the next page they show you what animals it will attract.
The frame for the story is that there used to be thousands of miles of extended prairie in North America, but it’s been sliced up by roads and human development. It’s an appealing idea that you can help reclaim the prairie with your own planting, though this isn’t an instructional on how to get started.
This is, essentially, a list of related plants and animals, and while the relationship between them is neat to see, it doesn’t feel like it amounts to a compelling story.
Not recommended.
One of a Kind: A Story About Sorting and Classifying by Neil Packer
A book about categories and classifications, this is clearly a labor of love. But I wanted a more clear approach to visually communicating the groupings that Packer presents. The pages are crowded, with items smooshed up against other items, regardless of whether or not they are ostensibly grouped together. There is little use of white space or borders to draw visual distinction between sets of related items. It doesn’t help that the names of groupings are often written in tiny type, connected to the groups with distant, meandering lines.
I wish this book did more with its premise, such as grouping the same items first one way, then another. For a bunch of people, do you cluster them by age? By gender? By languages spoken? What do you do when someone belongs in multiple groups?
Not recommended.
Facts vs Opinions vs Robots by Michael Rex
I appreciate that this book teaches kids about the distinction between facts and opinions. But why does author Rex want to teach this? Why are we here? A child reader won’t be convinced by this book that the topic matters. And the robots are not used in robotic ways; they could have just as easily been monsters.
Not recommended.
Robotics for Babies by Chris Ferrie and Sarah Kaiser
A picture book that tries to demonstrate the types of problems that can be solved by employing robotics.
The key to a book like this is finding the right version of the story to tell. But I imagine the problems and solutions presented here will confuse readers, due to the varieties in their scope and complexity, and the ways they don’t directly follow from each other.
Not recommended.
Baby Loves Coding by Ruth Spiro and Irene Chan
I appreciate the way this book introduces some terms that a child could get familiar with. But I wish the examples had clearer purpose, and I wish we got to actually follow a step by step algorithm.
The bigger problem is that this is, physically, a board book; but it is not really a board book in terms of its language, its story or its rhythm. This is a book to make adults feel good, not a book to be loved by a tiny, pre-literate child.
Not recommended.
I Can Code: If/Then by Vicky Fang
A very simple board book about coding. The problem is that, for all the conceptual simplicity, the actual code snippets are confusing. They seem to be there to convince parents that the author knows her stuff, rather than to ensure that kids understand something new. Why should we try to teach a board book reader a term like “conditional statements”?
Not recommended.
Adi Sorts with Variables by Caroline Karanja and Ben Whitehouse
I was excited to see the impressive title of this book, and was looking forward to seeing how a picture book might introduce programmatic sorting with variables. If you don’t know much about programming, you might not know that “sorting” is a big topic in programming — particularly in programming classes, because it offers a clear entry point for studying which programs run quickly, and which run slowly. There are databases with millions of entries, and if you aren’t careful with how you write your programs, doing something as simple as producing a high score list could take many hours (whereas if you are careful, it can be done nearly instantly).
Unfortunately, this book doesn’t really tackle the topic of sorting algorithms, even indirectly. It relies heavily on metaphor, which is fine, except that it never graduates from these starting metaphors into more complex understandings.
In this book, a “variable” is like any container: a sand bucket, a backpack, etc. I’m not sure that’s a very useful metaphor; what makes variables useful isn’t so much that they contain, but that the refer. It’s a shame that Karanja and Whitehouse didn’t choose a metaphor for variables from those that are already in kids’ lives; one that comes to mind is classroom roles. If Sofia is the “line leader” today, but Kendrick is the “line leader” tomorrow, then “line leader” is a variable — the person it refers to may change, but you can always call for the “line leader”, whether you happen to know who it is right now, or not.
The same with “arrays”. To explain arrays, the text tells the reader that buildings are like arrays full of people. But that’s more confusing than illuminating, because people are found in all sorts of patterns in buildings: not merely above and below each other, but next to each other and behind each other. Buildings can have some rooms empty, and others crowded with people. If you don’t know what an array is, how does the metaphor of a building help you? Why not just use a much clearer metaphor for arrays: lists?
Not recommended.
Hidden Figures: The True Story of Four Black Women and the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly and Laura Freeman
A picture book version of Shetterly’s adult book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, which was made into a feature film.
Shetterly clearly knows the subject well. Given the importance of her work, I was disappointed at her approach here; I don’t think she quite found the picture book version of the story to tell. Fascinating, thrilling topics get swallowed up in walls of dry text; that’s a profound mistake in picture books, which must take seriously the challenge of capturing the attention and passion of kids.
Not recommended.
Sonia’s Digital World by Miller
Basically just lists different things you can do with computers. But doesn’t prompt readers to reflect on these uses, or to anticipate the difference that they make.
Not recommended.
We Are the Builders! by Deepa Iyer and Romina Galotta
In rhyming verse, this book describes different roles you can play in social change: being a disruptor, an experimenter, a healer, etc.
I love the impetus behind this book, but I wish the roles were given more concrete form. For instance, the experimenters are proposing to turn used plastic bottles into backpacks. How does that work, exactly? The healers are shown sitting in meditating, and not doing anything with medicine or nutrition.
When adults are waving our hands and overpromising, I think kids notice. I think they want real models of meaningful action they might really take, not vague pantomimes.
There’s no story here, only one named character who never makes any actual character choices. And the rhyming verse is inconsistent, frequently missing syllables, and awkward to read aloud. As a concept, this book is intriguing. But as a book, it didn’t work for me; I had trouble even remembering the various roles afterwards.
Not recommended.
Ada Lovelace and Computer Algorithm by Ellen Labrecque
A very basic introduction to Ada Lovelace and her legacy. The text is mostly a series of simple factual statements; it’s readable and straightforward, though the reading level seems out of step with the cutesy, minimalist design. For a picture book, I don’t think it synthesizes text and images well enough, and the dry approach doesn’t bring to life what was special about Lovelace.
Not recommended.
Fiction books
The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
A searing sci-fi portrait of colonialism, this book is primarily interested in the mindset of colonizers, and the practices of doctrinaire enforcement required to see people as no more than material to be formed for the colonizers’ purposes.
Le Guin alternates her narrative perspective between an unapologetic colonizer, a colonizer whose loyalty is wavering, and a rebel leader among the indigenous population. For each, she follows the ways each has had their identities shattered by the colonial project, and how they internally reconstruct coherent identities in the wake of that destruction. Le Guin was raised, famously (as well as infamously), by anthropologists, and this book is full of bits of imagined ethnography and linguistics, along with her portraits of each group’s worldview.
These three characters differ wildly from each other; but each is essentially an ideologue, someone focused on the purity and righteousness of their perspective. Each, in other words, is a passionate storyteller — someone who cares, intensely, about ethics, even if those ethics are constructed, cravenly, to justify exploitation and cruelty.
But while the mental whiplash of moving between these characters is thrilling, I wish I could also see the perspective of non-ideologues—those focused only on concrete daily matters, those who are not so actively engaged in self-justification.
What does the world look like through the eyes of those colonizers for whom slow, grinding pillage is just another day job, is there any level on which they can imagine the agency and perspective of the colonized?
And what does the world look like through the eyes of the enslaved indigenous servants, those who have absorbed the colonial worldview and can only see themselves from within it? Do they have an internal life at all, or have they silenced their inner voice because it can only speak in screams?
Highest recommendation.
1984 by George Orwell (Eric Blair)
A more bizarre and personal book than I remembered, and one which maps onto 20th century history less neatly than I assumed.
That incongruity is a good thing; it’s a testament to the curiosity that drove Orwell. He started writing this book with the aim of attacking Stalinism, but the actual story that came out of him is both smaller than that, and bigger, as well. This piece of writing is fixated more on the atoms of disgust and desire and shame in daily human life, than on particular ideological patterns. It’s not a takedown of Stalinism, but rather a speculative exploration of the theoretical limits of authoritarianism. Orwell wants to know what authoritarianism says about people; what its weaponizing of betrayal can do to people; how it transforms our very minute-to-minute existence as human beings.
When I last read this, in high school, I didn’t buy the ending. Winston, we are told, sheds a tear of true love for Big Brother. I thought I was supposed to believe that he had invented love out of whole cloth. But on this reading, I got it. I had missed the explanation that Orwell so carefully sets up: it’s not that Winston has been brainwashed into a false love, it’s that his ability to endure suffering has been smashed and ground to bits so mercilessly that to believe what the Party says — and thus to be safe — is an honest relief. Love for Big Brother isn’t a lie thrust upon him; it’s literally the only thing that keeps him from suffering, the only way he can keep from being abandoned.
So this is not a book about the evils of political philosophy gone amok. As Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains, the Party has no political philosophy, no theory of how its policies are right rather than wrong. This is about how power, when it is wielded effectively, cares only about the power itself; and if that power is able to inflict enough suffering on its subjects, it can rob them of the very spark of human independence that we hold out as universal and irrepressible. Humanity, in our need for comfort and acceptance, have a weak point that can be exploited by those willing to take the initiative of shedding all trappings of morality.
I think you see an echo of this in the guns blazing styles of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Javier Milei and others. Being loudly incorrect, as Musk so often is in the tweets that he forces his staff to boost into everyone’s feeds, seems idiotic to many of us; but it has the intended effect of putting everyone on the defensive, of making us think the only safe way to respond to this force is to appease it. I don’t mean to equate Trumpism with the Party of 1984; but I do think we are seeing the effectiveness of even a few drops of unpredictable, unashamed cruelty, a primordial hack that renders many of the most proudly independent minds into sheep.
If you apply Orwell’s thesis to considering history’s great abuses, an aspect of their horror comes into focus. Absent from most portrayals of, say, the Holocaust and American slavery, are the ways that oppression twists the minds and souls of the oppressed, by forcing them to find a way to feel secure in their day to day lives. For millions of people, they learned through violence and abuse that they could inch away from the horror only by surrendering their selves entirely to their oppressors, and by betraying any sense of having their own cares and loves and identity. This makes the currents of music and culture and joy that survived these horrors all the more spectacular. And if you consider that capitalism puts oppressive pressure on all of us—even those who seem to be thriving within it—then we have work to do to find our own internal appeasement of it, our own internalized ideologies of duty and service to the fierce sword and warm shield of the dollar.
Highest recommendation.
Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld
This book was made for me, to a ridiculous degree. It contains three of my favorite creative forces: Sittenfeld, author of the indelible Prep; Saturday Night Live, responsible for my sensibility more than any other influence beyond my family; and, good God, the Indigo Girls!
And on all these fronts, it delivers, although I confess that I wanted more from the third act: more trouble, more imperfection, more self-sabotage, more consequences. This is the most easygoing and forgiving that Sittenfeld has been, among her books that I’ve read; it’s a legit beach read.
Noah, in particular, never fully came into 3D shape for me. Sittenfeld hints in a few spots that he might have more of an uneven landscape of the rational and irrational, but she ultimately allows him to be cuddly and vague.
But Sally, the protagonist, absolutely does have such a lumpy landscape, and in many ways this book more a portrait of her psychology than a tale of a relationship. This introspective texture is something Sittenfeld does incredibly well, and it makes for a rich experience.
There is also incredible detail about working environments and work politics. We see the ways that power operates within an organization both to appreciate to the crucialness of some people’s contributions, and to ignore or take others for granted. In particular, the assistant to the Lorne Michaels character wields great power, and holds fiercely to it, in subtle ways.
As for the Indigo Girls (OK, stop twisting my arm, here is my all-gems Indigo Girls mix!), this has to be the most prominently that the Dixie dyke duo have featured in culture since the heydey of “Closer to Fine”, coming only a year after that song was used in the Barbie movie. Sittenfeld uses the Indigos’ song “Dairy Queen” in this book, and it was a delight to see the love for it—it’s one of my favorites.
Highly recommended.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin
A patient is seeing a psychoanalyst to help him stop dreaming, because whatever he dreams actually happens in real life—and only he remembers how things were before his dreams changed reality.
I love Ursula Le Guin (see my thoughts on her book The Word for World is Forest, written a year later in 1972, above), and this premise is brilliant, but the book felt tossed-off and flat.
So much of Le Guin’s other writing feels outside of its time—Forest, The Left Hand of Darkness, the Earthsea books, stories like “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and essays like “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” feel like they could have been written in recent years, not in the 60s/70s/80s! But The Lathe of Heaven feels like it was written exactly in 1971, with its Philip K. Dick-esque drug paranoia, the godlike power that psychoanalysts wield (with a side of pseudocientific hippie psychobabble), and the cringey way Black characters are painted through an othering White lens, as though they go around thinking “I’m Black” all day long. All of this identifies the voice as very specific to White people on the West coast in the 70s, a literary moment that the culturati have closed the door on entirely.
The character types are dated, especially a mixed-race woman who uses language I have a hard time believing anyone would ever use to describe their own struggles for identity; for example, “My dad hated my mom because she was white, so what does that make me?”
I still enjoy reading Philip Dick, who was both of this culture, and critical of it—wholeheartedly, in both directions. Dick believed literally that he was hit with a revelatory beam of pink energy from space, but could also see that these drug-induced hallucinations were a pathetic dodge from relationships and responsibility. Le Guin here doesn’t seem to have that external perspective; her narration and characters never scratch the surface of the very Dickian scenario she’s playing with.
Not recommended.
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
My partner Kate and I started to read this together, because many people had recommended it, and we truly loved Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun, and Remains of the Day. The story takes place in an Arthurian, fantasy version of England that appears to be shrouded in an invisible mist of forgetfulness. Ishiguro writes as though not only the characters, but perhaps even the narrator is veiled by this mist; he enforces a sort of formalism on himself, so that some passages are maddeningly repetitive. The reader, just like the characters, seems to trudge on endlessly, with no sense of progress, no sense of where you’ve been or where you’re going.
The book does cast a sort of spell — after finishing and turning to other novels, I felt like I was reading at Usain Bolt speed. And I can discern an allegorical political lesson in the connection Ishiguro draws between forgetfulness and peaceful coexistence; it might be a good thing, for example, if the forgetfulness-inducing dragon Querig would haunt Israel and Palestine for a while, making people forget their sense of having been wronged unforgivably.
But is that metaphor worth following the meandering road this novel takes to get there? For me, it was not worth it; Ishiguro’s project never quite came into view. Kate declared boredom and bailed on its stagnant and circular plot halfway through. I stuck with it, sure that Ishiguro had something more up his sleeve, but he didn’t.
Not recommended.
Patternmaster by Octavia Butler
I’ve read about a dozen of Butler’s books so far. Kindred was very good. Wild Seed was amazing, and its prequel Mind of My Mind was also rich. Dawn blew me away, and the sequels Adulthood Rites and Imago deepened that world well. I liked Parable of the Sower and thought the crucial sequel Parable of the Talents brought it all together (I really think they should be read as a single work). And her vampire novel Fledgling was an unexpectedly thrilling exploration of institution-building, injustice and liberation. And her collections of short stories (particularly “Bloodchild” and “Amnesty”) are fascinating.
So when I say that I found her novel Patternmaster unreadable, please understand how dazzled I am that it’s taken me this long to find a book of hers I don’t like! This was the first novel she ever wrote, which explains its clunkiness.
Butler begins by dumping onto the reader a dozen new terms, place names and character names, as if she’s nervous about convincing you of the world she’s built. I admit that sometimes this works; Dune does it, for example, and pulls it off. But I find it annoying, and too common. And even when the exposition-speak dies down, the dialogue is stagey. Butler’s characters have supposedly known each other forever, but they speak as if performing for an audience.
Stories that build worlds well are careful to let you in easy, to lead with drama on a personal scale, and only slowl yto bring in broader context. Star Wars: A New Hope is one of my favorite examples of doing this right. The initial text crawl establishes that there is a civil war between the “rebels” and “galactic empire”, that the rebels have stolen plans for a weapon called the “DEATH STAR”, and that “Princess Leia” has the plans. Then the opening three minutes tell the story almost entirely visually. They have only a few spoken lines, just some worrying from C3PO, plus beeping from R2D2. We see a scary ship chasing a smaller ship, distressed people running around, a bunch of fighting (where it’s clear who the bad guys are), and a silent entrance from an imposing figure in black. You haven’t heard about Luke; you don’t know why the robots matter; you don’t know where the plans are; you haven’t heard of Alderan, or the emperor, or the Force, or light sabers, or the Jedi. You don’t need to know any of this yet! You don’t even know Darth Vader’s name (although these days, odds are that your dad is next to you saying “THAT’S DARTH VADER”). You don’t need to know his name yet! He’s obviously terror personified.
Not recommended.
The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
I realize this won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. But I find this type of prose exhausting to read.
I sense a pattern with certain popular bestselling novels. For one thing, they are crowded with wacky names. In the first chapter here, we have “Quoyle”, “Partridge”, “Mercalia”, “Foxley”, “Kimberly Plud”, “Ed Punch”, and towns called “Mockingburg” and “Bugle Hollow”. The heroes are hilariously unfit for the world (or, is the world hilariously unfit for them?). And hey, I’m down for a little absurdism; by cranking up the dial of the world’s arbitrariness—both whimsical and tragic—we can better appreciate and see our world. But in books like this one, the trick quickly gets stale, and I can’t see the purpose.
Here’s a typical passage from the opening chapter:
Partridge saw beyond the present, got quick shots of coming events as though loose brain wires briefly connected. He had been born with a caul; at three, witnessed ball lightning bouncing down a fire escape; dreamed of cucumbers the night before his brother-in-law was stung by hornets. He was sure of his good fortune. He could blow perfect smoke rings. Cedar waxwings always stopped in his yard on their migration flights.
Amidst this parade of quirks, I am struggling to learn anything of substance about this character. I like “He was sure of his good fortune”; that stands out as meaningful, because without it, I would hardly have any sense of who this guy Partridge is. How am I supposed to read this passage? Are the facts listed here things that he actually knows? Or just things he tells people? Things he has been told about himself? What on earth is the point of mentioning the dream about cucumbers—that I shouldn’t believe the narrator? Or just that this character is hella zany?
And please, please, it doesn’t matter at all to me that a particular variety of bird is sometimes in this character’s yard. I only care if that matters to the character, or to anyone else, and how.
That’s the problem. I want Annie Proulx’s characters. She wrote Brokeback Mountain—she has great characters in her! Instead I’m getting something else, and I can’t figure out what it is. What is Proulx hoping to convey with all of these Cedar waxwings, not to mention “crenshaws”, “casements”, “braid catches”, “canions”, or “ham knuckle”?
Not recommended.
Comics
Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
The story of one Korean woman who was abused by Japanese occupiers (and Korean collaborators) during World War II as a so-called “comfort woman”, raped and beaten more times than she can count.
Reading this graphic novel, I thought often of Maus. Both books take a grounded approach, making the horror no bigger or smaller than it was in their subjects’ lives, keeping the focus on their actual voices. In the situations of constant danger these people recount, nearly all of their focus went into survival; and so their contemporary storytelling leaves the reader to grapple with the enormity of what has been lost, without the subject themselves as a guide. In both Maus and Grass, the reader has the help of the author/interviewer, who appears in the book as a character and stands in for the reader, asking obvious question after obvious question in an ultimately impossible effort to bridge the gap of understanding. That makes it stand out all the more when the subject does comment on something besides survival—such as when “Granny” Lee Ok-Sun refuses to be called by a Japanese name.
Gendry-Kim decided to avoids providing the reader with anything that might falsely suggest closure, such as majestic vistas or portraits of her subject appearing to be at peace. Instead, interstitial pages show us scenes of nature sketched in almost abstract form, pacing the story and giving the reader time to digest. Looking at the panels, and reading the narration at random, you might not think this was a book about essentially genocidal sexual violence; Gendry-Kim’s presentation does nothing to emphasize the shock you should feel, and instead leaves it sitting there, unadorned, for the reader to pick up and examine in all of its banality and horror.
Part of what feels fresh about this is hearing a story of oppression told by someone unfamiliar with jargon, and not interested in learning it. It’s not that Granny Lee doesn’t know many terms for classes of suffering or injustice, but she doesn’t think of herself in those terms; she doesn’t tend to encapsulate her experience with tidy summaries. (Even when she spends weeks homeless and sleeping on the street, she describes herself as “roaming the streets like a homeless person”, since “a homeless person” is necessarily someone else.) This allows Gendry-Kim to focus on the details and rough edges of Granny Lee’s experiences.
In the face of this, Gendry-Kim, the character, tries to find texture and story in Granny Lee’s memories. Some of the most profound passages are when she fails as an interviewer and researcher; Gendry-Kim’s attempts to forge some form of resolution crash and burn in the face of the featureless monotony of her subject’s years of suffering.
This reminded me of one of Michael Haneke’s agendas as a filmmaker: to throw his audience’s desire for closure and satisfaction in our faces. Gendry-Kim ultimately is forced to ask herself, what if there’s no ending here? What if there is just damage, and wrongness, and this is not an adventure of reportage, not inspiring, not a cause for hope?
Highly recommended.
Blurry by Dash Shaw
Powerful evidence that you don’t need shallow trappings of drama — tears, death, apologies — to have drama, and you don’t need a veneer of zaniness to interest the reader. The stories here, which link together in recursive vignettes that the characters tell each other, find fireworks in the everyday questions and impulses that every person has.
Some of these stories and characters land with me more than others, and I would be curious to know if other readers have different favorites among them than I do.
This is the fourth of Shaw’s books that I’ve read, and I’ve always loved how his visual style moves fluidly between representation and abstraction, and the novel ways he bends and twists the comics medium. Here, he switches between stories and temporal periods from page to page—or even from panel to panel—in a way that playfully interrupts the flow of each individual story.
Shaw’s writing and drawing work together multiplicatively, almost like they’re dancing. In the image above, note the word balloon shapes; the economy of introducing a character; the bossy self-improvement dynamic among roommates; the space, and characters, evoked so fully with just handful of lines.
I don’t understand the surreal closing sequence, but want to reread it and try again.
Highly recommended.
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
A unique take on a (fictionalized) coming of age memoir, this covers only a few slim episodes of the protagonist’s life. Yang mixes in two other stories: a retold Chinese myth, and a parody of Chinese stereotypes told as though there’s a racist studio audience dying of laughter. There’s a bit of storytelling magic in how Yang connects all of these together, and he handles this elegantly, avoiding some of the clunkiness that can sometimes come when authors incorporate myth into contemporary stories.
I don’t think the central friendship dynamic totally lands with the weight that Yang intended; there’s a betrayal that seems to come out of nowhere, and it’s not quite solid enough to hang the book on. But there’s a center here in the protagonist’s pain, as he simultaneously tries to distance himself from his foreign-ness, and stand up proudly for himself and others. Yang finds brilliant ways to bring this to life.
Highly recommended.
ElfQuest Book 4 by Wendy and Richard Pini
I actually don’t remember how I came across the physical copy of this book, but I’ve had it for decades, and this year I found it in an old box, reread it, and loved it as much as I remember loving it at 16.
But I find myself struggling to say just what is so delightful about it! On the surface, ElfQuest is unpolished cutesy, agonizingly geeky, and surprisingly unblinking about ethnic and religious violence. Part of what is so captivating is how unexpected this combination is; I wouldn’t think there was an audience for this, if it weren’t a phenomenal success that did much to establish the commercial potential of independent comics in the 1980s.
There isn’t anything that exactly screams gritty about the presentation here, and yet it’s unflinching and unapologetic to an unusual degree. There is little pious handwringing, compared to mainstream superhero comics; Wendy and Richard Pini have no desire to bring karmic retribution on a character who, say, murders out of revenge. But neither is there giddiness about the violence, as you find in, say, Frank Miller’s work—work that feels, by comparison, immature in its infatuation with violence.
Also, as anyone familiar with ElfQuest knows, this book is horny as hell. I don’t mean that sex is coyly hinted at; characters are vocal about wanting to hook up, and there is a baseline presumption of polyamory. I think the violence, in its matter-of-fact brutality, shares something with the Pinis’ approach to sex. In ElfQuest, the lust to kill your enemies is just part of life, as is the lust to sleep with someone besides your life partner. You don’t wring your hands about it, but also, you don’t get carried away with it; you keep your cool, and handle these passions with grace. In this sense, ElfQuest is old fashioned in the way it pairs an emphasis on etiquette and poise with room for human (er, elven) frailties, in a way I don’t often see.
That maturity—if you’ll allow me to use that word for, ahem, an elf stab- and sex-fest—extends to how villains are portrayed. Villains here are not morally responsible for their fates; we are not made to see them kill their own helpers, or detest themselves, in order to demonstrate moral asymmetry between the good guys and the bad guys. Even though the elves slaughter the king of the trolls, the scenes with the king really do allow him to be the hero of his own story. He is not defeated because he deserves to be; he simply has what the elves want, and they have to kill him to get it.
Just as an example of the effect ElfQuest had: the forward to this collection is by a woman who started reading comics through ElfQuest, and eventually got a job in comics publishing. That enthusiasm was still in the air when I first started reading independent comics around 1991 or so; I would hear people talk about ElfQuest in reverent tones, and cite it as a crucial influence on newer books like Jeff Smith’s Bone. And I get it. I’m still surprised that I get it, but I do get it. This peculiar little story feels monumental, the way a breakup, or a rumor, or a passed note in math class can feel. All these decades later, there’s still a spark in these pages.
Highly recommended.
The Night Eaters, vol. 1: She Eats the Night by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
I love Liu and Takeda’s long-running comic Monstress, though after a while, I think they lost their grip on the plots and mythology. The Night Eaters is—at least in this first volume—smaller in scope than Monstress, lighter in tone, less ornate. It takes a challenging premise, which I won’t spoil, and delivers, while presenting an over-the-top allegory of Asian-American immigrants and their generational differences.
Sana Takeda has less heavy lifting than before, without Monstress’s towering paisley gods. But I found her artwork here even more hypnotic, and I appreciate the subtle ways she takes a broader approach to character expression, with hints at the exaggerated visual vocabulary of manga.
As I did in reading Monstress, however, I felt confused sometimes by the layouts, and needed to reread to follow the action as intended. Too many images were murky and muddy, and I could have used more consistent delineation between the main characters.
Highly recommended.
What it Is by Lynda Barry
A companion piece to Barry’s wonderful Making Comics, this book is an artifact of love, awakening and transformation. It’s not a book of instructive activities like Making Comics—it’s more a reflection on what creative storytelling is, where it comes from, why we do it, and how to hold onto it and make space for it.
In Rick Rubin’s incredible conversation with Andre 3000 (please listen to that right now if you haven’t!), Andre talks about that moment when you are playing creatively behind a closed door, and someone suddenly opens the door; you were in a state of exploration and freedom, but now you’re suddenly under the microscope, and the magic is gone.
This book is Barry’s attempt to help us to kick the microscope out of the room, close the door and relight the spark.
Highly recommended.
Clementine: Book One by Tillie Walden
A new comic set in the Walking Dead universe. I love to see a fictional world open up like this, to other voices and styles. It’s delightful that the visual style is so indie, so different from the more gritty art in the main Walking Dead book. But while I really liked the look of this book, I frequently found the layouts and control of the visual focus confusing. Some pivotal sequences felt disjointed and hard to follow.
I did love the main character, Clementine, who had a bad attitude and a tendency to get into fights that she loses. The other characters felt underdeveloped, but Clementine’s charisma made up for that. There’s a danger in such a character of being too close to a certain type common to post-apocalyptic stories: tough as nails and prickly on the surface, with a deeper yearning for trust and connection underneath. But even though I can’t point to any particular page where the storytelling is spectacular, the portrait of Clementine as a whole is full and wonderful, and I’m eager for volumes two and three.
Highly recommended.
The Thing: Classic vol. 2 by John Byrne, Mike Carlin, Bob Harras, Ron Wilson
A lighthearted romp through a fantastic scenario. Having wrapped up the Secret Wars confrontation against the god-like “Beyonder”, Ben Grimm—better known as the Thing, the muscle of the Fantastic Four—finds himself able to switch between human form and rocky Thing form at will. But he learns that when he returns to Earth, he will return to Thing form permanently. So, when the rest of the Fantastic Four heads home, he decides to stay behind, on the Beyonder’s fast-changing and nonsensical home planet, to try and figure out who—and what—he wants to be.
This setup provides John Byrne and colleagues an excuse to tell stories that evoke the pulpy early days of comics, with aliens riding pterodactyls and shooting ray guns with purple blasts, a few damsels in distress, and even more damsels who kick ass and make everyone else do the distressing.
The result is preposterous, all the more so because:
- Ben Grimm’s “yous guys shudda listened to Mama Grimm’s boy” New Yorker jargon is hilarious in such a fantastic setting, and:
- he constantly pauses to mope about being a monster and wonder whether he’s lovable—and this will happen in the middle of, say, a spaceship dogfight with robot lizards.
But there’s a joy here, as these comics veterans play with a character they love in a little corner of the Marvel universe where the sky’s the limit. One favorite sequence of mine, patiently played out over a full year of stories, follows a cute alien kitchen maid who has had her favorite trinket stolen; Ben helps out by demanding that the techno-pirates return what they took from her. Each issue, the pirates bring her an item from their hoard that they’re sure is the right one; and each issue, she rejects that item, sending the pirates back to square one. Finally, finally, after umpteen tries, they find the item she’s looking for… and it’s something I never would have guessed, something that reveals a side of her character that is as unexpected as it is hilarious.
This is hokey as hell, and the book’s final showdown makes exactly zero sense, but I didn’t want it to end.
Recommended.
She-Hulk Epic Collection: Breaking The Fourth Wall by John Byrne, Chris Claremont, Peter David, June Brigman, Alan Davis, Bryan Hitch, Don Perlin, and like 6 more people
This was fun, though not quite as good as I remembered. I think Byrne really hit his stride with She-Hulk in the years following these stories, which are mostly from the first year of her relaunched title. Here, the fourth-wall-breaking never goes below a surface level.
Recommended.
Invincible: The Ultimate Collection vol. 6 by Robert Kirkman and Ryan Ottley
Collects Invincible issues #60–70.
Here, some of the storytelling momentum is slowing down; in particular, the danger and humor of the Martian squid invasion of Earth felt flat. I also felt a lack of full narrative commitment in the book’s other invasion of Earth, by copies of Invincible from other dimensions—a common problem in multiverse stories. Who are these other Invincibles to our planet’s Invincible? What is different that made them so cruel, instead of making them feel connection to the humans around them—and to their own human mothers? These could be intriguing questions to explore, but Kirkman doesn’t get below the surface level of them all having different variations on Invincible’s costume.
Other episodes are better, particularly the violence and politics around the imperialistic Viltrumites and their plans to invade Earth (are you sensing a pattern here?), and Invincible’s evolving relationships with fellow hero Atom Eve and Pentagon honcho Cecil—both wonderfully complex characters.
I love Invincible, and I find it truly remarkable that Robert Kirkman is so able to find new ideas to mine in the well-trod territory of invulnerable flying superheroes, just as he is in The Walking Dead with zombies. Of course, Kirkman has the blessing of the blank slate, something that writers of, say, Superman do not; he can introduce major elements and characters, and change them or destroy them, without having to grapple with decades of continuity and fan expectations.
But much of the complexity in Kirkman’s superhero stories doesn’t come from headline events like characters dying; it comes out of fresh attention to power dynamics and relationships, such as the challenge of squaring assymetric physical abilities with supposedly symmetrical interpersonal relationships. There’s no reason we can’t have more of this in mainstream superhero comics! In fact, these elements used to be explored far more, by writers like Peter David in Hulk, and John Byrne in Next Men.
Recommended.
Normandy Gold by by Megan Abbott, Alison Gaylin, and Steve Scott
Fun 1970s political paranoia, that is brutal and skeevy; sort of Foxy Brown meets The Parralax View. As with many conspiracy stories, the scenario doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny, but there are lots of fun beats and setpieces, and Normandy is an awesome character.
Recommended.
Faith and the Future Force vol. 1 by Jody Houser, Stephen Segovia, Barry Kitson, and Diego Bernard
Light in tone, with a wonderful character in Faith, and very true to the 90s origins of her character. The flippant vibe, bumbling enemies and timeline-hopping mean there are no real story stakes, but the story is well-scripted, and works up to a satisfying finish.
It’s wonderful to see love poured into writing a character who I thought I’d seen the last of 25 years ago.
Recommended.
X-Men: Days of Future Past by Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and others
“Days of Future Past” is one of the most celebrated stories in superhero comics. I’ve I’ve known the basic outline of it for decades, but I had never actually read it until now. Incredibly, it’s only two issues long! So many of my favorite superhero comics are from the days when a single issue would pack a massive amount of story, unlike too many of today’s comics.
This collection has much more than just that story arc. The first few stories are insubstantial and episodic, but Claremont and Byrne’s developing the young Kitty Pryde as a character pays off when he gets to contrast her naive teenage self and the jaded, grief-ravaged middle-aged woman she turns into in the dystopian future.
The best parts of Claremont and Byrne’s X-Men writing are the little moments between the members of the sprawling team, as they examine and revise their relationships. Wolverine notes that Kitty is still holding the bizzarrely-featured Nightcrawler at arm’s length, and reassures him that she’ll grow out of her bigotry. Storm takes an unconsciously parental approach to Kitty, trying to be the mother for her that Storm herself never had, and she recoils when another woman also begins to take care of Kitty. Wolverine tells his Canadian superhero friends — friends that took care of him in his most vulnerable moments, and who need his help — that he hates the way the Canadian government made him into a living weapon, and that he simply cannot serve it. The Kitty of the future, married to Colossus for decades, finds herself back in a past where their love hasn’t happened yet, and where she has the body of a 13 year-old.
At the same time, I was reminded of how generic I’ve always found fight scenes in X-Men. They seldom feel consequential or specific, in contrast with, say, Spider-Man, where fight scenes communicate geometry and move story and character forward. Again and again, I see Wolverine slash someone in the face with his claws, which we’re told are the strongest material in the world; and yet they look like they’ve merely taken a punch to the jaw. And when Wolverine goes into a “berserker rage”, can there be some actual unintended effect of his unchecked fury?
Recommended.
Kaijumax by Zander Cannon
I love Xander Cannon’s work on Alan Moore’s comic Top 10, which takes place in the police department of a city where every single resident is a super-hero—not just the criminals, but cops and civilians and politicians and even pets. Kaijumax, which Cannon both wrote and illustrated as a labor of love, has a similarly outrageous premise: its world has seen a proliferation of kaiju, huge monsters along the lines of Godzilla and King Kong, to the point that the kaiju are no longer a novelty, but a constant pain in everyone’s ass. So they’re all thrown in a huge, outdoor prison. What could go wrong?
This premise leads to all sorts of fun implications in the pattern of “you know how in real jails, _______ happens? Well, what if that happened but in KAIJU jail!?!?” Some of these are predictable: cliques and mutual-protection gangs form, based around categories of monster (dinosaur-types, cryptids, robots). There are illicit drugs—in this case, anything radioactive or electric. Contraband, in the form of uranium and redirected power lines, is introduced into the prison by corrupt guards. Weak prisoners are manipulated by the powerful, forced to shank a fellow prisoner (with a skyscraper spire!) or to smuggle illicit substances inside their shell. There are bribes, romantic relationships with guards, omerta, and even rape.
As you can imagine, balancing the tone of all this is hard. The stakes of mafia entrapment and drug addiction need to feel weighty, even while the book has fun with the absurdity that all of this involves 60 foot tall swamp monsters. What makes it all work is that Cannon cares so much about these characters; he really and truly loves the preposterous world he has built.
What didn’t quite work for me was his basic panel-to-panel visual storytelling, which left me confused. I always refer back to the Disney concept of “staging” (see here, here and here), and some of Cannon’s sequences are just poorly staged. Part of the problem is that the physical environment is a generic set of rolling hills, without the landmarks or variety of backdrops to orient the action. I kept asking, is that the same shank that he used in issue one—did he hide it to retrieve it later? Is that the same guy as before? What is he doing with the poison? Why is that guard so calm, isn’t he the one with a hit out on his life? Etc.
I have to share Cannon’s amazing afterword from the end of the book:
This book represents a lot of decisions I resisted making for many years.
I resisted working for smaller press publishers. I resisted creating ambitious new series. I resisted writing and drawing a series by myself. I certainly resisted coloring it, and most of all, I resisted doing anything on a monthly schedule.
I resisted all those things because they were inefficient, because they didn’t pay well, or because other people didn’t think they were the smart thing to do. Perhaps they aren’t. Perhaps it does make a lot more sense to write several series than write and draw one. Or to do little freelance illustration gigs while spending years on a graphic novel. I know I’ve joked with many people that writing, drawing, lettering, and coloring an ostensibly monthly comic book is a questionable move. But nothing I’ve ever done has made me happier.
To hear people tell it, monster movies are silly. Prison movies are lurid. And for that matter, comic books are dumb. But I love all of them to varying degrees, and I have reached a place in my career that I can choose to ignore the prevailing aesthetic opinions, and instead just do something that makes me happy. I spent many years doing work that I thought was “important”, and I believe some of it was, but for all its importance it never made me half as happy as I am when I’m drawing monsters taking drugs and murdering each other…
To have created something that people react to is the primary goal of the artist. I resisted it for many years out of the fear of failure, the fear of irrelevance, the fear of not making enough money, and the fear of looking foolish. If you have been resisting something for the same reasons, my advice to you is: try it.
It might be the best decision you’ve ever made.
Recommended.
Leaving Richard’s Valley by Michael DeForge
It’s hard to describe this book, which collects a daily strip that was serialized on Instagram (thus the square format). It has elements of existentialism: no specific events that happen are particularly memorable. No one is getting anything done. But everyone is struggling for something. And DeForge steadily refuses to provide any sense of resolution in the fourth panel of his four-panel sequences.
The focus is so picayune and existential that the broader details of the fictional world are almost beside the point. The location is modern Toronto, in and around a public park. Richard, a former natural foods grocer, is the unlikely leader of a cult that has emerged at the park, with many of its members being talking animals. Like gurus everywhere, Richard abuses his power, and disillusioned animals leave the park so they can finally find themselves. That sounds dramatic, but plot is almost never explored head on, and any significant events happen outside of the page. What we see instead is the residue, the leftover pain and confusion after the drama has passed.
I said the characters were “talking animals”, but that doesn’t do justice to the unique approach DeForge takes. The animals are abstracted, more like shapes than recognizable species. This anchors the book’s sense of absurdity, and widens the dislocation between the self-help-talk that the characters spout, and the actual realities around them.
Not every page is compelling, but I found it to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Recommended.
Ultimate Spider-Man vol 1: Married with Children by Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto
In the world of this comic, Peter Parker has never been Spider-Man. He was robbed of his destiny by a megalomaniacal version of Reed Richards, who manipulated this timeline to prevent many superheroes from ever gaining their powers.
So our Peter is a middle-aged dad, a working photojournalist married to his high-school sweetheart, the successful Mary Jane Watson. His uncle Ben, never having encountered the burglar who Spider-Man let pass him by in the traditional timeline, is still alive, and is the managing editor of the Daily Bugle.
Peter’s life is going well, and yet he can’t shake the feeling, deep down, that he’s not living the life he is supposed to be living. He knows that he should be more, that he should be taking risks for others, sacrificing for others. He dreams of having the opportunity to become a hero, and longs to take it.
It’s a brilliant premise, and allows for scenes between Peter and MJ, Peter and his daugther, Peter and his uncle, which have room to breathe without the superhero stuff hemming them in. Unfortunately, when some super-hero stuff does start happening, it gets generic quickly. The writing brushes aside the most interesting questions the comic has brought up, such as, is it wrong to put your children in harm’s way by making enemies with super-villains?
Still, this comic has a beating heart, and I’m eager for the next volume.
Recommended.
Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross
A gorgeous throwback to Marvel’s silver age and Jack Kirby’s cosmic creations. The oversized format and almost fluorescent color inks make for a unique look that updates the retro style wonderfully, although I often find Alex Ross’s figure drawing stiff and posed—it doesn’t have the sense of body motion and force that Kirby’s has.
The “Negative Zone”, a staple of Fantastic Four stories, is something of a narrative minefield. The Negative Zone is made of anti-matter, not matter, and all sorts of things work backwards there. What this means, in practice, is all over the place. Sometimes matter and anti-matter explode when they come into contact; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes gravity works normally; sometimes it doesn’t. So it’s no surprise that the Negative Zone journey the FF take in this book feels inconsequential, and its characters and plot points all fizzle.
But there are a few moments that resonate. The FF unexpectedly meet up with Ricardo Jones, a character who hasn’t been appeared in the comic since the 60’s, when he morphed his body to look like The Thing’s; here, he tells Ben that his mind also took on Ben’s characteristics, and even just pretending to be Ben made Ricardo a better person. The book should have been built around that.
Recommended.
Fantastic Four Visionaries: John Byrne, vol. 3 by John Byrne and others
Surprisingly episodic and disappointing. Showdowns, including with the vicious villain Annihilus, are resolved in arbitrary ways, without any interesting character decisions. In one multi-issue story, the godlike planet-eater Galactus decides—after long deliberation—to devour the homeworld of the Skrulls, a major Marvel alien race. This should be a pretty big deal, but the event comes and goes with seemingly little attention from Byrne as a writer.
A major story arc here centers on the Fantastic Four returning to the Negative Zone. Why do they go there? There’s not really a reason. What do they hope to do there? Just kind of fly around a bit and see what happens. We’re told to look out, because the very rules of reality are different there! What’s the consequence of this? Basically nothing.
There are a few memorable moments, though. Reed and Sue have sex when they are visiting some alien civilization within the Negative Zone, and they’re having so much fun it makes them both horny. It’s refreshing to see this aspect of the FF’s dynamics celebrated, rather than pushed aside or exploited in they ways it could be, as part of making Sue one-dimensional.
Another memorable episode is when the FF encounter a civilization that has been traveling in a massive spaceship for 10,000 years, looking for a new homeworld. Reed invests his technical skill in helping them find just the right planet, at last. But as soon as they get out of the spaceship and set foot on actual land, they are driven mad with terror by the open sky and endless horizon! They retreat back to the ship, and declare the planet evil.
There’s a potential Twilight Zone-style lesson there, of our hardships becoming our comforts, and of our tendency to locate our fears in places external to us, when they so often reside only in our own minds. The natural next step is for Reed and the Fantastic Four to address the situation with some of their trademark resourcefulness and ingenuity. But instead, the FF just shrug, and leave these travelers to wander the stars indefinitely. It’s like Byrne just gave up trying to find a way to compose the story’s ending.
Not recommended.
Processing: 100 Comics That Got Me Through by Tara Booth
Tara Booth has a unique comics style, using painting, pencils and markers, with exaggeratedly lumpy figures and coarse coloring. In its best parts, her self-exposure and self-exploration were thrilling. But I wanted to enjoy it more than I did. I had a rard time parsing some compositions visually, and the sequential storytelling seemed muddled. I found myself flipping through the pages more than relishing them.
Not recommended.
Hulk Visionaries: John Byrne, vol. 1 by John Byrne and others
I read a bunch of classic John Byrne comics this year, and came away surprised to have found his writing boring and unimaginative.
In this disappointing volume, Bruce Banner is physically separated from the Hulk, so that they are completely separate physical beings. Okay, that’s an absurd setup, but from a storytelling standpoint, it should be fruitful! I started wondering: is Banner really as independent of the Hulk’s motivations and emotions as he thinks he is? Does the Hulk actually prefer to be free of “puny Banner”, like he thinks he does? Are they tied together more intimately than they would each like to admit? Have they been intertwined so long, that each is insane without the other?
But none of these questions get explored or asked in any way. The most interesting moment in this volume is when the Hulk encounters a Native American elder who lulls him into a meditative state. That seems like a great setup: what can we discover about the Hulk when he is at peace? Nothing; it turns out just to have been a ruse to arrange a big fight.
Not recommended.
Batman (DC Universe Rebirth) Vol. 1: I Am Gotham by Tom King, Scott Snyder, David Finch, Mikel Janin, Ivan Reis
The storytelling here feels like it was written by a committee whose only rule was that visual stuff needs to be happening, as if they were terrified the reader might put the book down. It moves quickly from setpiece to setpiece, too fast to establish the stakes of any given situation before it’s over and we’re somewhere else. It’s such a scatter-brained pace, I almost feel King and Snyder forgot to hit all of the story beats they meant to. It’s as though pages are missing.
Here’s the overall plot: there is a new pair of heroes modeled after Batman and Batgirl, but with Superman-level powers. Batman is wary of accepting their help, but can’t deny their usefulness. This is a promising premise! I wondered, does Batman feel a jealousy that makes him undermine them, instead of using them productively? Is he so wary of the possible misuse of their powers that he cannot allow them—no matter how well they appear to mean? They don’t have Batman’s knowledge of Gotham City or its criminal underworld (or his detective’s patience), so might they be easily tricked by some crime bosses into devastating attacks their rivals?
But none of that is explored. Instead, what happens is that an obscure villain called “Psycho-Pirate”—who appears in exactly two panels—drives the new heroes murderously insane! And they proceed to wreak havoc on Gotham City, which Batman has to stop.
It’s disappointing that their insanity, as consequential as it is for the city, has absolutely nothing to do with the characters themselves. It doesn’t bring out their latent fears. It doesn’t reveal a truth about them. It doesn’t connect to any decisions, by anyone. There’s no cause for Batman to think, “I was too eager to trust them!” or conversely, “My reluctance to accept help contributed to this!”
There’s nothing at all about these new characters that matters, except that they have powers. Do their particular powers matter, at least? OK, here is something interesting! Gotham and Gotham Girl’s powers are set up with an intriguing flaw: using their powers causes them to age faster, and the more power they draw on in any moment, the more they age! So, guess what they do with that intriguing premise: nothing at all. One of these heroes-gone-bad is defeated, and even killed, by… just being beaten up really hard. No, he doesn’t suddenly have to stop a nuclear bomb, and doing that ages him until he’s a skeleton. No, he doesn’t have to decide between allowing himself to be defeated and staying young, or fighting back and turning old. He just… gets beaten up and dies from that. No one even mentions the mechanics of his powers.
This might literally be the most confounding comic I’ve ever read. Because… why do all this work to start to tell a story and then forget to, like, tell a story?
David Finch’s art is fantastic, for what that’s worth. The textures are palpable, just a little gritty and not too clean. Layouts pop crisply and are easy to scan. What a waste.
Not recommended.
Nonfiction books
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
A book about how animals perceive the world, by a veteran science reporter. Ed Yong might be one of the world’s great explainers, right up there with Bill Bryson; I have the sense that he could explain the phone book and I’d find every page delightful. With a topic as rich and surprising as this one, the result is magical.
One of Yong’s talents is to make the familiar seem fresh. After describing a typical sequence of human perceptions, he asks the reader to reflect on just how remarkable it is that we should experience our physical surroundings so richly:
The preceding paragraph could have been pulled from a high school textbook. But take a moment to consider the miracle of what it describes. Light is just electromagnetic radiation. Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules. It’s not obvious that we should be able to detect any of those things, let alone convert them into electrical signals or derive from those signals the spectacle of a sunrise, or the sound of a voice, or the scent of baking bread. The senses transform the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences — things we can react to and act upon. They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information. They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany. They connect animals to their surroundings. And they connect animals to each other via expressions, displays, gestures, calls, and currents.
As you can see, Yong manages to be erudite without being obscure; his writing is proof that a rigorous scientific approach to popular explanation does not need to oversimplify to be dazzling.
The sense of imaginative wonder that Yong sets up becomes all the more fantastic when he turns his attention to the things that animals sense—some adjacent to our senses, some much farther afield.
“Science-fiction authors like to conjure up parallel universes and alternate realities,” Yong writes, “where things are similar to this one but slightly different. Those exist! We will visit them one at a time…” And then he takes us there, in each case telling the story through the process of discovery and exploration that led biologists (and the occasional physicist) to the understandings they have today. The impression of these scientists, overall, is of a sacred order dedicated to both truth—no matter how bizarre—and to maintaining the Earth’s species diversity. Especially right now, I feel deeply thankful for these people, and appreciative of the ways Yong honors them by telling about their work.
One of my favorite episodes is about a tiny bug called a “treehopper”, which produces vibrations in the specific plants they inhabit. Those who study them have determined that these vibrations are not incidental; they are a means of communication with each other, which is all but indetectible to other species:
Treehoppers communicate by sending vibrations through the plants on which they stand. These vibrations are not audible but can be easily converted into sounds. Cocroft clipped a simple microphone to the plant, handed Ryan some headphones, and told him to listen. Then he flicked the leaf. Immediately the baby treehoppers ran away, while producing vibrations by contracting muscles in their abdomens. “I figured it was probably going to be some kind of scurrying noise,” Ryan recalls. “And what I heard instead was like cows mooing.” The sound was deep, resonant, and unlike anything you’d expect from an insect. As the babies settled down and returned to their mother, their cacophony of vibrational moos turned into a synchronized chorus.
And of course, Yong dons the headphones himself, to hear their song.
There is hidden world after hidden world like this, to an almost absurd degree; the ceaseless march of these cases, each different than the last, is deeply perspective-altering. As Yong points out, many of these animal senses make for an ambient awareness of a dimension of the world that simply does not exist for humans—one which we can imagine only obliquely:
We cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can. We are not privy to the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect. We can’t trace the invisible trail of a swimming fish the way a seal can. We can’t feel the air currents created by a buzzing fly the way a wandering spider does. Our ears cannot hear the ultrasonic calls of rodents and hummingbirds or the infrasonic calls of elephants and whales. Our eyes cannot see the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes detect or the ultraviolet light that the birds and the bees can sense.
A beautiful, lucid, beguiling, unforgettable book.
Highest recommendation.
Educated by Tara Westover
It’s difficult to talk about this widely-read memoir of childhood abuse and neglect in a Mormon family, without addressing the question of how true Westover’s account is.
I’d like to pause that meta-textual question, to describe my actual experience reading this book. But my actual experience ran into the truthfulness question too, and—at first—that got in the way of my absorbing myself in Westover’s personal world.
In the first few dozen pages, I felt resistance, maybe because the horrors were so preposterously horrible, or because details aligned so often in neat ways that I suspected a heavy hand of artistic license on the part of the author. A line might be spoken by a family member at the perfect time, say, just as the wrong person arrived in the room, the expression on their face tying the dramatic moment in a bow.
I wondered, Is this book the document that it purports to be, or is there some authorial sleight of hand at work? I had heard some brief mention that the book’s veracity had been challenged, and I noted how often Westover, as narrator, took a moment to acknowledge disputes within the family about what exactly happened, especially in incidents where someone got seriously hurt.
But as I kept reading, the artistry of Westover’s prose seeped its way into me, and I stopped worrying about the accuracy, and started to read this more as a novel. It’s a lovely text, lucid and evocative, with a light touch. Westover is never flowery, but finds phrases and details that help give shape and color to her world.
Here Westover is writing about Gene, her pseudonym for her father:
There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.
Far from being demonic, her parents and siblings came across to me as nuanced and believable; each seems capable of going along with mistreatment, as Tara herself is, but also capable of great compassion and generosity.
That said, the abuse that Tara suffers is striking and horrific, as is the mortal danger she and her siblings face, through her father’s consuming hatred of the government and suspicion of any form of precaution. The sensational wildness of those dangers is a big reason the book attracted so much attention—and also a big reason it attracted so much suspicion.
The thread that pulled me in most was Tara’s journey as an intellectual and as an agent of her own desire, including all of the ways she tried to hide and deny herself, even as her brilliance brought her farther than she could have imagined. The passages about her hunger for becoming, and the whiplash between the person she is within academia and the person she is back home, are searing. Though in such a long book, it’s unfortunate that she rushes through so much of her self-destructive thinking during her time in graduate programs.
I also wished for more exploration of the “educated” aspect of the Westover siblings’ intellectual lives. Several of them, not just Tara, have PhDs, and several seem to be living lives of profound professional purpose. But Westover never pauses to note that the incongruity of her own academic success isn’t unique in the family, and to ask why. Throughout the country, and the world, educators, policymakers and parents wonder how to produce professional outcomes as good as the Westover family achieved; and yet, by her account, the kids only intermittently attended school, did little real homeschooling, and when they did defy their father and attended college, had to scramble to catch up. Something worked right for them. Was it the chance to decide for themselves that they wanted to be educated, rather than having it foisted on them? Was it growing up with a firm grounding in some moral ideology, even a misguided and contradictory one?
Then there’s the question of how much to trust Westover’s account. I often found that the perfect timing of events, and quotes, strained belief; and some of the backwards gummint-hating Christianism seemed simply too tuned perfectly to the pitch of a dog whistle that might come free with your New Yorker subscription. It’s not that I think no such real stories exist; but when they’re so much what the people in, say, Cambridge, MA (where several people recommended this book to me) want to hear, you have to wonder if something besides plain reporting is at play.
I often struggle with the license that nonfiction writers take in blurring summary with specific fact—as in relating a dialogue from years earlier with quotation marks. It’s reasonable to do this when the exact wording doesn’t matter; for example, here is Atul Gawande, in his part-memoir, part-reportage Complications:
Outside the [operating] room, [my supervising physician] S. said that I could be less tentative the next time, but that I shouldn’t worry too much about how things had gone. “You’ll get it,” she said. “It just takes practice.” I wasn’t so sure.
A key here is that even if Gawande doesn’t have the exact words his supervisor spoke, that’s okay. What’s important is the dynamic. Besides, Gawande signals that the quote is of a piece with this summary, rather than, say, transcribed from an audio recording.
Westover does plenty of this, describing events from memory, or with the help of the diary she kept. When she describes the motivation of another family member, it’s clear that this is her interpretation; I can’t judge how fair it is, but she’s not making it out to be an absolute fact.
But sometimes, the quotes run long, and I get uneasy at her willingness to present such an infallible memory. Here’s one early section that made my ears twitch, about her father’s reaction to the violent 1992 “Ruby Ridge” federal raid of the Weaver family’s home in Idaho:
“There’s a family not far from here,” Dad said. “They’re freedom fighters. They wouldn’t let the Government brainwash their kids in them public schools, so the Feds came after them.” Dad exhaled, long and slow.
“The Feds surrounded the family’s cabin, kept them locked in there for weeks, and when a hungry child, a little boy, snuck out to go hunting, the Feds shot him dead.”
I scanned my brothers. I’d never seen fear on Luke’s face before.
“They’re still in the cabin,” Dad said. “They keep the lights off, and they crawl on the floor, away from the doors and windows. I don’t know how much food they got. Might be they’ll starve before the Feds give up.”
No one spoke. Eventually Luke, who was twelve, asked if we could help. “No,” Dad said. “Nobody can. They’re trapped in their own home. But they got their guns, you can bet that’s why the Feds ain’t charged in.” He paused to sit, folding himself onto the low bench in slow, stiff movements. He looked old to my eyes, worn out. “We can’t help them, but we can help ourselves. When the Feds come to Buck’s Peak, we’ll be ready.”
I’m not doubting that this scene took place in the Westover home, but I suspect that Westover is recreating it piecemeal from memory, maybe amalgamating multiple conversations, and filling in gaps with her intimate knowledge of her father’s voice. Maybe that is supposed to be obvious. And maybe presenting verbatim quotes—together with a few stage directions—is the most reasonable way to tell the story; it’s certainly more involving than reading a mere description of his overall message. I can only say that this exaggerated verisimilitude takes me, as a reader, out of the book, and reminds me to take the intimate facts of various scenes with a grain of salt.
In another example that gave me pause, Westover provides a cinematic level of detail for an incident that she heard about only second-hand:
From Mother I would later learn [the dead animal] was Diego, a German shepherd Shawn had purchased a few years before. The dog had been a pet, much beloved by Peter. After Dad had called, Shawn had stepped outside and slashed the dog to death, while his young son, only feet away, listened to the dog scream. Mother said the execution had nothing to do with me, that it had to be done because Diego was killing Luke’s chickens. It was a coincidence, she said.
…But the real reason I didn’t believe her was the knife. I’d seen my father and brothers put down dozens of dogs over the years—strays mostly, that wouldn’t stay out of the chicken coop. I’d never seen anyone use a knife on a dog. We shot them, in the head or the heart, so it was quick. But Shawn chose a knife, and a knife whose blade was barely bigger than his thumb. It was the knife you’d choose to experience a slaughter, to feel the blood running down your hand the moment the heart stopped beating. It wasn’t the knife of a farmer, or even of a butcher. It was a knife of rage.
This speculation seems to rest on less than solid evidence. But it comes in the context of a real pattern of abuse of Westover by her brother Shawn, and of course, part of the way that abusers exert power over victims is through indirect, plausibly deniable threats. That is, Tara might not know that Shawn’s child listened to the dog scream; she might not know that Shawn killed this dog in rage at her.
Part of me feels like, this is her story; yes, I might prefer a more cautious framing, but I don’t think she’s selling a story she doesn’t believe herself. The problem for me, as a reader, is that I find her certainty less interesting than her uncertainty. I am rooting for her, as a person, to square herself for battle, to recast details as votes in favor of her need to propel herself out of this toxic environment. But as a reader, I want to examine the raconteur herself, and her motivations, not to swallow her tale.
I don’t mean to suggest I was entirely caught up in nitpicks about Westover’s account, because her rich observations would be so worthwhile even if this were a novel. Here’s a passage I flagged, which takes place after Tara is brutally abused by her brother, Shawn, and rescued by her brother Tyler:
Tyler found me and folded himself onto the sofa near my head. I was not pleased to see him. The only thing worse than being dragged through the house by my hair was Tyler’s having seen it. Given the choice between letting it play out, and having Tyler there to stop it, I’d have chosen to let it play out. Obviously I would have chosen that. I’d been close to passing out anyway, and then I could have forgotten about it. In a day or two it wouldn’t even have been real. It would become a bad dream, and in a month, a mere echo of a bad dream. But Tyler had seen it, had made it real.
I love this book for how it follows the thread of these unexpected wrinkles of relationship. Your beloved brother witnessing your being made a powerless victim deepens the humiliation; it punctures the self-image you are able to present when you’re with him. And, it makes it impossible to continue to compartmentalize your abuse, to keep from processing it. That should be good, but it’s much harder, at least in the short term.
In 2019, Westover gave the commencement address at Northeastern University. She talks about the images of ourselves that we post online, calling these our “avatars”, and urges us to acknowledge not merely that these are fake, but to appreciate that all of the true meaning in our lives comes in the course of our very mundaneness:
Your avatar isn’t real. It’s a projection. It’s not terribly far from a lie. And like all of the lies that we tell, the real danger isn’t that others will believe it but that we will come to believe it ourselves. That we will come to identify with our virtual self (who looks so beguiling in photographs, whose life is bright and free and literally filtered).
In this way we become alien to ourselves. Who is this person who spends so much time studying? Washing dishes? Taking care of grandma? This is not how I see myself.
I learned at my own graduation that over-identifying with your idealized self is a deeply alienating experience. It is a form of self-rejection. Because what you are saying to yourself is: I’m not good enough the way I am.
So today, I would like to pause for a moment to appreciate the parts of you that you don’t put online. I would like to mount a defense of them. Of your boring, internal, book-reading, dishwashing, thought-having life. Of the parts of you that can’t be captured by any technological medium. It’s a concept that I’m going to call “the un-instagramable self.”
Here’s something I truly believe: everything of any significance that you will do in your life will be done by your un-instagramable self. It is, for example, your un-instagramable self who is graduating today. I say this with confidence because I’ve yet to see a Facebook or Instagram account which is dedicated to photos of someone studying or attending lectures or writing essays.
I’ve been turning this point over in my mind ever since. There is a way that the ubiquitous advice to dismiss Instagram can feel like nagging, or like homework. It sounds a bit like the people who thought a puff of marijuana would rot our brains. But Westover is making the case that there is something richer in the background than in the foreground; that the revolutions come from the scullery and not from the boardroom, that life is actually made up of the unprintable couples therapy sessions, and having sex with someone for the 500th time, and driving your kid to their friend’s house. And it’s not actually make up of the skiing in Gstaad or optimizing the attention you’re getting.
And all of this makes me wonder how much is this book’s narrator the Tara in the spotlight, versus the Tara in the background?
When you read accounts by her other family members, they’re actually pretty short on factual disputes. So what are they animated by? I think it’s what has ever frustrated subjects of memoirs and reporting: the writer is not merely capturing what happened, they are capturing the audience’s attention. That means glossing here, speculating there; and it means the story is ultimately king, not any of the people, and not the writer herself. That is, the writer as a performer is in the spotlight; that same person, not as the protagonist but as a mundane animal who shits and burps, is in the back, folding laundry.
So, finally, I’m left wondering what Westover’s writing will be like going forward. Having seized the spotlight, is she interested in bringing in the woman in the back, the one whose TV bingeing we get only a few sentences of in Educated? What does that woman think about the surface of Tara Westover that the world is seeing? What does she think about the performance of identity and pain in Educated?
Highly recommended.
The Elements of Pop-Up by David Carter and James Diaz
A pop-up book about how to make pop-up books. There are few step-by-step instructions; instead, you are supposed to surmise from examples how to construct similar mechanisms. I would need more if I wanted to actually make some of the more complex assemblies. But it’s wonderful to see so many techniques broken down their components, and I love that you can see behind the pages, and look at how the various pull-tab effects are achieved.
Highly recommended.
Politics Is for Power: How to Move Beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change by Eitan D. Hersh
A timely book about the importance of directing our political energy to the community around us, rather than squandering it fussing about on social media.
I found Hersh’s thesis convincing overall. But he overstates his case along the way, in a manner typical of polemics that cast reality as cut and dried. The picture he paints fits the simplicity of his thesis — but that’s partially because it’s an inaccurate picture.
I often find myself disagreeing with people who decry today’s political polarization. I mean, I agree that our society is woefully polarized, and that some leftists are foolishly (and sometimes cruelly) alienating. But I mostly blame the right half of the electorate, which has furiously embraced fascism and the shredding of the Constitution. In theory, either party could have elected someone who lies more than he breathes, and who would fire the executive branch’s inspectors general and purge military leaders in order to give the president freer reign; but for at least the last decade, it has been clear to everyone that if this were to happen, it would be done by the right and not the left. Given the reality of our politics, the reasonable response to our polarization is to abjectly denounce the right wing’s anti-American destructivess.
But Hersh is stuck in a “both-sides” version of the polarization critique, one that paints the separation as little more than a style choice. For example, he complains that a much higher percentage of people in 2008 report that they would dislike their child marrying sometime from other party, than indicated this back 1960. But think about that for a moment. In 1960, the nation was in the middle of a confusing party realignment, and party identification provided little information at the time about political beliefs; a “Democrat” might be someone who calls Martin Luther King Jr. to offer support, or someone who declares “segregation forever”. What if, instead, you looked at whether people would dislike their child marrying someone who was vocally supportive of, or opposed to, segregation? Or interracial marriage? Many people in 1960 would report being polarized on those questions back then—and a good, thing, too! I wouldn’t want my child to marry someone who supported racial segregation, and presumably neither would Hersh. That’s not a common problem anymore — not because we got more tolerant of the segregationists, but because we got less tolerant of them.
Hersh also tries to make the case that too many of us ground our political positions in moral terms. This has several problems. First, he conflates self-reporting with objective measures. He presents the work of professor Tim Ryan, whose surveys ask people if their positions on various matters are based on their “fundamental moral beliefs”, and how much; he finds that higher rooting in morality correlates with greater reluctance to compromise. But we should take people’s self-reports on vague philosophical questions with a grain of salt; many people might take such a question to be simply about how much they care about the issue, making the finding a tautology.
And what about the many movements which rooted their message in morality, and succeeded in transforming American politics? Were they the problem? You’d think Hersh would ask this, but he doesn’t.
In another section, Hersh tells of a an experiment done at the University of British Columbia in which volunteers at a table invited passing students to donate money to support veterans. Poppy flowers were given as a sign of having donated; some students had a poppy affixed to their coat, while others were offered a ready-to-wear poppy in an envelope. The envelope-receivers donated more, on average, than the affixed-poppy receivers, and Hersh interprets this as indicating that the public display of a poppy on their lapel served for that cohort as a substitute for donating money; just wearing the poppy outwardly felt for many like enough of a contribution, whereas those who received the envelope felt the continued need to give to to their part. The lesson: performative activism isn’t only a distraction—it actually replaces more substantial activist contributions.
But wait! In passing, Hersh also mentions a third group: those who were given no poppy, at all. And how did they donate? At rates indistinguishable from those who wore the poppy.
Think about this for a second. Those who didn’t get any poppy did none of this performative work that Hersh is focused on. And yet, they didn’t donate in higher rates. This undermines his point—and yet he’s so sure of the story he wants to tell, he doesn’t seem to notice.
This is the danger in polemical monographs that want to both persuade, and to credibly report objective findings: they often decide what they’ll find, and then go looking for it. They only pretend that the reporting came before the persuasion, so they don’t pay much mind to the reporting—not realizing that they are building their case flimsily.
All of which is to say that this book — which inveighs so passionately against getting high on your own rhetorical supply and making a narcissistic game out of politics — is, to some degree, getting high on its own rhetorical supply and making a narcissistic game out of politics.
The book closes with Hersh joining his local Democratic Party club in Brookline, MA, and pushing them to actually stand up and endorse (and reject) candidates based on how good they are.
I applaud this, and I appreciate the kick in the pants to do the same. But in contrast to the organizers who Hersh profiles and holds up as models, his own political activity on the ground doesn’t seem as effective. He just isn’t embedded in existing communities of common political interest, such as seniors or recreational gun users.
All of this makes me wonder what this book could have been if Hersh admitted that he’s not much closer than the BlueSky posters among us at figuring this stuff out—if he had treated his argument as the beginning of an exploration.
Recommended.
Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill
A book about the increasing ubiquity of facial recognition, and the outsized role that one scrappy and ethically shaky tech entrepreneur, Hoan Ton-That, played in this change. I’m particularly interested because Hoan has been a friend of mine, and Hill spoke to me a few times in her research for this book, though ultimately I had a negligible part in it.
Overall, this is a readable, straightforward history, that lays out the unexpected path of Hoan’s company, Clearview AI, and lets its absurdities speak for themselves. Hill is careful to appreciate the ways Clearview’s work has been useful, though it’s clear she’s more animated by the dangers and risks. She shows the quirks of personality, regulatory holes, and power that allowed such a plucky entrant to change the world, for better and worse.
Recommended.
Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
I hopped onto the effective altruism bandwagon around 2013, and got to meet GiveWell founder Elie Hassenfeld back when GiveWell’s offices were still in New York. In my mind, being an “effective altruist” is something similar to, say, thrift store hunting, or being someone who likes to read Supreme Court decisions: it’s a pursuit, not a conclusion.
What appeals to me are the efforts by self-declared “effective” altruists to surface their own mistakes, to discuss them, and to transparently revise their principles and methods. (Here’s GiveWell’s page on their mistakes.) I also appreciate their attempts to weigh wildly different types of value against each other. How do you compare the concrete (say, extending lives by several years by preventing malaria), against changing the rules (training activists in an autocracy to work for long-term political change), and against high-leverage research (moonshot biomed stuff). What an impossible challenge—and what a necessary one!
Fast forward to a meetup I went to in Cambridge, MA in 2022 for readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten blog, a community that prides itself on its rationalism. Several people I met introduced themselves immediately as “effective altruists”, which surprised me. I assumed this meant that they were doing some sort of writing, or building, or at least some thinking about the tricky questions that effective altruism posits.
I wanted to know, how did they weigh the disparate categories of spending? What did they feel was under-explored in the world of charity? Who in the various effective altruism debates did they agree with, and disagree with? But for the most part, these people had little to say about effective altruism besides the words “effective altruism”—and the identity.
This was sobering. I had a moment of realizing how many times in history this same scene must have played out: that moment when you realize a movement which started specifically to invite complexity in the face of a world of flag-waving has become just another flag to wave.
I thought of that meetup many times while reading Going Infinite, a short, strange document by Michael Lewis that tracks the rise and fall of the startup FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried. Even by Lewis’s prolific standards, he wrote this one fast; FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022, and Lewis published this book in October 2023. Some of the buzz on the book was that Lewis ends up more supportive of Bankman-Fried than just about any other public commentator has been; and it was intriguing to see Lewis make his case, though he didn’t convince me.
It’s not the first time that Lewis has been an apologist for a young financial wizard accused of being a scam artist; see his incredible 2001 New York Times Magazine profile of Jonathan Lebed, a 15 year-old charged by the SEC with stock market fraud. Lewis’s take in that piece was that Lebed’s internet message-board pump-and-dump schemes were little different than what some Wall Street suits do every day; I’m reminded of the paper trail revealed at Goldman Sachs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, where it turned out that brokers were privately joking about selling customers instruments that were likely to blow up and be worthless; and Goldman part-owner Warren Buffet’s Machiavellian defense that if people are willing to take the other side of a trade, then by definition it’s a fair exchange and not a scam.
In that article, you have to squint to realize that Lewis is calling both the Goldman Sachses and this 15 year old internet liar scam artists; in terms of simple vibes, it’s clear that he’s impressed by this kid, and admires his DIY cowboy spirit.
And that’s Lewis’s vibe in Going Infinite, too. He criticizes Bankman-Fried plenty, and points out the rules that he broke. But as a reporter who seeks out stories about people, he can’t get enough of this beanbag-sleeping, vaguely polyamorous weirdo, and he’s delighted to report that when all of FTX’s assets were inventoried and made liquid, pretty much all of the missing customer money was recovered.
Lewis is too forgiving on this point; the problem was not that FTX couldn’t possibly earn back the customer money it gambled with and spent, it was that it put this money at risk secretly, lying about how safe it was, and setting up customers to be cleaned out if its bets went south. That said, I didn’t see FTX’s ultimate solvency reported as clearly elsewhere as Lewis reports it.
I wish Lewis had gotten deeper into the mechanics of Bankman-Fried’s money-making. For instance, he mentions’s Bankman-Fried’s “Japan Bitcoin arbitrage”, but doesn’t explain what it was; I had to go elsewhere to learn that many people in the Bitcoin trading world knew you could sell Bitcoin for more in Japan than in the US, and that the obstacle was logistical: you needed to set up shell companies in Japan and fly couriers from Japan with stashes of bills.
I appreciated his exploration of Bankman-Fried’s philosophies more. It’s fascinating that Bankman-Fried and fellow FTX exec Caroline Ellison are both people who pride themselves so much on their first-principles thinking, and yet that their smarts seem to have sunk them, in a situation that specifically called for better first-principles thinking. Ellison is in prison, at the time of my writing this, but her old blog is still up, and I enjoyed exploring her punchy, rude libertarian takes. Here she is on the tendency of Westerners to idealize Eastern family connections:
She also posted a data analysis she ran on hundreds of posts to the “AmITheAsshole?” subreddit (!).
Whether you find Ellison’s takes fresh or tired, I hope you can join me in feeling puzzled at how the heck this frank person got so neck-deep in lies. Is it as simple as that she and Bankman-Fried allowed a little lie temporarily, and didn’t have the courage or integrity to stop? In some ways, I felt intellectual kinship with the Sam that Lewis portrays. In his telling, both Ellison and Bankman-Fried can be cannily self-observant about their mix of conflicting desires, needs and psychological patterns. And like Sam, I think it’s foolish that society derides as weird many logical extensions of existing rules and values; “I can’t say why it’s bad, but it’s just not done” poor reasoning. But unlike Sam, I’m interested in establishing what I think of as “constitutional” rules in both private life and in organizational work, rules that would sometimes be obnoxious to comply with, but which force problems to be addressed rather than punted.
That is, I wonder what would happen if you took Sam—at least, the character described by Lewis, however real that portrait is—and started his story over. I might expect he’d be the first person to pay attention to violations likely to bring his career to a halt, not the last. Because Sam’s specialty was taking concepts or behaviors that people unthinkingly bundle, and unpacking them frankly. I know that most people who have an incentive to brush problems under the rug do, in fact, brush them under the rug; it’s rare for someone to actually be eager to exhume them, to pick them apart out in the open. But in Lewis’s telling, Sam does do that—what’s curious, in fact, is how readily he does that, in an unromantic, autism-spectrum-adjacent style that is typical of effective altruists and self-declared “rationalists”.
So—again—why didn’t he do that, with FTX? Is he actually just as susceptible to wishful and magical thinking as most people? To the sunk cost fallacy? To path dependence? To a short-term aversion to public shame? Is all the philosophizing a load of BS? Does he know it’s a load of BS, or does he use the philosophy as an internal cope to enable behavior that he knows, on some level, is both immoral and unwise? How can the same people who are so aggressively smart be so stupid? How can the same people who are so aggressively moral be so immoral?
To be clear, I don’t think it’s especially surprising that some crypto hustler bro stole money whenever convenient from his depositors. But I’m surprised that this one, a strident effective altruist, was such a non-EA about it.
The problem with this book, then, is not that Michael Lewis is too sympathetic to Sam. It’s that these questions are the fascinating part of the story, but Lewis, as readable as he always is, doesn’t grapple with them.
Recommended.
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler
This book has a spirit that I wholeheartedly love, a philosophy of cooking and eating that embraces deliciousness and eschews fuss. The author’s prose is gorgeous, and it’s impossible not to fall in love with the precious way she constructs a sentence about how to bring out the best in a precious ingredient.
The only real problem is… I mostly didn’t read it. It’s long and dense. After 20 pages, it was hard for me to believe I’d make it through 20 more, let alone 120. To be fair, this is kind of a cookbook, and cookbooks aren’t really meant to be read beginning to end; then again, there’s also an Everlasting Meal Cookbook, and this only has one recipe every 8 or so pages. Are you really going to read this whole book? I doubt it. So I suggest reading the first 20 pages, holding on to her spirit, and accepting that as enough.
Recommended.
The Chip by T. R. Reid
A straightforward history of the invention and development of the microchip. Takes a balanced approach: a few personal profiles, a bit of detail on the chemistry of silicon wafers and integrated circuits, a lot of business history. And the execution is solid, though I wanted more support to understand the details. I came to the book especially curious about the technical and chemical fundamentals of microchips, but I came away only understanding them a tiny bit better.
I’m sure Reid’s descriptions are technically correct, but he doesn’t have the imaginative creativity that great explainers have. I found myself wishing I were listening to someone more like Richard Feynman, whose explanations feel like they’re just extensions of common sense, as though you’re talking to a friend who knows you well and who has just come from the lab, and can’t wait to report what he’s found.
Recommended.
Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquin People of New York by Evan T. Pritchard
This wonderful, exhausting book is all over the place. Pritchard meanders with his attention up and down the Hudson River, around the island of Manhattan, from tribal nation to nation and story to story, frequently doubling back to revisit earlier stories, sometimes repeating or contradicting what he has said before.
I loved his detailed imagined walkthrough of pre-colonial lower Manhattan, with all of its different villages of different tribes. He is an excellent storyteller and collector of information, and deeply passionate about the history, culture, philosophy and future of the native people of the New York City area, whom he convincingly argues should be seen as having founded a multi-ethnic center for international trade (including canoe-based shipping business!) many centuries before Europeans first arrived.
Pritchard himself is a descendant of the Algonquin Micmac (or Mi’kmaq) people, and he freely moves from talking about concrete history to relating his personal encounters with Native spirits, including lengthy visits and conversations. It’s more of a compelling read in some places than in others, but this is a unique book, full of heart and imagination, and I’ll never see the streets of New York City quite the same.
Recommended.
Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City by Eric Sanderson and Markley Boyer
I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.
Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient,
I see that the word of my city is that word from of old…City of hurried and sparkling waters! city of spires and masts!
City nested in bays! my city!-Walt Whitman, “Mannahatta” (1860)
This book is the artifact of an ambitious project, to fully envision what the island of Manhattan was like — in its people, its flora and fauna, its climate, its terrain, and its native architecture — before it was discovered by Europeans.
It’s full of gorgeous illustrations, created in an almost photorealistic style with help from 3D rendering software and using databases that Sanderson and others constructed. The text is academic, but readable and fascinating.
I can’t really recommend that you read this whole book, which is more of a reference volume than a book meant to be read from start to finish. But it’s totally effective at being the book it intends to be.
Recommended.
Voyager: An Adventure to the Edge of the Solar System by Sally Ride and Tam O’Shaughnessy
This book centers on the photographs of our solar system that the Voyager probes took, and explains the discoveries that came from these. The original photos are often low-resolution, and are more often disappointing then spectacular; since then, we have taken much higher resolution photos of nearly all of these bodies. But Ride and O’Shaughnessy are lucid explainers, and it’s thrilling to relive these discoveries through the actual photos that elicited them.
Recommended.
Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances by Lucas Mann
A book of essays about fatherhood and masculinity. Reading this book swung me back and forth between delight at Mann’s insightful prose, and agonizing boredom. In some essays, he seems to dance at the edge of poetry and dream, and I can’t stop turning the pages. But much of the time, this book is essentially the diary of a modern, overly attentive parent—not the worst helicopter parent among us, but in the same airfield.
I grew up in a big family. I’ve taken care of more children between infancy and middle school than I can possibly count; I changed at least 100 diapers before I had to change the diapers of my own child. Which is to say, I love taking care of kids, I love playing with them, I love talking to them, I love doing the fun part of parenting, and I put up with the dull and awful parts of parenting because that’s what it costs to have the good parts — and also because my wife picked up more than her share of the dirty work and the sheer, endless hours. I love actually being a parent, and I love inspecting how I parent and having my approaches challenged, but I’m not particularly interested in identifying as a parent.
Maybe that’s a privilege I have received, which those from more typically-sized first world families haven’t. These things are newer for Mann than they were for me; he feels deeply drawn to, say, observing how quickly or slowly his child wakes up, how long to wait before responding to his child’s tears, and how he and his partner are negotiating their parenting styles. I also spent time as a parent attuned to these. But Mann seems too quick to assume their importance is gospel.
It’s difficult for me to relate to someone who leans so hard into the parental impulse to control and sanitize his child’s life. I, too, often wish to provide my children an idealized version of the world to navigate, but in Mann, as with so many parents, this impulse has metastasized to an unhealthy degree, and he only sometimes seems to notice.
And that’s too bad, because Mann is so observant about his parenting in other ways. He talks eloquently about areas of his own shame that are activated in the course of parenting; I loved an essay focused on his and his partners’s learning to allow their daughter to eat just because she wants to, stripped of the additional layers of shame that they feel about food.
But I struggled to relate to their elaborate, achievery approaches to potty training, and tracking every last detail of their child’s day. It’s not that I can’t abide others’ pathologies; these can make great stories, especially in the hands of a writer as talented as Mann. But it’s hard for me to have much patience for the taxing nature of so many new parenting conventions, so recently declared necessary, so ignored by most of the world. Mann struggles with his boredom when taking care of his daughter, for example, and recalls his father’s frank professions of boredom with both a fondness for that real talk, and a resistance to the coldness it implies. But I find myself wanting to just agree that parenting a small child is pretty boring much of the time, and that’s fine, and we don’t need to wring our hands about it.
Recently, I was with a couple, one of them from Europe and the other from New York, and I asked them about parenting differences in their national cultures. What did they each think about leaving a sleeping toddler at home in their crib alone for an hour, to do an errand? Predictably, the (male) European found this perfectly reasonable, while the (female) American found this shockingly unthinkable. How paradoxical is American culture! There is much stronger individualism here; Europeans have told me they chose to raise their children in the U.S. because growing up in Europe, they felt shackled by social norms and expectations. On the other hand, Americans infantilize our children, scrambling to avoid their being exposed to unfamiliar situations, to avoid their being alone, to avoid their talking to strangers, to avoid their feeling inadequate because they performed poorly on a spelling test—all this while we routinely expose them to the far more likely dangers of cars, inexperience with consequences, and academic underpreparation.
This is not to say that Mann is confident about his approach. In one of my favorite passages, he writes:
“To think about what we want for our kids is to place tracing paper over the childhood we remember having, deciding what lines to match, where to turn away. It’s never clean, of course — the ink bleeds; all the decisions our parents made that we feel hurt us or stunted us begin to blur in memory, until all we have is this certainty that we don’t want to repeat that pathology without any concept of what an alternative looks or feels like.”
I think much of America is in that state. We know there was too much neglect in the past; say what you will about helicopter parents, I don’t think priests are routinely molesting their children. And there has been too much shaming of students in schools. What I wish is that there would be more of a spirit of exploration of possibilities, and less implicit acceptance of parental control and of low standards for children’s capability.
Not recommended.
Freud: The Making of an Illusion by Frederick Crews
I only got through 30 or so pages of this before giving up. I understand that Crews is to be credited for his relentless work to dispel the weirdly reverent aura that still hangs around Freud, whose work was neither as novel or as valuable to his actual patients as the public tends to assume. But Crews is that proverbial person with a hammer, to whom everything looks like a nail. His tone is sneering from jump, and he is far too quick to declare that his shots have hit their target.
For example, early in the book, Crews examine’s Freud’s time as a university student. He points out that Freud was part of some university organizations that included both Christians and Jews, and declares that this means Freud was exaggerating—perhaps even lying—when he described feeling like an outcast in college for his Jewishness. This argument seems laughably flimsy. I mean, maybe sometimes Freud did feel like an outcast, and sometimes he didn’t? Maybe these clubs did formally admit Jews, but some members were still jerks about it? Don’t exclusivity and inclusion have outsized effects on the human soul? And, like… aren’t these objections kinda obvious? What’s going on here?
Crews’s goal doesn’t seem to be to edify the reader — the point seems to be to impugn Freud, at every turn, at any cost. Reading him is like hearing one side of a debate—yet coming away more confident than before that the other side will win. I was happy to shut the book and let Crews continue his diatribe without me.
Not recommended.
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements by Sam Kean
A conversational dive into the periodic table of the elements—something I’m very game for! But parts of this dragged hard, such as a two-page digression into the question of which molecule has the longest single-word name. A good editor would help the author hone this and sharpen it. I tried listening to a bit of this audiobook with my 15 year old (who is taking Chemistry!), and it was hilariously unlistenable.
And then when Kean does deal with core aspects of chemistry and atoms, he breezes through them too quickly. For instance, he introduces two separate rules about how many electrons an atom “wants”—one is the same number of protons the atom’s nucleus has, and the other is the electrons that would fill up the atom’s outer valence level. I remember these from high school chemistry, but I’m not sure how to reconcile them. But Kean mentions these rules at two separate points, and doesn’t call out the overlap or contradiction between them. That tension is an awesome aspect of fundamental atomic physics! But Kean seems to forget that this is a confusing and interesting point that should be addressed.
Not recommended.
Playing with Infinity by Rózsa Péter
When this book of math exploration was originally published in 1961, it became a beloved popular treatment of math. There’s lots of good stuff in here, but I found Peter’s explanations inconsistent. Some sequences would ease me into a concept, careful step by careful step; but others would make wild leaps. I read some sentences ten times, and still didn’t understand how they followed from the argument she had been building. Maybe the flaw is in me, but I kept feeling impatient, lost or bored.
Not recommended.
Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery by Stephen J. Pyne
This meandering telling of the Voyager mission treats it as an extension of mankind’s long history of earthbound discovery. It ties Voyager to the sea voyages that originated in Europe and explored the Western Hemisphere, Southeast Asia, Australia, and the North and South Poles. I appreciate the scope of this vision, but I’m not sure what this context adds.
The prose is dry, and I lost interest, skipped around and only read about 1/4 of the book. But I appreciate that Pyne avoids stale (and misleading) narratives of heroes and transcendent acts of imagination, and instead tells a story of negotiation, cooperation, and strategic salesmanship.
The most enjoyable bit was Pyne’s skeptical lens on science popularizers like Carl Sagan, suggesting that they have little respect within the actual spacefaring engineering and science communities.
Not recommended.
More Alive and Less Lonely by Jonathan Lethem
I have loved some of Lethem’s fiction, and a brilliant essay he wrote about plagiarism—which is made up entirely of plagiarized sentences! I also share his love for some particular writers, like Philip K. Dick and Kazuo Ishiguro. Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude is one of the most “me” books I’ve ever read.
But this book of Lethem’s essays left me bored.
My favorite bits were the short, two page experiments or discursions, like a poem addressed to Philip Dick’s novel Ubik, my favorite of Dick’s novels as well as Lethem’s.
In another, he breaks down the mythology around Batman, and catalogues all of the the resonant aspects of his character. These are aspects that I immediately recognized—that I knew, but didn’t know I knew. For instance, he points out that Batman is never, ever sarcastic: “Batman’s real enemy is joking itself… [just as] we clap for Tinkerbell, we despise irony on Batman’s behalf.” He also helps me understand what feels so flat about the Batman of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises:
The Christopher Nolan version takes Frank Miller’s brilliantly reactionary nihilist Batman of the ’80s and leaches out all the tragedy — leaving a state-sponsored psychopath Batman for our era of triumphalist remote-control revenge. He’s the manned drone of 21st century urban warfare.
So I did enjoy the essays on writers I am familiar with, though I struggled with the stiffness of Lethem’s prose. He admits, in reflections he wrote for this collection, to himself being embarrassed by what he now detects is “a pretty stuffy borrowed tone, to be honest”. According to him, in much of his writing, he had been trying to imitate what he only assumed literary criticism should look like.
I find this type of writing too performatively clever. It certainly is clever! I couldn’t do it. The real problem is that the cleverness becomes the purpose of the writing; it feels aimed at impressing and dazzling readers, rather than guiding us in better understanding the books. I appreciate that Lethem feels unsatisfied by it—and, I’m holding out for a more mature, unadorned style.
Not recommended.
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber
This book began as a short essay that prompted a flood of online comments from people who recognized they, too, might be in ‘bullshit jobs’ — roles where, if no one did them, the world would not be any worse off.
Graeber clarifies that he’s not suggesting these jobs serve no interest whatsoever to whoever signs the checks; rather, he’s talking about the crufty corners of the working world where legal and bureaucratic demands have drifted far from any constructive purpose, but the work keeps trundling on out of inertia and in defiance of common sense. He’s talking about companies that contract to provide third-party compliance with some regulation they know is meaningless, or insurance adjusters who on net just play a game of hot potato with a static amount of spending.
In contrast, some of the most crucial work to keeping our society going is paid poorly, or (in the case of, say, parenting) not at all:
…in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic.
Graeber asks, if bullshit jobs have no actual economic value, why do the powerful pay for this poor excuse for “work”? And why don’t they pay for the work that matters most?
I wholeheartedly cheer Graeber’s vision of a society where the most socially valuable work is prized most highly. I also appreciate the gutsiness of his attack; he calls it “an arrow aimed at the heart of our civilization”.
But I found his reasoning frustrating, and found myself arguing aloud with him constantly. I want to be clear that I only read about 25% of the book; I didn’t have the patience to read much more. But even reading bits and pieces was worthwhile just for his voice and his provocations.
I’m often suspicious of claims that the elite “want it that way” (my quote, not Graeber’s), when a phenomenon can be better explained as emerging organically from political forces and local incentives. And Graeber swings, too casually for my taste, between reasoning on an individual level, and reasoning on a societal level.
Graeber’s answer to why we pay for bullshit jobs is, in part, that it’s a political project. The powerful need a gospel of work; they need a system where it is considered deeply moral to work at a pointless job that you hate for decades, and immoral to opt out of that system and do something with actual value, like taking care of kids or gardening or running a choir or (presumably) writing social critique. And from the elite’s point of view, this political project — like, say, racism — is worth sacrificing some economic prosperity in order to prop up.
But what does that look like, on the individual level? I’ve witnessed such roles up close — and Graeber is right that years of labor by the people who filled them amounted to little more than wasted time for everyone involved. But the powerful people creating and hiring for them were sincerely trying to make their company achieve its goals better; they were guilty of foolishness, of the mythical man-month fallacy, of misjudging the difficulty of constructing an effective team. They were not trying to do their part to immiserate labor. That is to say, in my own encounters with bullshit jobs, Graeber’s theories haven’t actually had explanatory power.
A friend who does intellectual property litigation feels that our laws protect IP too much, at too much public cost. But it’s clearly in the actual financial interest of his firm and its clients to exploit their IP legally, and also to lobby for IP terms to be extended. This isn’t some makework system, not some plan to suppress radical change; it’s just Disney taking Congress members on junkets, and the public at large not valuing the public domain enough to put up a fight.
I admit that saying the phenomenon of bullshit jobs is emergent, rather than conspiratorial, doesn’t let us off the hook. If the outcome is that people waste their working lives, we ought to resist it, whether it was consciously directed or not.
So I agree with Graeber that our culture and laws are in need of drastic reform. But I struggle to understand, from Graeber’s diagnoses, what actually needs to change, and how. It seems to me that the more excited Graeber gets about an idea, the less I can count on his helping me think it through.
For example, he observes a dynamic in American society he calls “moral envy”, proposing that part of the animosity against, say, teachers in our political society comes from jealousy that teachers have a clear ultimate purpose, when so many of us do not. It’s neat to try on a lens like this, but is it actually a useful tool for explaining which jobs do, and don’t, get condemned publicly? Surgeons have a clear purpose and can take pride in their work; do we insist they be paid little? Do firefighters get thought of with moral envy? Garbagemen? Wedding bands? Entrepreneurs? Contrast the “moral envy” lens with the lens of sexism, say; that lens makes much more sense of which unions are mocked as greedy and wasteful (teachers) and which are treated as noble (police, firefighters).
Part of what’s going on, I think, is that Graeber is eager to validate leftist sensibilities, and steers his thinking toward certain questions while avoiding others. He is accusing our political economy of starting with an ideological project, and retrofitting the economy around that; but I get the sense that he’s doing some retrofitting of his own.
He’s thrilled to call “bullshit” on a corporate lawyer who reviews contracts and ensures they will hold up to various possible future challenges, but won’t do so on a security guard. When mentioning prostitutes, he avoids the question of whether they provide a service there is a genuine desire for, such as bartenders or physical therapists; instead he gestures at the “mutual disdain” he believes prostitutes and johns have for each other. And though he calls out bullshit regulatory compliance, he never acknowledges the awkward fact that the center of passion for regulatory simplification in America is among conservatives, not among leftist critics of capitalism.
I don’t mean these as “gotcha” points. But despite his avowed trouble-making intentions, Graeber is stepping around some complexities, rather than wading into them. It’s as though he went to work as a garbageman and came home with spotless overalls. If you come out with your assumptions fully intact, did you really grapple with the messy, the inconvenient and the unexpected?
Ultimately, I can’t recommend a book I wasn’t compelled to read more of. But if this all sounds interesting, I encourage you to give it a try.
Not recommended.
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns
Burns seems, to me, trapped in conventional wisdom. He keeps writing things like “Drugs are the most common treatment for depression in the United States” that leave me scratching my head. I mean, the most common treatment is probably nothing; the second most common treatment is talking to friends or family; the third most common treatment is probably alcohol, which I don’t think Burns is thinking of when he uses “drugs”.
Am I splitting hairs? My point is that Burns often doesn’t think things through for himself, from first principles. If fascinating questions and avenues of exploration were to come to Burns’s attention in the course of his work, but these seemed like they would not be what his audience was hoping to hear, I don’t trust that Burns would pursue them.
Not recommended.
Outlive by Peter Attia
Often, when people recommend a nonfiction book, they’re really expressing support for its core ideas. Outlive is a prime example. I think Peter Attia’s analysis of medicine is spot-on, and I agree with him that US healthcare is poisoned by reverence for received wisdom and structured around doctors’ heroic authority, rather than a patient’s actual health.
Sometimes these align well, as with a talented surgeon. But often doctors prize their confident prognostications over taking a wider view of patient health, and resist challenges to the ways they’ve always done things. As you can imagine, this leaves a ton of low-hanging fruit for anyone who’s genuinely concerned about health, and that’s the fruit Attia sets out to pick.
I truly appreciate having Attia out here, assailing the horrendous incentives of the healthcare system:
There’s no billing code for putting a patient on a comprehensive exercise program designed to maintain her muscle mass and sense of balance while building her resistance to injury. But if she falls and breaks her hip, then her surgery and physical therapy will be covered.
Well said! I hope many people read this and it changes things! Knowing this, should you actually read the nearly 500 pages of Outlive? No. Reading it might make you feel more confident in Attia. But would that mean you’d dedicate time to making these changes, compared to just reading a summary?
Let’s try that. Here is my attempt to distill Attia’s core recommendations into a more concise form:
- Behavioral changes: make small, steady shifts that become part of your routine — forever. Social connections help enormously, making it uncomfortable to stray.
- Emotional health: underlies everything else. Invest in relationships over career success; prioritize “eulogy virtues” over “resume virtues”. Therapy can help.
- Do not smoke: nothing else can offset smoking’s negative impact.
- Sustainable diet: little to no processed foods, mostly plants, plenty of nuts, seeds, olive oil, protein, and fewer calories overall than the standard American diet.
- Sufficient sleep: go to bed at a decent hour, limit screens before bed, keep your room cool, and avoid evening caffeine or alcohol.
- Limit alcohol: a few drinks per week is OK, but try to get to zero.
- Intense exercise: figure out how to build strenuous workouts into your life.
- Stability work: also regularly exercise your balance and core stability, to reduce injury risk.
- Take a statin: Attia puts most of his patients on one. Tests may also indicate you should take PCSK9 inhibitors, or ezetimibe.
- Proactive screening: the trickiest one. Attia wants you to find a doctor who’ll test for: coronary artery calcium, apolipoprotein B, lipoprotein(a) (why are only some of these letters capitalized??), heart rate variability, glucose, A1C, and VO2max; and who will conduct DXA scans for body composition. He warns that insurance sometimes won’t cover these tests.
It often seems to me that self-help books fail to appreciate how difficult it is for readers to translate appreciation to action. Making actual changes in your life is many times more complex than just understanding the impetus for these changes.
Not recommended.
