The books that connected me in 2023
2023 was a year that started for me with great uncertainty, then built into connection and community, and finally became engulfed by war.
The education nonprofit where I worked for the last five years started the year in the worst kind of crisis: one that leadership wouldn’t acknowledge. Our budget was in crisis, with employees worried for their jobs and for the company mission. But our organizational culture was also in crisis, so the official word was that there was no crisis. This, even though great people kept quitting; crucial projects had no funding or project leaders; and longtime partners kept expressing surprise at the absence of communication within our company. In the face of secrecy, opacity, and (unfortunately) even dishonesty, employees were only able to discuss these problems in backchannels; asking in a way that others could see was forbidden. The one relief valve, staff surveys that included questions about trust in managers and leaders, was unceremoniously axed.
As you might guess, I was one of those frustrated and confused, and also one of those who insisted on continuing to ask questions. As a result, others who were frustrated and confused reached out to me, describing their fears of speaking up, or their disagreement within their team about a decision that had been presented to the broader company as having been unanimous. One of the most common complaints was that people had been instructed to keep key decisions and plans from their colleagues; even just expressing discomfort about this had been punished.
And so, we began to meet. We listened to each other’s experiences, and gasped in recognition of the unprofessional and contradictory demands that had been made of so many of us. Each of us realized with relief that the weirdness we’d been experiencing was a pattern. We supported each other in staying focused on doing our jobs through the chaos, and in keeping the commitments we had made to users, to colleagues, to open source contributors, and to other stakeholders. We bonded over our continued commitment to the organization’s mission. Out of a place of disconnectedness, we built something powerful, intertwined, and real. Holding this community might be the thing in my career I’m proudest of.
In all this, I struggled with uncertainty around my ego. Was I looking for any opportunity to play the hero? Who appointed me, or others who took an active role, custodians of the organization’s mission? These questions are one price of taking action; I couldn’t answer them, but I could keep them close.
I finally left in August, when the crisis finally metastasized past the point of even the most slippery denialism, and the organization had its third leadership shake-up in four years. For better or worse, the chaos was behind me.
But another type of chaos awaited, one that would be painful in an entirely different way, on a totally different level.
On October 7th, I saw the Central Square Theater & Bedlam production of Angels in America, with a friend who is also Jewish. After the play, we had coffee, and at some point we commented on this attack we’d vaguely heard about that morning; she mentioned checking in with friends in Israel. It wasn’t until the next day that I had any sense of how horrific and cruel the attack had been; not until days later that I really registered that the response would be war; and not until weeks later that I began to grasp the scale of the death, impoverishment, violence and fear that would be rained on Palestinians — and foreign journalists, and aid workers, and anyone else who happened to be anywhere near the thousands of targets identified every day by the Israeli military.
The horror was dizzying, and I spent the last season of the year struggling to find any firm ground to stand on.
In September, I started working with a startup exploring AI in education. I say “exploring”, because there is so much more we don’t know than what we do know about the impact AI will have in education, or on all the other levels of our society. I think that impact will be profound, and keep being surprised more non-technical friends aren’t talking about it. At the same time, I seem to be less impressed with ChatGPT than most of my technical friends, and we’re constantly debating whether to focus on the dazzling accomplishments of large language models, or the persistent obstacles.
So much seems like it’s changing so fast. Some of what’s happening is thrilling: in terms of poverty, today might be the best time in history to be born; sustainable electric power is now actually cheaper to produce, at the margin, than coal or oil. AI really does seem to convey superpowers, albeit — for now, at least — limited ones.
But opaque AI is also being used to target thousands of places to bomb, every day, in ways that those who launch the rockets don’t even pretend to understand. Young people are struggling desperately, and one part of the problem is the ever-more-recursive halls of mirrors and echo chambers of social media and smartphones. Seeing people I know and love, on a weekly basis, seems to require more and more effort, compared to just calling the crew of the Serenity my friends, taking a shot of brandy and going to sleep.
I often feel afraid of the chaos, and the speed, and the irresistible waves of indifference. And yet, I really do believe that I can help others navigate the chaos. Being in it, not pretending to be above it. Struggling for footing, not pretending to be on firm ground. That is something I fundamentally have to offer the world.
As always, my recommendations are not meant to be a measure of a book’s value. Instead, I ask whether others should actually read the entire work in question. I’m glad the Odyssey exists, but I wouldn’t actually, like, read it.
My highest recommendations:
- The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
- The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
Sections:
- Fiction
- Plays
- Children’s Books
- Comics
- Nonfiction
Past years:
Fiction
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
Like most of Le Guin’s sci-fi writing, The Dispossessed is light on spaceships and heavy on issues of culture, politics, and identity. The setup is that there are two adjacent worlds — Urras, an Earth-like planet, and Anarres, a habitable moon that has been colonized by a breakaway anarchist movement. Society in Anarres has no government or private property and is self-organizing, without any social hierarchy — or at least, it’s supposed to be, though people still find little ways to exert power over each other, to curry favor and to squash dissent. Anarres is a harsh environment, barely able to produce meager harvests, but its people prefer to live on their own terms than to be slaves to the “propertarians” back on Urras.
Shevek, the main character, is the first person from Anarres to travel to Urras in the two centuries since the split. Though he is a proud anarchist and finds locked doors and property fences revolting, he is unusual in his curiosity about the other world. His interest stems from his work in physics, in which he is unquestionably the most brilliant mind on tiny Anarres; he learned the language of Urras’s most powerful country in order to correspond with physicists there, who hope to use his theories to make practical breakthroughs in spaceflight and interstellar communication.
The core tension is that of the traveller far away from home, where the farther away you go, the more you belong to your home. Back home on Anarres, Shevek is something of a dissenter, unhappy with the provincialism and petty politics that have grown as the original revolution has calcified, and stubbornly willing to engage with Urras, to study its culture, and to send his work there to be published. Le Guin’s sharp eye absolutely pierces the countless self-serving exceptions and small-minded hypocrisies in Anarres’s political culture, which so agonize Shevek.
But once he is actually over on Urras, Shevek feels more alien than he expected, unable to penetrate the mindset that embraces military chain of command, imperialism, and capitalistic divisions of owner and wage slave. And as he is pampered by the academic and political elite on Urras, he feels alien even to himself, unable to find a way to live that feels true to his identity — unable even to connect to Urras’s lower classes, whom he assumed he would feel part of.
There’s little in the way of plot, making this essentially a study of political identity and the stories we tell ourselves to place us within a social whole that we find meaningful. The momentum is low, and there are some choices of wording that I stumbled on (if I never read the word “copulate” again, it’ll be too soon). But the ideas and relationships here are rich, with an incredible amount of romantic, economic and procedural detail about life on Anarres. I’m sure I’ll read this again and get even more the second time through. It should be read by anyone interested in envisioning a better world, and in taking seriously the ways that revolutionary fervor must reckon with the full complexities of human society.
Highest recommendation.
The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante
A colder and more alienated novel than Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (and, presumably, the rest of her Neapolitan novels). The protagonist here is a mother with deep ambivalence about motherhood, and a pervading sense of disgust and displeasure that she covers over with perfect civility, and with desires she doesn’t own or understand. She is, in a sense, in long-term flight from her children and their father, and they from her; and yet, she cannot keep from paying attention to the minute details of the parental and spousal dramas that play out around her, and insinuating herself as both a force of connection and destruction.
It’s a delight to have such meaty storytelling, that more than holds up to being read and reread, stretched and bitten into. Ferrante’s approach is oblique, and there’s more shading here than I could pick up in just one read. And yet, no page or paragraph is difficult to read — the prose feels effortless, but it is dense with precise detail.
Highest recommendation.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
I’ve been meaning to read this forever. I didn’t expect it to be so meditative, to consist so much of a character in frustrating stasis, juggling his immediate survival needs with compulsive ruminations about the past. The main character was essentially a fly on the wall during the destruction of the human and animal world, which proceeded bit by bit, and then all at once.
This protagonist, Jimmy, was friends with both the “Oryx” and “Crake” of the book’s title, who were architects of this destruction, but he was not on their level; Crake outclassed him scientifically and intellectually, and Oryx outclassed him in terms of charisma and interpersonal power. Our hero is not especially honest, or resourceful, or anything; and yet, there’s a spark of human empathy and humility in him that Atwood respects deeply, and which Oryx and Crake see, too — even if he doesn’t recognize it, himself. Oryx and Crake, for all that they condescend to Jimmy, seem to be aware that he has something they don’t have, and maybe can never have.
And what, exactly, is that quality? Much of the beauty at the center of this bleak story, with its bitter humor, is in the contradiction between how crucial Jimmy’s character is being to the future, and how mundane and worthless it seems to him and most others.
Atwood builds a very particular tone, a space on the continuum between naturalism and its opposite, which might be symbolism, or absurdism, or even comedy. Here and there her storytelling inventions are wacky or juvenile. I expected these to be an obstacle, to take me out of the novel; but as choices they actually reflected the protagonist and his attentions.
In some ways the novel stays shallow, at the surface of things; there aren’t the poetic observations about life and the universe that you might expect from this scenario. In this, Atwood is reflecting her protagonist; Jimmy does have meaningful thoughts and profound values, but he has never had the intellect or storytelling gift to synthesize these into any sort of career.
Each of the two key friendships, with Oryx and with Crake, has stayed with me, many months after I finished the book. I recognized elements of my own past relationships in each, and Atwood makes the dynamics, especially around imbalances of status, power, world experience, and desire, truly rich.
Highly recommended.
Chocky by John Wyndham
This book was recommended on a Reddit thread about favorite overlooked science fiction novels. Wyndham was a pulp sci-fi writer in the 50’s, and this was one of his last books, written the year before he died, and quite a departure for him, with its extremely “soft” brand of sci-fi. There are no spaceships, futuristic technologies, or robots; instead, this is just the story of a child making unexpected psychological contact with a strange presence, told from the point of view of his adoptive father.
I put this book down at first because I struggled so much with the prose, which felt ancient and stilted. It’s extremely British, from an era before colonialism — and its ways for British men to think of their role in the world — was really challenged. But I picked it up again because the father’s voice was so sensitive and thoughtful. Though the book centers on a sci-fi phenomenon, the feeling throughout is grounded and humanistic, and the types of insights that are discussed are philosophical and rhetorical ones I found subtly profound. It’s ultimately a book about thinking and observing, and about figuring out your place in the world. It’s also mercifully short.
Highly recommended.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Boy, did I go on a journey with this one. I struggled to understand the crowd scene that the first chapter opens with, and found its main character uninterestingly antisocial.
But my partner suggested we try to keep reading, and I quickly came around, and ended up loving the book. There are still many clunky elements; for a book so specifc about its place and time (Harvard Square in the 90s, then LA in the 2000s), it gets a few key details wrong. And it suffers from Ms. Maisel syndrome, where the response of the public to the characters’ creative work is so fawning at times that it’s silly. But the core of the novel is the relationship between its two protagonists, with plenty of ups and downs, and that relationship is totally, completely believable.
I also loved all of the writing about video games, and how Zevin deftly mixed so many real games — and insightful understanding of their contributions — into the artistic landscape that the protagonists create within. It made me want to go back and play Jonathan Blow and Jenova Chen’s games, which I’m guessing were some of the biggest influences on the book’s fictional game Ichigo.
Highly recommended.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
The magical realist premise here is neat. It’s made clear very early in the book, so I’m going to go ahead and spoil it: all over the world, doors start suddenly acting like portals to other doors, elsewhere in the world. The effect is unpredictable, and only lasts for days or weeks, and then stops; but a given portal will reliably lead from one place to another, and back, as long as it persists.
This immediately transforms worldwide migration, as, for example, people in an unnamed war-torn Middle Eastern country find they are able to go through some closet door and come out in a fancy home in London. The protagonists, Saeed and Nadia, start out in that war-torn country.
Nadia is well-drawn, her beliefs and desires pointed. Saeed, in contrast, is more of a blob; he is slow to take deliberate initiative, and tends to absorb the norms around him, becoming, for example, more of an observant Muslim when around Muslims.
Hamid names every place that Nadia and Saeed journey to in their flight from war, save one: their original country. This serves to keep the focus on their experience of migration, without the distraction of conjuring up the specifics of a particular real war they could be said to be fleeing, without the question of how faithful Hamid is to a particular country’s culture or timeline.
Or maybe it’s a deliberate imitation of the ways orientalism treats some places as exchangeable, ready to be carved up on a map by imperial powers in an afternoon.
Recommended.
Mind of my Mind by Octavia Butler
Continuing my march through all of Butler’s published work, I’m tackling her Patternmaster/Patternist series. (Her sets of connected novels seem to have been given overall titles by others, which is why they have more than one name.)
I loved Wild Seed, which is considered the first in this series, with Mind of my Mind the second; Wild Seed is one of the sci-fi novels I recommend most highly to others. Mind of my Mind contains a lot of the wisdom about leadership and interpersonal power that make the Patternist scenario so intense, and this one has a thrilling climactic sequence.
But I confess that I never really warmed to the characters, particularly Mary, the heroine. On paper, she should be compelling; the sequence where she takes political control of an assemblage of peers shows her unique courage and initiative. Honestly, I can’t put my finger on the issue; I certainly liked this book, but I didn’t feel blown away like I usually am by Butler’s writing.
Recommended.
The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
To my shock, I hated this! I tried reading four of the stories, and I just found them all unreadable and somewhat pointless. I’m floored, because I’ve loved many of her books, and several of her short stories are my all-time favorites. I can’t even explain what the pattern was; they were just uninteresting and a slog to read.
Not recommended.
Little, Big by John Crowley
Wow, is there a fundamental difference between what this author finds interesting, and what I find interesting!
Let’s say an excellent psychotherapist picked a random human and stayed up with them all night, hearing about their life and asking them questions that prompt them to reflect deeply. What would be most interesting in that conversation? My answer: this person probably has had massive areas of conflict: places where their childhood assumptions crashed against harsh reality; or where a seeming friend had been unreliable and their friendship had transformed; or where their own selfish ways had been cast into relief by a particular mistake; or where they ruined a cherished relationship, and had to change.
I think that if you drilled down into many episodes of their life, you would find these sorts of aspects of conflict, or tension; each personal story would have a distinct shape you could find if you asked the right questions, and if they were able — and comfortable enough — to dig past the surface level and voice the parts of themselves that they usually hide.
John Crowley would disagree. He thinks, instead, that what is interesting is to look at a situation and to strip away the familiar, recasting its common terms with more obscure or surprising ones, shifting its conventions to weirder alternatives. It’s a sort of revelation-by-quirkiness, an approach that I associate with Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon. For example, in Foer’s Everything is Illuminated, we learn that the dog named “Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior” is “a very distinguished character, one with variegated appetites and seats of passion”. This portrait is obviously exaggerated on purpose, but intended to contain a kernel of truth — a truth that can’t be named directly, but can only be circled through looking at it obliquely. There’s overlap with absurdism here, and just maybe even with mysticism.
I’m not saying these non-sequitur contrasts can never work. Take Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and its many imitators; there is a delightful sort of French existentialist experiment at work when this group of thieves and killers argues over the meaning of “Like a Virgin” and the morality of tipping.
But Crowley’s approach to descriptive distancing feels to me like a barrier, rather than a door. In fact, it’s almost the perfect negative of what I find interesting. Here’s a sentence from Crowley’s introduction of the protagonist, Smoky Barnable:
When his mother realized that the solid Barnable fortune had lately evanesced under his father’s management, and that there had been therefore little reason to marry him and less to bear him a child, she left him in an access of bitterness.
This tone isn’t so far off from Jane Austen’s, in passages like (to pick one randomly, this one from Northanger Abbey): “A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.” Both have a winking stiffness. But on top of this, Crowley frequently adds cute words, in a spirit that feels sometimes sarcastic, and sometimes distracted. Whereas Austen seems to employ an economical pithiness to slice directly to the heart of things, Crowley batters me with decorations and euphemisms that make for an impassable emotional buffer zone.
And the quirkiness is not just in word choices, it’s in the scenario itself. Thus Smoky not only travels on “broken macadam passing untenanted factories” on his way to get married; but there’s even a “stipulation” that he make his way exclusively on foot, to a place he’s never been, to marry a woman named “Daily Alice Drinkwater”, whom he met only once, in the home of “George Mouse”. You get the picture.
I have no idea how to access something meaningful in this writing. If you take away the wacky names and adjectives and details, there is nothing left — which is to say that there’s nothing there to start with. Is that Crowley’s point, to give us something empty that only appears full, and to suggest that that is the nature of life? Or does he just not understand the rich worlds that exist inside every humble moment, that very much do not need to be “nattily bespeckled” or whatever? This feels tragic — there are universes in every soul, and every life is worth a novel, but a novel like this seems to render life soulless.
Not recommended.
Ware Tetralogy: book 1 by Rudy Rucker
I just couldn’t get into this. It has the feel of so much 70s sci-fi: seedy, arbitrary, exhausted. It is haphazard in its movements, without dancing; lurching not out of passion, but out of emptiness. Everyone is on drugs, but no one is inspired. At least when Philip K. Dick did this, he was giddy with ideas, and alternate realities would rapidly start to poke through the starting scenario.
Not recommended.
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson
I know this series is a favorite of many, and I might try again, but my first impression was that it’s clunky and immature. The hero is a total Mary Sue — I didn’t feel any dramatic stakes, for as far as I got. Does Sanderson not know that a character who has to be carefully tactical, and to sacrifice, is more interesting than a character who can just take on a bajillion enemies with no plan?
Not recommended.
Ice by Anna Kavan
Honestly, I can’t remember anything about this book, except how quickly I felt it wasn’t for me.
Not recommended.
AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future by Chen Qiufan and Kai-Fu Lee
What a let-down! I thought these would be works of disorienting imagination, but they’re pretty obvious scenarios, with bad prose.
Not recommended.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Another let-down! I’d heard that the movie is fun and the book is better, and this type of magic realist sci-fi should be right up my alley. The whole point of placing characters who are highly-trained into an outlandish environment should be to witness the clash between rational thinking and an irrational world. But the characters don’t have strong motivations, and they just start making dumb decisions right away. It was readable, but I lost interest quickly.
Not recommended.
Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
I’d been meaning to read a book by Kingsolver forever, but I had a real struggle with this book, and put it down after a few pages. It seemed like just a wall of precious adjectives in a Southern Gothic manner that felt tedious. What am I missing? Does this style give way to something deeper?
Not recommended.
The Best American Short Stories of 2020 edited by Curtis Sittenfeld
I love Curtis Sittenfeld’s writing, including her short stories. But I tried reading five of these, and couldn’t get into any of them.
Not recommended.
Plays
The Hour of Feeling by Mona Mansour
The first in a trilogy of plays that take place before, during and after the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and Egypt. The Hour of Feeling centers in Ahmad and Abir, Palestinian newlyweds who travel to London for an academic speaking invitation that promises to open up Ahmad’s career as a scholar of English literature.
Mansour deftly balances the personal and the political, connecting little professional compromises and courtesies to broader themes of identity and exile. This isn’t an “ideas play”; the themes never seem larger than the people, and the focus is allowed to expand and shrink at their pace. I didn’t quite buy the very last scene — there is an ultimatum that I found unearned — but all the characters felt real, and the few elements of theatricality that break from realism felt rich.
Highly recommended.
Children’s books
We Go Way Back: A Book About Life on Earth and How it All Began by Idan Ben-Barak and Philip Bunting
This picture book lets the astonishing reality of biological reproduction and evolution be communicated without too much adornment. It doesn’t exactly read smoothly, but there’s plenty to look at and notice.
Highly recommended.
Agatha May and the Anglerfish by Jessie Ann Foley and Nora Morrison
A picture book in the “cute geeky kid wins over their classmates” tradition. The vocal gymnastics around different scientific terms are fun. I didn’t love the climax being that the mainstream recognizes the weirdo with a big award, but it’s an uplifting portrait of scientific enthusiasm.
Recommended.
Comics
Roaming by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki
Another incredible graphic novel by the Tamakis, Roaming follows three young women, two of whom are old friends, as they visit New York City for the first time. Everything that happens is mundane: the New York they experience is entirely Tourist New York; the conversations thru have are inarticulate; their obstacles are quite surmountable. But because the Tamakis take them each so seriously, every molehill really seems like a mountain; every interpersonal slight is a mortal wound; every worn-out tourist bait is delightfully new. Their friendships fray, break down, split, and re-form in a mix of real differences and an inertia of immaturity. But their failures of agency aren’t put on a poster; the Tamakis have as much compassion for these women in their low-agency late teenage years as they would for older, wiser characters. Each character is different, and in their conflicts, I recognize each of them immediately; I’ve been each of them, as different as their are from each other and from me.
Supporting their storytelling, the Tamakis use an incredibly wide variety of layout techniques. They mix minutes in backgrounds under floating frames, and place characters at multiple positions within a static scene; they alter character appearances to reflect their memory of the past, or to suggest how this experience might linger in their memory in the future.
This story might seem small and inconsequential. But I think the Tamakis are reminding me of just how hugely consequential stories like this are.
Highly recommended.
Aspara Engine by Bishakh Som
A graphic novel of short stories — sometimes realistic, sometimes magical, most touching on Indian or Indian-American identity, most at least a little queer. A common throughline is identity disorientation and finding orientation; sometimes the characters and themes are explicitly gay or trans, other times there is just queerness in the air, in rigid certainties and the faultlines they hide.
Not every story works equally well, but the dialogue shows a real ear for conversation between friends and couples who’ve known each other for decades. A few stories burst out of their own seeming boundaries, and bring radical imagination to life. Some critics have called Som’s genre “desi futurism”, and her storytelling is in the great tradition of futurism: not so much about the temporal future, but rather about the wild possibilities in our world — possibilities we can only see if we have the courage to imagine them and demand them.
Highly recommended.
The Amazing Spider-Man Volume 2: Revelations by J. Michael Straczynski, John Romita Jr., and Scott Hanna
This collection begins with the issue in which Marvel first responded to the September 11 2001 attacks. It’s a moving piece of writing, and makes a brave attempt to tie the pieces left over from that shattering event back into a coherent and meaningful whole.
And after that, the rest of the stories that follow somehow keep this tone, while taking small steps towards being Spider-Man stories again. It’s the best that the Aunt May character has ever been written, and there’s a good Mary Jane story in there, too.
And John Romita Jr.’s art is always delightful.
Highly recommended.
Silver Coin vol 1 by Michael Walsh, Chip Zdarsky, Jeff Lemire, Kelly Thompson, and Ed Brisson
An anthology horror comic series created by artist Michael Walsh, with each issue telling a standalone story written by a different author. The mythology here has simple internal rules, and a premise that can be used endlessly. The only episode I thought didn’t work was Jeff Lemire’s, which seemed as though he’d misunderstood the scenario, a major mistake in horror writing.
Recommended.
The Eightfold Path by Steven Barnes, Charles Johnson, and Bryan Christopher Moss
A group of people gathered in a mysterious location tell each other interconnected stories, each touching on Buddhism and Afrofuturism. Part of the fun is the very different visual styles that Bryan Christopher Moss uses for each story. Some stories work better than others, but most have a spark of unique creative inspiration — even if they don’t really deliver on the Buddhism front.
Recommended.
Transmetropolitan Vol. 2: Lust For Life by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
A cyberpunk/ambiguous-topian romp, as entertaining as it is sprawling and random. The three-issue arc at the end is especially delightful, and the stories before it flesh out some of the shape of society in “the City”, where these books take place. I appreciated this, because it goes beyond the scatterbrained, anything-goes approach that Ellis so often uses in Transmetropolitan. But most of these brief, one-off sketches stopped just before they started getting interesting.
Recommended.
Monica by Dan Clowes
Aggressively empty; an Odyssey through the fallout of America’s endless appetite for reinvention and messianism. This never quite took shape for me, but I think that shapelessness was kinda the point.
Recommended.
Onion Skin by Edgar Camacho
A hit Mexican graphic novel that follows an unlikely pair of acquaintances on the run as they get into, and out of, trouble. The art is in an indie style reminiscent of Carol Swain; the author writes the popular Mexican webcomic Tiras Sin Sentido, or “Senseless Strips”, and I wonder if that name is at all a reference to Swain’s Way Out Strips.
One of the protagonists is practically the dictionary definition of a “manic pixie dream girl”, and the action is cartoonish and silly. But the way the pages dance around in time works, and the heroes’ affectionate friendship and spontaneous commitment to each other are touching. The only thing they have in common is that they don’t want the night to end — which makes them my kind of people.
Recommended.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Micro-Series vol 2 by Erik Burnham, Mike Costa, Ben Epstein, and Charles Paul Wilson III
Uneven, but I really liked the Casey Jones and April O’Neil stories.
Recommended.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Classics vol 1 by Michael Dooney, Mark Martin, Mark Bode, and Kevin Eastman
An assortment of TMNT stories published in the 1980s outside of the main series. There were more misses than hits. I did enjoy the self-improvement pep talk that Splinter gives a vagrant, helping him overcome a sense of having failed irrevocably; it perfectly captures the idealistic voice of Northhampton progressives trying to change the world in the mid-80s, equal parts communitarian and DIY individualist.
Not recommended.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin by Tom Waltz, Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird, Ben Bishop, and Esau & Isaac Escorza
An ambitious premise: far in the future, only one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has survived. Armed with the weapons of all four Turtles, he goes on one last mission — almost certain to fail — to finally get revenge.
Unfortunately, the writers never figure out what to do with the premise. We get a hodgepodge of flashbacks that don’t give more shading or context to the present; reappearances of old characters, or their descendants; and fights, mostly against unnamed legions of enemies or robots. But no story beats have particular meaning, and the hero never has to change in any way.
The most boring villains are those who are motivated only by a tribal feud. The battle between Splinter and Shredder has always been best told as one between generosity and selfishness, along the lines (conciously, I’m sure) of Yoda vs. Darth Vader; even the cheesy 1990 live-action TMNT film understood this. Instead, here this struggle is rewritten as little more than a family feud, a multi-generational clan vendetta taking place in both rural Japan and futuristic Manhattan, with no actual moral distinction between the two sides. The story has nothing to say about the senselessness of feuds, tactics to avoid fighting, or the futility of war. We see Splinter charge into battle, precipitating his own death; but nothing is done to signal that his reflects any character drama on his part. A character’s fatal mistake that isn’t rooted in their unique nature, or at least in a gesture to the whims of fate, is really a writing mistake.
Not recommended.
The One Trick Rip-Off by Paul Pope
Paul Pope’s artwork blends familiar comic art tropes with Pope’s unique, elliptical strokes and distortions. As I usually feel with his work, it was gorgeous to look at, but the characters were thin.
Not recommended.
The Will Eisner Reader, by Will Eisner
A collection of odds and ends — previously unpublished short graphical stories. I absolutely love Eisner’s work, but this is missable. There are some moments of delight for a fan, but on the whole the stories seemed less… well, significant than in his longer and more focused books.
Not recommended.
East of West vol. 1: The Promise by Jonathan Hickman and Nick Dragotta
There are so many comics like this, with beautiful character design but really no discernible story to tell. This one centers in part on a character who is Death, and it’s hard not to wish for Neil Gaiman’s infinitely more fascinating stories around his Death character.
Not recommended.
Nonfiction
Invent to Learn by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager
I started this book knowing I agreed with its overall message — it even has a picture of my colleague Eric’s educational invention on the cover! But I find extended writing about education a chore to read, and as I made my way through, I found my attention clashing against the meandering focus of the writing, the cursory and breezy format, and the jargon.
Around page 50, though, something really clicked. The authors are not just cheerleading; they have some critical takes on seminal papers and mainstream ideas in the field. For instance, they look at Scratch co-creator Mitch Resnick’s widely loved “creative learning cycle” model, and ask if it is really so much more useful than the old “waterfall” design approach, which is out of vogue. In practice, they ask, isn’t there a danger that this new sequence will be forced on kids, as models so often are? They acknowledge that Mitch cautions readers not to do this, but they wonder if that’s good enough, and if the problem will happen anyway. I love the creative learning cycle model That’s the kind of real world critique — not of a model itself, but of the value of the model, to actual classrooms — that I wish I saw more of.
I also appreciate that the authors do not downplay the size of the change they would like to see in education. They come out and say that schools will have to change a lot, structurally, if they are to institute creative learning beyond a superficial level.
Some other parts of the book felt thin and frustrating. One of the trickiest questions for project-based learning is how to assess students. Should you use rubrics and give numerical ratings? Should you push for assessment to be qualitative, rather than quantitative? The authors dance around the edges of these questions, but don’t dive in. They urge readers to ensure that projects be done with high quality, and they have a list of descriptors they want students’ projects to meet. They emphasize that educators should evaluate projects using a high bar. But what does that actually mean? Does that mean giving kids who complete projects, but who do not do exemplary work, C’s and D’s? Does it mean structuring feedback so that it is ongoing, rather than one-time — and if so, how do you fit all of that evaluative work into the limited time that teachers have?
I have similar questions about the particulars of which activities and tools teachers should use, and purchase. In a typical passage, the authors write:
If you don’t yet have a Fab Lab or laptop per student, you already have lots of tools and materials suitable for making! …you do not need expensive hardware or software to share your message in a compelling fashion. YouTube filmmaker Casey Neistat is turning the world’s journalism, advertising, television, and storytelling upside down with the camera that many of us have in our pockets.
The problem is, what exactly do you do with this? How do you structure students’ filmmaking experiences? How the heck do they edit what they record? How do you have students use their cell phones for creative purposes, and not just end up browsing TikTok?
As in so much other writing about creative approaches to education, the authors avoid the toughest questions, and often don’t even bring them up. It’s a frustrating trend.
All of that said, I cheer for the core ethic that the authors are pushing, one where activities are authentically engaging for students, and make them more powerful in ways they can see and feel right away.
Recommended.
Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy by Rachel Krantz; and The Sex Lives of African Women by Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah
Both of these books on women’s sexual agency were disappointing to try to read, even as I’m happy that they exist. Hearing a friend tell you their life story, in person, can be riveting. But it takes incredible craft to make a life story about someone you don’t know at all compelling enough to read for many pages. These books might be valuable documents, perhaps even radically necessary ones. But I did not find them to be good reads.
Not recommended.
Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv
Aviv is a compelling writer, but after the engrossing opening autobiographical episode, I felt bored.
I appreciate Aviv’s thesis that pharmacological psychiatry should do a better job of allowing for intentional change and free will, and not presume that mental illness and drugs have inevitable effects and progressions. But when Aviv is retelling the case histories of others, she doesn’t know their inner lives well enough to weave introspection and fact like she can with her own life. The result is page after page of biographical and pharmeceutical detail, far out of sight of what it was that attracted her to this person’s story in the first place.
Not recommended.
Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood by Frederick Joseph
I tried a few times to get into this and found it relentlessly generic. I essentially agree with what Joseph is saying, but I struggled to find particular insights from his perspective. There are lots of phrases like “intersectional oppression requires intersectional liberation”, but not so much confronting the reader’s assumptions.
One of the times I tried to pick this back up, the very next page read, “As bell hooks said:” and then had a 200 word excerpt from hooks. I love a good bell hooks passage, but no commentary by Joseph follows this one; he just drops it and moves on, picking up a completely unrelated point. In too many places, his prose doesn’t make use of the ideas it touches on, doesn’t wrestle with them, illuminate them, or develop them.
Not recommended.
