Hello all! It is the last newsletter of the year. It has been up and down for me, but through it all, I had my charge- produce worthwhile critical content (and cute cat pics) for my lovely subscribers. I’m grateful to you all. I took a week off from reviewing books to “recharge my batteries” but I have produced an annotated list of the best and worst I read this year for your New Years enjoyment!
There will also be a reading election today, for my next set of recreational reads! If you’re already a voter, look for an OpaVote email. If you want to be, hit me up in the comments or however else you know how to reach me. This is also a good time to become a Citizen, as I am going to start producing —exclusive— fiction content soon! In any event, happy New Years and enjoy!
CONTENTS
Best Reads of 2021
Worst Reads of 2021
BEST READS OF 2021
NONFICTION
10. William Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of One German Town, 1922-1945 (1965)
A good, straightforward social/political history of centrist failure and fascist opportunism.
9. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)
Reed’s journalistic account of the October Revolution conveys much of the confusion, excitement, and even hope of the moment.
8. Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form (1932)
This is a weird and more or less impossible political-philosophical work from a guy who wasn’t a fascist only by technicality, but it was fascinating throughout.
7. Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1945)
As you’ll see in the “worst of” section, I read a lot of right-wing dreck this year, but with Jünger and Nock I got some good ones in too. Nock’s ideas are pretty bad but his prose was great.
6. Zachary Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (2020)
Big Poppa Keynes gets the biog treatment… but have we ever truly seen his dream, when scabs like Nixon could claim to be Keynesians, Carter asks? Well, I don’t know about all that but it was a good book.
5. Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019)
Another big dude of midcentury liberalism, John Rawls, gets a similar treatment, not entirely sympathetic but mostly… the Marxist in me senses a pattern… but hey, both were just the sort of thick, crunchy intellectual histories I like.
4. Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019)
A book that not just provoked many thoughts in me, but many feelings (including eye-rolling frustration more than once), this is a master class in how to do intellectual history about subjects apart from the ivory tower.
3. Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012)
One of the great all-around intellectuals of her time comes to grips with what was lost through the one-two punch of AIDS and gentrification- not just the loss of vibrant urban centers for alternative living, but the thought that went with them.
2. Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (2021)
A great big history of American culture in the Cold War era, and one that departs from the “McCarthy killed culture” angle. Menand brings the glories (and problems) of a high point in both high and low culture to glorious life, in wistful but non-sentimental tones.
1. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960)
My favorite nonfiction book this year was this work of criticism, which tore through a vast swath of American literature to advance a theory, more or less spun out of whole cloth, that is still relevant today: Americans like death and sentimentality more than they like human-scale love. Sounds about right!
Nonfiction honorable mentions: Nicole Aschoff, The Smartphone Society (2020); Eugene Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship (1980); Seth Jacobs, Rogue Diplomats (2020); Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America (2019); Hilary Moore and James Tracey, No Fascist USA! (2020); Suleiman Osman, The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn (2011); Tom O’Neill, Chaos (2019); Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Cold War’s Killing Fields (2018); Stanislav Vysotsky, American Antifa (2020); Michael Trask, Cruising Modernism (2003); Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites (2020); Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)
FICTION
10. J.K. Huysmans, Là-Bas (1891)
This work of French decadent literature took us to Parisian black masses, and worse, into the stale decaying heart of late nineteenth century bourgeois life.
9. Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1949)
The great Trotskyite writer of the twentieth century takes us through a Stalinist reaction to a murder mystery.
8. Frederick Forsythe, The Day of the Jackal (1971)
Examinations of where low life and politics mix, fast-paced action, and a celebration of dogged, patient work — by both cops and criminals — characterize this highly enjoyable thriller about almost killing Charles DeGaulle
7. Norm Macdonald, Based on a True Story (2016)
We gotta get the funny in here somewhere, and no one brings the funny more than a man who died this year, the great Norm Macdonald. He skewers the celebrity memoir genre and himself and left me laughing like a fool.
6. Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight (1939)
Oof- this one hurt. Rhys channeled her own experiences down and out in Paris and London — and something tells me she had it worse than Orwell — to tell this story of a woman tripping through a thirties Paris where every street, bar, and shop reminds her of her fuckups and hurts. Brutal but beautiful.
5. Ben Lerner, The Topeka School (2019)
Hey, what do you know- a highly praised literary novel that takes itself seriously, doesn’t put a ton of chips on the identity of the author/narrator, and actually deserves something like the praise it got! I don’t even necessarily agree with its “takes” about how we got here from its late nineties Kansas setting- it was just a solid, serious novel of ideas. For once!
4. Natalie Ironside, The Last Girl Scout (2020)
For sheer enjoyment, this might have been my favorite book this year. A hundred-odd years after an apocalypse, a trans-woman commissar for an Appalachian communist republic fights fascists and vampires (and finds love!) in this kick-ass scifi/horror adventure. Pure fun from start to finish.
3. Doris Lessing, Stories (1978)
No one does it quite like Doris Lessing. Whether she’s conveying the modalities of bad faith among “progressive” rich Brits, the desire of a child to swim in dangerous waters, or just how weird West Germans in the fifties were, she’s uniquely insightful and readable.
2. Terry Bisson, Fire on the Mountain (1988)
I’d known about this book forever, but avoided it because I thought it’d be an ideological Mary Sue story about a slave rebel utopia. It isn’t- it’s a whip-smart story about historical memory, meaning, and sacrifice, telling the story of what a successful John Brown raid might have looked like, and what might have come after.
1. Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Love, Anger, Madness (1968)
My favorite fiction this year was this collection of three short novels/novellas by an exiled Haitian writer depicting the personal sides of racial and political conflict in her homeland. This would be interesting enough, but her prose is just intoxicating- it takes you into the deep waters of time, place, and mind right away and doesn’t let you up. Beautiful.
Fiction honorable mention: Garrett Cook, Charcoal (2021); James Ellroy, Widespread Panic (2021); Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace (2000); Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee (2000); Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (1964); James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (2013); Joseph Hansen, Death Claims (1973); Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017); Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014); Michael Thelwell, The Harder They Come (1980); Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (1877); George Pelecanos, The Big Blowdown (1996); Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)
WORST READS OF 2021
I’ve been told by several readers that they enjoy my negative reviews more than my positive ones. This makes sense to me. Sometimes, I enjoy writing them. I will say there’s one conceptual difficulty for me in denoting a “worst of” list in the same way I do with the “best of.” There’s two categories of books that tend to dominate the list: mediocre books I’m compelled to read for research, often for my birthday lecture (this year, that means a lot of mediocre alternate history fiction), and stuff I read as part of my “readings on the right” slot. Picking on stuff I read for birthday lectures often feels trifling, like I’m picking a fight with someone small. Picking on right-wing stuff makes me seem like I have an ideological litmus test for quality, which I don’t.
So, I’m going to do this sort of essay style, give you a few categories of shit books I read. I’ll throw down a bottom ten at the bottom, where it belongs, but it’ll probably be less interesting.
Shit I read purely for ideological education (libertarian edition) - I’ve read a lot of fascists, I thought it would be good to get some libertarians in, especially as many of the latter are becoming the former these days. So I read Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market, and the granddaddy of them all, Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action. What did I learn? Well, I learned that even at its most supposedly erudite, libertarianism is a complete intellectual paper tiger, based on people like Mises waving their hand at the twentieth century so it goes away, and catamites like Rothbard pretending like it had. It’s much less of a surprise to me now that the movement as a whole got gobbled up by Trump. So that’s something- but these sucked to read.
Shit I read to have some idea of what the contemporary right is thinking - Honestly, this is probably a pointless category; if you want to know what these people are “thinking,” have a look at the comments on any news story. But still, I figured I’d have a look at some books. Steven Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City was the most disappointing of the lot, as I expected an erudite type of crazy but for the normal, gay marriage and trans bathroom-obsessed kind. Andy Ngo’s Unmasked was close to my heart, as it purported to “expose antifa” as anti-democratic terrorists, but it was mostly about they hurt Ngo’s fee-fees. Probably the worst was Chris Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement, a smug, pseudo-erudite rehearsal of cliches about the sixties and what it meant for us all whose real project is to edge denunciation of the civil rights movement closer to mainstream acceptability. All in all, a sorry lot.
Shit by other conservatives I read (nonfiction edition) - William F. Buckley was supposed to be some sort of god of erudition and sharp writing, but God and Man at Yale, the book who made his name, was a tattle-tale slog. Still, it was brisk next to Rene Guénon’s traditionalist tome The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times.
Shit by other conservatives I read (fiction edition) - I go looking for good contemporary right-wing fiction writers, and come back disappointed more or less every time. The one who was holding the flag, Michel Houellebecq, both is a fairly ambivalent right-winger (a Macron voter rather than a LePen one) and his writing has fallen off rather badly, and his latest tale of depressed eurocrats oppressing good French farming folk, Serotonin, is his most phoned-in novel yet. Long-time readers might remember the writer of the worst book I read last year, fascist boy Michael “Mike Ma” Mahoney. Well, he came out with one this year, Gothic Violence, which is neither particularly gothic nor violent. It was an improvement over his last effort, but just barely. Lastly, for both readings-on-the-right purposes and for birthday lecture purposes, I read L. Neil Smith’s The Probability Broach, about a libertarian utopia alternate timeline where everyone’s strapped and monkeys vote. I could see that being fun but it just sucked as a book.
Shit I read for my birthday lecture - I actually expected this to be longer, but a lot of the alternate history I read for this project wasn’t half-bad. And I don’t feel great for shitting on Kurt Giambastiani’s The Year the Cloud Fell or Rod Duncan’s The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter. But they took interesting concepts — a Wild West where the Native Americans ride dinosaurs and a Britain run by Luddites, respectively — and made them boring. I’m a little more happy to shit on Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation, for its nakedly zeitgeisty semi-slave-girls-of-color kill steampunk-zombies story, it’s weirdly racist treatment of Native Americans, and the fact that Ireland is a woke-twitter drama queen who gets woke wrong and works as a contractor for the Navy.
Contemporary literary shit - After birthday lectures and readings on the right, probably my most fertile field for bad books every year is my effort to read at least some “important” “contemporary” literature. To be fair, I scored a few good hits there this year, as you can see in the “best of” section. But I also read three true stinkers. In rough descending order of how bad they are: Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, a bid to be The Great Asian-American Novel that makes you feel bad for Asian-Americans, and novels; Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which is only redeemed by the way it acts as a skeleton key for the solipsistic reveries that make up so much of contemporary literary fiction; and lastly, Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts, which was just dreck from the latest smarter-than-thou literary “it girl.” A depressing reverse picture to the sorry state of right-wing writing I started with.
Shit I read by dumb liberals - But wait, there’s more signs of contemporary degeneration of thought! Neal Stephenson, who has written some magnificent works, put out a turkey of a climate change thriller this year, Termination Shock, that doesn’t even manage to be ideologically offensive. Admiral Jim Stavridis teamed up with Tufts College former spy Elliot Ackerman to produce a similarly boring but also profoundly stupid thriller of a war pitting the US against, well, seemingly everyone? In 2034. They can’t even deliver the genre goods right, that’s the maddening thing about these books! Lastly, we have the deeply disappointing A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, which swings at the biggest available target — idiot libertarians settling northern New Hampshire to start their own community — with the most fun angle — bears! — and doesn’t land a glove, and barely gets a laugh. Just awful.
I was thinking of ranking the bottom ten, but the more I think about it… Nah. I’ll just say the competition for last place is between three awful contemporary right-wing books. Ngo’s Unmasked and Mahoney’s Gothic Violence were truly bad, and just incompetent on top of it all. But it’s gotta be Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement for sheer stupidity, creepiness, and just all around bullshit.
Woof! Maybe I shouldn’t end on such a negative note… but hey, I also read a lot of good books this year! Plus, I’ve always got a certain someone to cheer me up.
Mithra wishes you a happy new year, and so do I!