1. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo (started 12/27; finished 1/19): A-

This is easily one of the most illuminating, mind-expanding books I have ever read. Once I got past the slightly cringe-inducing declaration of the foreward by Michael Erid Dyson, a Black man, saying of Diangelo, a white woman, that she is "the new racial sheriff in town"—this book educated me in ways I could not imagine nearly every step of the way. I figured I would learn a lot about things I never thought to consider, and the book still exceeded all expectations. This is an excellently researched and easily digested book that challenges all assumptions of people continously conditioned by living in a racist and white supremacist society, and every white person in America should read it.

Three vital takeaways from this book: 1) No single white person is exempt from or immune to the social conditioning of racism in a white supremacist society. 2) All white people are beneficiaries of and complicit in white supremacy, whether they want to be or not. 3) The learning process never ends, until the day you die: challenging racism within ourselves is a work in progress to which there is no end, and the greatest hope is only to learn how to receive feedback and criticism with grace and humility as opposed to the knee-jerk guilt and defensiveness indicated by the book's title, and then work on improvement thereafter.

This book was first published in 2018, and has had time to receive some inevitable feedback just because it was written by a white woman. But there's something to be said for the sad truth of how white people receive feedback about racism from other whites far more readily than they do from people of color, and it's also good to note that this book isn't a singular authority, on anything. It's simply a fantastic and expertly crafted jumping-off point for further education whose need has no limit.

2. Watchmen: The Deluxe Edition by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (started 1/19; finished 3/13): B+

My interest in this original text had piqued after watching the excellent 2019 HBO limited series Watchmen, which stood well enough on its own—I loved it, after all—but which also technically served as a sequel, 34 years after the events of this widely celebrated graphic novel. I had also long ago seen and reviewed the 2009 feature film based on the original novel, which, in retrospect, a lot of I simply didn't get thanks to never having read it. (That said, you should not have to have read the source material to fully understand an adapted film, so many of the points I made then still stand.) The story at play here is very complext, intricately layered stuff, which the 2019 series only made more complex and more layered. And it's kind of unfortunate from the point of view of the series, but it remains true there as well: you gain a hell of a lot better understanding of so much of what informs the series if you read this book, which, while I wouldn't say I find it earth-shattering now, is easy to see how and why it was so celebrated in its time. My favorite things about it are more technical in nature, making it the only superhero graphic novel I have ever read (among admittedly very few) that I found completely engaging: the plotting and use of transitions and flashbacks, from one panel to the next, are unusual and innovative, surprisingly easy to follow. It feels a lot like watching an impressively edited film.

At the end of the day it's still a standard superhero story, with expositional monologuing by the main villain as it approaches its climax, although I'll give it this: there's no clichéd "super battles" between good and bad guys, all the pricipal characters are complex with nuanced and maleable moral codes. The whole thing is very contemplative and philosophical, which also explains a great deal of the 2009 film's somewhat surprising lack of action (with a couple notable exception sequences). The 2019 series very much enhances just about everything about this story, with its clever wit and its directness about U.S. racial history. In short, at this point it makes for great supplemental material for the HBO series (especially if you read this book first), but it also a better experience to read than watching the 2009 film. I can easily see why it's widely regarded as one of the best graphic novels ever written.

3. In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters (started 3/15; finished 5/3): B

This is a 2013 young-adult fiction novel set in 1918—during the last pandemic even remotely close to the current one, the Spanish Flu. I actively sought this out: I was curious to find out what kind of other writing there was about the last time people were expected to go about their daily lives in public in face masks, or deal with any number of the other jarringly unusual things we are also experiencing right now. I first searched for literature about the Spanish Flu several months ago, when we were much closer to the height of our current pandemic, and found it difficult to find. In fact, I would have much preferred literature written closer to the time, by people who actually lived through the Spanish flu, even if it were (maybe even preferably) fiction. Society is so different now than it was a century ago that it may play out differently this time, but the real problem then is that few people wrote about it because a pandemic virus is a slow drip of melancholy and tragedy and heartache, which is difficult to dramatize.

So how did Cat Winters do it? Well, 1918 had an added level of drama missing from 2020: the first World War was also raging, which meant two high-casualty events were occurring at the same time. And Winters writes a love story, and weaves in the "spiritualism craze" of the time, where photographers race to prove the existence of an afterlife. This was really the part of the novel that disappointed me, as it turns the whole plot into a straight up ghost story, when what I really wanted was just a realistic portrait of what daily living was like in the U.S. in 1918. To be fair, Winters offers a fascinating look both into researched portraits of life at the time (an author's note indicates that "flu vaccines were crude and scarce" and when it comes to the frequently depicted folk remedies, "every preventative flu measure and cure described . . . came from historical accounts of the pandemic"), and into sometimes naive assumptions about people's behavior in a pandemic, having written this book all of seven years before the next one occurred.

In short, the story is . . . fine. But the setting of this novel makes for a fascinating read just from the contextual vantage point of 2021, which was precisely what I was looking for.

4. Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz (started 5/3; finished 7/14): B+

This one was still a relatively popular book even by the time I finally checked it out of the Seattle Public Library, fully six months after its initial release prompted many discussions on the several movie related podcasts I listen to. That means that, when I inevitably was far from finished with it by the time it was due back to the library, I could not renew it due to the number of other holds also on it. I discovered a relatively easy fix, however: I checked out the ebook version, which I could then continue reading in the Kindle apps on both my iPad (preferred) and my iPhone (not ideal, but worked during lunch breaks at work after I had returned to working from the office). This one I could never "renew," but at least twice—maybe three times—I still just checked out the ebook again the very day, or the next day after, the checkout time ended. And as you can see, after a couple of months I finally got it finished . . . on the last day I could keep it checked out.

Anyway, the book pretty strictly lives up to its title, assembling mostly direct quotes from nearly everyone involved in the 1993 cult movie Dazed and Confused, crucially including those who later became the biggest stars: Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Renee Zellweger, Parker Posey, etc. Several interviews are done with movie studio executives who had been involved in the movie's marketing and distribution, and also with some of the crew members behind the camera (of course most prominently director Richard Linklater). Only one or two cast members either declined or were unavailable to participate. It's a fascinating read, so long as you are least a casual fan of the film. I always liked this particular movie fine, but am much more passionate about film in general, which thus makes a story like this more interesting, especially when looking into the details of how a movie like this has such enduring appeal, over decades.

5. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCullovh (started 7/15; finished 10/15): A-

How's this for irony? My favorite book I read this year is also the one I took by far the longest to finish. I checked Because Internet out of the library on June 17 but was umable to begin reading it until July 15, by which time I had already had to renew it once; I renewed it again, and by the time I finally finished it, precisely three months had passed since I started it, and I got a notice from the library that my account had been suspended, because they only allow you to renew twice, and after that they suspend your account if you haven't returned the book 14 days past its due date. Without returning it within six weeks, they then charge you for a lost book. So, I read the last few chapters comparatively quickly.

How long it takes me to read a book is never a reflection on its quality, however. This was just the unfortunate circumstance of my trying to read a book over the summer, when my daily commute to and from work was almost exclusively by bicycle, during which I could not read. Once I was busing or walking again, I had more time to read—I am just far too distracted at home, or if I try reading in bed, I fall asleep. Well, I did finally get this one finished, and I must say it legitimately changed my worldview, a rare and impressive thing indeed; After reading this book, I am far less inclined to judge anyone, for any reason, for commumicating in a way that does not seem right or "normal" to me. How we communicate only matters to the person we are communicating to, and whether they understand us. Anyone would has done any hand wringing over the use of emoji or the lack of punctuation in texts or social media posts would certainly do well to read this book. Being old and out of touch is one thing; being willfully informed about how language is evolving—in differnt ways within different socioeconomic or generational groups of people—is another. And McCullough lays it out with beautifully articulate simplicity, no matter how complext the concepts might otherwise be.

6. We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach (started 10/15; finished 11/1): B

I told a friend I was reading a novel about a potentially planet-killing meteor hurtling toward Earth that was set in Seattle, and because he knows how much I love disaster stories and how much I love Seattle, he said, "Do you jerk off to it every day?"

Well, it's not quite like that. Especially considering the main characters are all high school teenagers. But, the premise was basically tailor-made for me, and being a YA novel it was an unusually fast read for me—barely more than two weeks; I finished it while in Las Vegas over Halloween weekend. The story has some fairly glaring plot holes that are easy to ignore given the focus on the kids and their own interpersonal drama, and how the threat of annihilation affects them, and I do like the ambiguousness—you spent the whole book wondering whether they all will actually get destroyed. The scientists in the novel say there's a 66.6% chance that the planet will be destroyed, so in all likelihood it does. That said, Hillary Clinton had about that same chance of winning the 2016 election, so stranger things have happened. Anyway, the book is fine; it may be a bit more fun for locals like myself who enjoy the Seattle area references, although some of it is already dated, the novel having been first published in 2015. As with many things, it's an occasionally fascinating exercise to think about the creator of that work having no idea what kind of completely different calamity was headed for us only five years later.

7. Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History by Glen Berger (started 11/1; finished 12/21): B

I turned my attention to this novel, well past its prime reading period, for the same reason I did Don't Look Up: because it was mentioned on a podcast I listen to. In this case, the podcast host mentioned that writer Glen Berger—who had been one of the primary writers of the Broadway play—pulls no punches, and really dishes regarding the famous people involved in the process. This would include the apparently megalomaniacal yet undeniably talented director Julie Taymor, and ridiculously busy musicians Bono and Edge from U2, who composed the original music.

The surprise of this book, to me, was finishing it to discover it had been published, in the fall of 2013, when Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was still defying expectations and continuing to run on Broadway two and a half years after an official opening that had occurred after three widely publicized delays and an unprecedented six and a half months of previews. I really had expected to read a book that was published after the show had closed. Instread, ironically, after the book ends on a somewhat cynical yet hopeful note about the show's future, the show actually closed on January 4, 2014—less than two months after the book was published.

And boy, does this book go through several years of juicy celebrity drama—plus a whole lot of drama among behind-the-scenes people, including everything about how a couple of notoriously horrible injuries occurred during previews. This book would obviously have far greater relevance if read in, say, the fall of 2013; it's easily eight years past its prime. But, while even Glen Berger kind of allows for how it's just his one perspective and can thus be taken with a grain of salt, it makes for a petty compelling read.