My 2021 (and 2020!) in Books

This is the eighth year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I post on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new.

So why didn’t I post a list at the start of 2021? Well, that’s because 2020 was… 2020. When the year started, I was already busy to the point of distraction, and we were looking down barrel of a gun called Covid. Then I started a challenging new job… so I never got around to it. This year I’m catching up.

I read 32 books in 2021 and 29 books in 2020… with a few extras that you’ll see as you read.

If you’re curious, then you can see the 2019 list here, 2018 list here, the 2017 list here, the 2016 list here, the 2015 list here, and the 2014 list here. As always, I want to thank my friend David Daniel for the inspiration to do this.

Three quick editorial notes before I get to the lists…

Note #1: this blog is becoming a newsletter! Please subscribe! It’s free, and in addition to things like this post it will also feature other interesting things I run across as well as updates on my book The Shakespeare Startup, which I’m busy writing.

Note #2: in the past, I’ve shared Amazon links for all the books I read in a given year. This time, I’m going to use Bookshop.org links instead because Bookshop supports independent bookstores, which are an endangered species. (When I can’t use Bookshop, I’ll use eBay. Also, if things are only available on Amazon, then I’ll skip the link.)

Note #3: I’ll put a simple list for 2021 first, then a longer version with analysis, then a simple list for 2020, then a longer version with analysis… with handy hyperlinks so you can skip around.

2021 Simple List
(skip to the longer version)

2021 Longer Version
(or skip to the 2020 simple list)

1. Cline, Ernest. Ready Player Two. Finished 3/3/21.

Terrible. A schmaltzy, sentimental, and dull follow up to the tasty meringue that was the first. Armada was bad, too. Cline has lost me as a reader. This is so bad I’m donating it to my local library. Sheesh. How sad that this is the first book I’ve finished this year.

2. Grant, Adam. Think Again: the Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Finished 4/3/21.

Everything Adam writes is insightful, interesting, and amazes me at his productivity. This is not different.

And… Good heavens! How had I only finished two books by the start of April???

3. Dumont, Joey. Joey Somebody. Finished 4/7/21.

Joey is a friend. I loved his book. Loved being on his podcast (although see entry #13), and wrote an extensive review of the book that you should go read right now.

4. MacGillis, Alec. Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Finished 4/18/21.

Magnificent. If you’ve ever felt slightly queasy about how much you spend on Amazon, or wondered about the impact that Amazon has on life as we know it… then grab a bottle of Pepcid and start reading.

5.  McKelvey, Jim. The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time. Finished 5/6/21.

Interesting, good storytelling, and some useful practical advice. At the end of the book, I worried that the core concept of an innovation stack was slightly underdeveloped, but still worth the time.

6. Wells, Martha. Network Effect: a Murderbot Novel. Finished 5/10/21.

The first full-length Murderbot novel—the others were all novellas—and a delightful read. Consistently interesting exploration of a non-human consciousness from the inside… akin in weird ways to Brin’s Startide Rising and Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time, only in this case rather than dolphins or spiders it’s cyborgs.

7. Wells, Martha. Fugitive Telemetry: the Murderbot Diaries. Finished 5/16/21.

Delightful, strange, laugh-out-loud funny much of the time. This one is a direct sequel to the earlier novellas, so I guess I read them out of order by starting with Network Effect. 

8. Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Assassins of Thasalon: a Penric & Desdemona Novel. Finished 5/19/21.

I love every single thing she writes, and despite my best efforts I inhaled this entry into the Penric saga in an evening, which always happens. Note that while there is an expensive hardback edition available on Bookshop.org, this is part of Bujold’s Direct-to-Consumer semi-retirement writing plan, and as such you can buy cheap digital copies on either Apple Books or Amazon. 

9. Lewis, Michael. The Premonition: A Pandemic Story. Finished 5/20/21.

Lewis is such a magnificent writer that I sometimes find myself grinding my teeth in envy for his ability to find and tell stories. A quasi sequel to The Fifth Risk, which was one of my top books of 2018, this one tells the story of how we missed Covid and why. 

10. Roose, Kevin. Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. Finished 5/30/21.

Consistently interesting think piece by one of The New York Times’ tech reporters about how things aren’t hopeless for humans as AI becomes more and more powerful. I was taken with his idea of “transfer learning,” or “using information gained while solving one problem to do something else,” which humans are good at and AI’s aren’t… at least not yet. A simpler word for this is “analogy,” which is a key human creative skill.

11. Lee, Sharon & Steve Miller. Trader’s Leap: a Liaden Universe Novel. Finished 5/31/21.

The most recent installment in the long-running sci-fi/romance series. The world-building has gone on for so many novels that this would be a difficult place to start, but hugely satisfying for longtime fans.

12. Sandel, Michael J. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Public Good? Finished July 19, 2021.

Some years ago (before I started recording what I read and when) I loved Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: the Moral Limits of Markets. This book is a fascinating exploration of the ethical limits of our conception of meritocracy, which sounds abstract and non-urgent but is critically urgent as we rethink policy in an age where the conventional ways into adult life and economic stability (college, working for one company for your whole career) are dissolving.

13. Lukianoff, Greg and Jonathan Haidt. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting up a Generation for Failure. Finished 7/29/21.

I read this for my appearance on Joey Dumont’s “Laugh Your Cry Out” podcast. Love Joey. Mediocre book. Don’t bother.

14. Heinlein, Robert A. Time Enough for Love. Finished 8/8/21.

A re-read of a favorite book from young adulthood. A passage about how some people are yeast in society’s loaf came to mind a week or so ago, so I found my copy of the book (one of two, I believe) in the garage, read the passage (which is towards the beginning), and then kept reading all the way to the end. Amazingly open story about polyamory and polygamy for a book published in 1973.

15. Heinlein, Robert A. The Number of the Beast. Finished 8/13/21.

Another re-read. This time I couldn’t find my copy in the garage, so I checked it out of the library. This was the first story I read with multiple first-person narrators, back when it came out in 1980. Like so much of Heinlein’s work, it holds up nicely. See the entry on The Pursuit of the Pankera (coming below sometime soon) for more.

16. Frenkel, Sheera and Cecilia Kang. An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. Finished 8/16/21.

A compelling but sadly unsurprising account of Facebook’s epic cluelessness, maliciousness, waffling and mendacity around misinformation and how bad actors use the platform to do bad things. 

17. Aaronovitch, Ben. False Value: A Rivers of London Story. Finished 8/28/21.

Another longtime series that would be nearly impossible to start reading now… but a delightful entry nonetheless.

18. Heinlein, Robert A. The Pursuit of the Pankera: a Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes. Finished 9/9/21.

Years after Heinlein’s death, his executors discovered the manuscript for this book in his papers. It’s a parallel novel to The Number of the Beast (#15), and finding a new-to-me book by Heinlein so many years later was an unexpected joy. The first 150 pages or so of Pankera are identical to Beast, but the characters (who are multiverse hopping space and time travelers) make a different choice in Pankera, at which point everything changes. Back in 1980, notions of the multiverse were not as common as they are today, with the MCU’s “Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness” coming this year to a movie theater near you. Heinlein was ahead of the game.

19. Schoenbaum, S. William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. Finished 10/7/21.

The above eBay link to this magnificent book is to the 1975 hardback edition, which is a coffee table book long out of print. Bookshop does have the Compact edition that followed a couple of years later. There are many, many biographies of Shakespeare. What distinguishes Schoenbaum’s is that he only talks about what he can prove, what there is documentary evidence to support. Since, as I mentioned above, I’m currently writing a book about Shakespeare as a startup businessman, Schoenbaum’s book has been a treasure trove. I actually have the Compact edition, which I bought on my first visit to the magnificent Folger Shakespeare Library in 1984, but I ran across a cheap copy of the hardback at Powell’s Books (a.k.a. the holy land) can couldn’t resist buying it, and reading it with intense interest. My copy is now festooned with post-its, since I couldn’t bear to write in such a book.

20. Spiner, Brent. Fan Fiction: a Mem-Noir. Finished 10/20/21.

Amusing noir-on-acid pseudo memoir set during the years Spiner played Data on Star Trek: the Next Generation in the late 80s/early 90s. Very reminiscent of fan fic, but with an actor’s narcissism and neuroses front and center. It has the depth of a crepe, but crepes can be very tasty.

21. Bujold, Lois McMaster. Knot of Shadows: a Penric & Desdemona Novella. Started and Finished 10/24/21.

She never disappoints. I downloaded it this morning intending to save it for a plane ride to NYC the following day, then inhaled the whole things. Sigh. As with #8, this is part of Bujold’s Direct-to-Consumer semi-retirement writing plan, and as such you can buy cheap digital copies on either Apple Books or Amazon. 

22. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. Finished 10/25/21.

I hadn’t read this since the 8th Grade, but since I was lucky enough to get tickets to see the Aaron Sorkin dramatization with Jeff Daniels on Broadway, I dug up my old copy and read the entire thing on the plane. I wish I hadn’t waited all those decades to reread this astonishingly good and impactful book. It’s a good thing that the guy in the middle seat to my left was a deep sleeper, as I cried buckets of tears reading it and might have alarmed him. The Sorkin adaptation, by the way, was also amazing, and I think I appreciated it all the more knowing the source material.

23. Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman: Act II—an Audible Original. Finished 11/1/21.

An audiobook, really an old-style radio drama, and a terrific adaptation of the comic series. I listened to the first act in 2020 (see below). As a result of this audiobook, I found my copies of the comic and reread the whole thing. This will also soon be a Netflix live-action series. I’m down.

24. Dini, Paul and Pat Cadigan. Harley Quinn: Mad Love. Finished 11/7/21.

A YA novelization of the origin of this fan-favorite character co-written by Dini, one of Harley Quinn’s creators. Enjoyable if you love the character.

25. Scalzi, John. The Last Emperox. Finished 11/26/21

This was the third and final book in the “Interdependency” trilogy. I read the first in 2017 and the second in 2018. When David Daniel mentioned that this last one was out, I realized that I remembered little to nothing about the first two, so I reread them over the last few days, before leaping into this one. As always, Scalzi is an engaging writer, if a superficial one. The cadence of his voice is uncannily like that of Robert Heinlein, one of my all-time favorite writers… with a lot more profanity and a lot less intellectual depth. I’m trying to decide if that last idea is fair or not. I certainly swallow Scalzi’s novels whole, often in one sitting. Plus, is it fair to critique him compared to Heinlein when Heinlein was part of the group who invented science fiction while Scalzi is an heir? I’m not sure. Heinlein was, in retrospect, bedeviled by the sexual and sexist mores of his era, which can be a bit hard to re-read (as with The Number of the Beast and others this year… see above), but he was a pioneer. Also, Heinlein dug into his character’s psychologies—even when he was alternating between different points of view—more deeply than Scalzi does. 

On the other hand, the conceit of this trilogy is, “what would happen if an interstellar empire held together by a collection of wormholes (although he calls them ‘the flow” instead) were suddenly to face the collapse of those wormholes?” That’s interesting. I just never felt deeply empathetic with the characters. 

If he were ever to read this, I suspect Scalzi would be annoyed by the critique but also chuffed that I’m comparing him to Heinlein. Since I’ve bought pretty much all of his books, he’d probably be OK with my critique so long as I keep on buying. Which I’ll probably do.

26. Fraction, Matt and David Aja, et al. Hawkeye: the Saga of Barton and Bishop. Finished 12/5/21.

I ordinarily don’t include comics in this list, but this is the 24-issue run that, at least in part, inspired the Disney+ streaming show Hawkeye that premiered the day before Thanksgiving. The comic is very different than the show (at least what I’ve seen of the show so far), but very, very good.

27. Connelly, Michael. The Dark Hours: a Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch Novel. Finished 12/7/21.

Started 12/6. I think in the dictionary under “compulsively readable” there’s a picture of Michael Connelly. Unlike my complaints about the Liaden books or the Rivers of London books, you can start anywhere in Connelly and get sucked in. 

28. Wiles, David. Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Finished 12/11/21.

An eccentric and brilliant exploration of Will Kemp’s style of clowning that sheds new light on the experiences of Elizabethan playgoers.

29. Barrett, Lisa Feldman. 7-1/2 Lessons About the Brain. Finished 12/16/21.

An enchanting little book. I loved her much larger book—How Emotions are Made, a few years ago. The new one actually would be a great introduction to the earlier one, sort of how I wish I’d had the chance to read Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project before I’d read any traditional Behavioral Economics. Barrett’s enthusiasm for neuroscience is infectious, and her ability to denature centuries of cemented misinformation about the brain and the mind is startling.

30. Weber, David. On Basilisk Station (Honor Harrington 1). Finished 12/17/21.

Stirring military space opera. I’ve been meaning to read this for years, and I’m glad I did. Weber’s plot is well-crafted, and the final action sequence had me on the edge of my seat. However, characterization is shallow, and I found myself comparing this to Bujold’s Vorkosigan series often, and unflatteringly. Honor Harrington is more like Forester’s Horatio Hornblower… a narrative agent more than a character with interiority. I’ll certainly read more in the series, but I re-read the Bujold’s over and over.

31.   Weber, David. The Honor of the Queen (Honor Harrington 2). Finished 12/21/21.

This series became my end-of-year relaxtion, but there’s no change in my evaluation from #1. Fun. Good. Can’t imagine re-reading.

32. Weber, David. The Short Victorious War (Honor Harrington 3). Finished 12/29/21.

More of the same. Great fun, but there’s not enough there there to comment. 

2020 Simple List
(or skip to the longer version)

2020 Longer Version 
(or go back to the top)

1. Kaftan, Vylar. Her Silhouette, Drawn in Water. Finished January 1, 2020.

Lovely, lyrical SciFi novella about a powerful telepath who is rescued by her wife after 10 grueling years in a mental prison called a T-Lock. Recommended by David Daniel via Facebook. A quick but stirring read.

2. Rucker, Philip and Carol Leonnig. A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America. Finished February 1, 2020.

Huh. How’d I only finished one other book so far this year? This is the problem when I am reading too many books at the same time.  Moving right along… Meh. This is a well-reported book that goes into depth about things we already know. If you’re on the left, then it’s an engaging hate read but one that only contributes to the outrage fatigue that might get Trump re-elected. If you’re on the right, then you’re almost certainly not reading this nor likely to credit anything I have to say.

3. Carriger, Gail. Soulless: an Alexia Tarabotti Novel. Finished 2/13/20.

Enjoyable Victorian England fantasy / alternative history in which werewolves and vampires have been integrated into the Empire for centuries. Recommended by Peter Horan. I don’t know if I’ll go onto the rest of the series, but this was good enough that I decided to finish it in the early morning before making breakfast for the fam. 

4. Tobaccowala, Rishad. Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data. Finished February 24, 2020.

Wonderful. You can get a sense of Rishad’s brilliance in this interview the two of us did shortly after the book came out.

5. Chambers, Becky. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Finished February 29, 2020.

Delightful science-fiction romp recommended on Facebook by David Daniel. I think of this as space opera without the opera. Imagine the TV series “Firefly” without all the high drama. This isn’t to say that there’s no action, or that there’s not a clear beginning middle and end. However, this is focused more on developing relationships within the crew of the tunneling ship Wayfarer, than on any particular plot. I finished the book on a lazy Saturday morning, drinking coffee and having cereal at the kitchen island. It was a lovely way to start the day. I will read the next one, although possibly not soon.

6. Peper, Eliot. Bandwidth (an Analog novel). Finisher March 6, 2019.

Terrific near-future dystopia… as I finished reading it (on a plane from NY) I realized that it inhabits more focused, less annoying territory adjacent to The Circle by Dave Eggers, which apparently (who knew?) is now a Netflix series. The Circle was about a thinly-veiled Facebook, about a globally connected world and a company with too much power because it is the substrate upon which that world is built. In contrast, Peper’s Bandwidth is an action/adventure story that takes place within a globally connected world that has a company with too much power. It’s fun. Note: I read this book because Peper reached out (we have mutual friends) asking me to review an advanced copy of his forthcoming book, and I didn’t want to do that without having read something else of his first, for context.

7. Lee, Sharon & Steve Miller. Accepting the Lance: a Liaden Universe Novel. Finished March 21, 2020.

Delightful installment—and it feels scarily like it might be the final one—of this long-running space-opera series. At this point, I couldn’t possibly explain the plot since it requires knowledge of many earlier books, but it’s great. Note: I Just checked, and another installment (Trader’s Leap) is due in December. Phew!

8. Gibson, William. Agency. Finished April 4, 2020.

My new job has been so intense that I haven’t read nearly as much as I usually would have by the beginning of Q2. By comparison, I’d read 15 books by this point in 2019 and 13 in 2018. There’s also a higher proportion of SF/Fantasy than usual. I picked up the Gibson book at Powell’s before the Coronavirus chaos and carried it around with me on the trips I made before quarantine. Finally woke up on a Saturday morning before the rest of the family (since I pull NY hours in OR) and finished it. I enjoy Gibson, but I don’t get what all the fuss is about. As I said in a conversation earlier this week, I feel his books are always missing about 10 pages of “what the heck is happening?” explication, and I resent the inferential work that makes me do. My high school girlfriend once said something about the movie Field of Dreams that connects: “it’s like the whole movie is a dream sequence and they never wake up!” Part of my challenge, here, is that I didn’t discover until after I’d finished Agency that it’s a sequel to a 2014 novel called The Peripheral, and perhaps having read that would have helped with the inferential work, but I doubt it since I felt that way about Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, back in the day. The plot of Agency is too complex to summarize—two overlapping plots that aren’t well sutured—and the main character, Verity Jane, seems like an accidental protagonist around whom action swirls rather than an actor herself. For people who like Gibson, they’ll like this. For me… meh.

9. Peper, Eliot. Veil. Finished April 30, 2020.

I owe Eliot a timely review of whatever his next book is. This one was terrific climate-change fiction… near future dystopia in which the reasons for a global heat wave turn out to have intimate connections to the protagonist’s life. 

10. Bujold, Lois McMaster. The Physicians of Vilnoc: a Penric and Desdemona Novella. Started and finished May 16, 2020.

See the comments from 2021 about this series, of which I can never get enough.

11. Karl, Jonathan. Front Row at the Trump Show. Finished May 22, 2020.

Jonathan kindly spoke at a board meeting I attended. It’s a terrific, well-written, highly-personal addition to the books about Trump that I read in gob-smacked disbelief that the man was ever elected. God save us all from a second Trump term and more of these books, though.

12. Wiener, Anna. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir. Finished June 4, 2020.

An interesting story of an English Major in hi-tech, which provokes lots of empathy in me because I’m one too. The story is good. The sentences are so sharp they can cut glass. Wiener’s style is remarkable, and I’ll eagerly ready anything she writes going forward.

Note: by this time in 2019, I had read 17 books; 21 books by this time in 2018; 18 by this time in 2017; 15 by this time in 2016; 28 by this time in 2015; 13 by this time in 2014… so I feel a little bad about how little I’m reading. I blame a new high-pressure job and the lovely time-suck that is the DC Universe comic-book reading app.

13. Heinlein, Robert A. Citizen of the Galaxy. Finished June 27, 2020.

[Out of print and unavailable at Bookshop or Powell’s, but findable on eBay, hence that link.]

A reread, although it has been over a decade since I read this last… maybe much longer. The story of Thorby, a slave boy rescued by a beggar on a faraway world and his Sci-Fi Dickensian adventures. I remembered the story pretty accurately, and a few years back I looked up the passage about “fraki” that really stuck with me. A great piece of Heinleinian juvenalia, marred slightly by some surprising sexism that is understandable for a book originally published in 1957 if still disappointing. I pulled it out of the garage for my son to take on a backpacking trip, but he wasn’t interested. Started and finished in one day.

14. Gooden, Philip. Sleep of Death: A Shakespearean Murder Mystery. Finished July 11, 2020.

[Unavailable at Bookshop or Powell’s, but findable on eBay, hence that link.]

Interesting and enjoyable murder mystery with a young player, recently hired by The Chamberlain’s Men (Shakespeare’s company), named Nick Revill as the detective. Fast-paced, neatly plotted, featuring good characters with interesting responses. The murder eerily parallels the plot of Hamlet, which Nick happens to be playing in when he becomes involved with the story… at first from the periphery and then at the center. I figured out who the villain was about 30 pages too early, and if I’d been trying to figure it out it would have been even earlier, but that’s a low-level ding. Gooden, I just learned through a bit of Googling, is an immensely prolific author, and this is the first of several Nick Revill mysteries, each orbiting a different play of Shakespeare’s. 

It’s worth situating my reading of this book in historical context. In March, I picked it up at the local library in a quick last-trip as everything was shutting down and we were heading into Coronavirus sheltering-in-place. Other books got in the way, and my work life became insanely busy, so the book just sat there for a long time. Finally, I had a little energy to read but not to read something serious (either fiction or non-fiction), so I took this off the shelf. It drew me in quickly. I may try to find the rest… it’s good to keep Shakespeare in my head both generally and because of my book project.

15. Kwan, Kevin. Sex and Vanity. Finished August 4, 2020.

I inhaled Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy in November of 2018 after loving the movie made of the first one. The books are agreeable puffs of smoke, mostly powered by Rachel’s “duck out of water” story with Nick. There is no such storytelling engine in Sex and Vanity. Instead of Rachel and Nick, the relationship that powers this story is anxious Lucie and quiet George, who are meant to be latter day versions of Elizabeth and Darcy but never pull it off. It was a good book to read at the beach on vacation, and a bit of a chore to finish off after coming back from the beach. 

16. Gaiman, Neil. The Sandman: an Audible Original. Finished August 14, 2020.

This is the first audiobook I’ve included in the history of these lists (I just checked), but it’s worthwhile for a few reasons: 1) at 10+ hours long the experience felt book-like, 2) it’s an adaptation of the first chunk of a comic book series that I loved so much back in the day (the 1990s) that I went back and collected every issue as well as the trade paperbacks, 3) it’s a fascinating departure from the typical audiobook that features one person reading, maybe with some music. This Audible Original is much more like an old-style radio drama with a full cast, sound effects, production values, and real direction. It’s a performance. 

I loved it. An adept translation by the author, who also serves as the narrator. 

17. Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. Finished 8/29/20.

Magnificent book. My progress through it was painfully slow because I stopped so frequently to take notes as so much of Ridley’s thinking about the roles of specialization and exchange—unique to the human species—in human progress is stimulating to my thinking about the Shakespeare book. I’ll move on to his “How Innovation Works” soon.

18. Heyward, Emily. Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One. Finished September 15, 2020.

Delightful. Read it prior to my interviewing her and two of her clients. 

19. Asaro, Catherine. The Vanished Seas: a Major Bhaajan Novel. Finished 9/19/20.

The latest (third) installment into this tidy offshoot of Asaro’s otherwise sweeping Skolian space opera series. Bhaajan is a PI in the City of Cries, the ancient home of the empire. She is a Dickensian success story, an escapee from the Undercity who made good in the military and then returned home. An enjoyable combo of science fiction, detective story, romance, and adventure.

20. Foner, E. M. Turing Test: Book One of the AI Diaries Trilogy. Finished 9/22/20.

Superficial but nevertheless enjoyable sci fi romp about a team of alien AIs working under cover to prepare Earth for first contact and the humans they befriend. I might read the next one. Self-pub, I think, only available on Amazon’s Kindle platform.

21. Maggin, Eliot S. Superman: Last Son of Krypton. Finished 10/3/20.

A rare re-read that I’m counting as a book finished this year because I don’t know how many decades ago I last read this novel, published in 1978 around the time of the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie. I’d heard of Maggin (who famously used an exclamation point after the S in his name in comics instead of a period) as a character in comics because there were a couple issues of Justice League where he and Cary Bates (another DC writer of the time) appeared inside the stories they were writing. Many years later at EarthLink I met my friend Mike Brown, who had worked with Maggin in a comics-related startup. 

This novel contains one of my two favorite versions of the Lex Luthor character (there other is Michael Rosenbaum’s star turn in the TV series Smallville). Maggin captures the intelligence and comedy of the character and shows how Luthor and Superman are strangely close even in their enmity. There’s also a moment when Luthor, captured and interrogated by aliens, realizes that he can make the universal translator have the aliens call themselves silly names because it calls them what he expects them to be called. Years later, when you could individualize a ring tone on a smartphone to match a particular user, i thought of that moment in the Maggin novel.

22. Bujold, Lois McMaster. Masquerade in Lodi: A Penric and Desdemona Novella. Finished 10/16/20.

As before, see the comments from 2021 about this series, of which I can never get enough.

23. Jemisin, N.K. The City We Became: A Novel. Finished 10/17/20. 

Wow! I somehow missed the explosive arrival of N.K. Jemisin on the fantasy/sci-fi scene even though she has been winning best novel of the year Hugo awards for ten years. I encountered her voice and vision in the Far Sector series from D.C. Comics that I’ve been loving (I may include an entry for the series in this list later), and I had to know more. This book is a rollicking story that’s a bit hard to describe without spoilers, but the short version is that it’s about a group of people who become living avatars of cities and the challenges that face them as a group. Jemisin is masterful at shifting among the different avatars’ points of view, so we get to see each of them in a faceted way that’s engaging. The characters are also diverse across radical, cultural, gendered, and economic lines, which is delightful and also fits the New York setting perfectly. Strong recommend.

24. Connelly, Michael. The Law of Innocence: a Lincoln Lawyer Novel. Finished 11/12/20.

Damn he’s good. This came out this week. I downloaded it yesterday and finished it today. Tight, well plotted, compelling, and I have no idea how it was going to end. Connelly is a master.

25. Newstok, Scott. How to Think Like Shakespeare. Finished 11/30/20.

Intriguing, interesting, and has zero to do with Shakespeare’s actual, biographical habits of thought, near as I can tell. Will need to keep thinking about this one. 

26. Shakespeare, William. King Henry VI, Part I. Finished 12/12/20.

Certainly a re-read, although it has been many years. Since I’ve been thinking about Shakespeare as a business innovator who experimented with sequence, going back to one of his earliest experiments seemed a good idea. I wound up listening to a full-text audio performance by ArkAngel, which is good, but then I stopped listening, went back and read one of my paper copies, and then restarted the audiobook. I just process information better if it’s visual first and then auditory. 

Note, there are so many free editions of Shakespeare’s plays online that I didn’t link to something on Bookshop. The University of Victoria editions are great.

12/17/20 Note: This is the fewest books I’ve read in a year since I started keeping track, which saddens me but is not a surprise for this very challenging 2020. On the other hand, it’s not intellectually honest just to blame 2020. I also started a challenging new job this year, which has taken over much of my reading time. I’m writing a book, so some of the reading time has converted to writing time. And finally, I subscribed to the DC Universe service which includes a dozen or so digital comic books each week, and that has become some of my “oh heavens, I need to decompress” reading, not charted here because a comic book is too short. I might include a couple of the comic book SERIES that have particularly struck me at the end of the year…

27. Shakespeare, William. King Henry VI: Part II. Finished 12/26/20.

28. Wright, Craig. The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit–Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness. Finished 12/27/20.

A fascinating book, and one that has influenced my thinking a lot, particularly when it comes to the Shakespeare book I’m writing. Craig quotes Schopenhauer who wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that a person of talent can hit a target that others cannot hit, but a person of genius hits a target that other people cannot see. That’s the key question around genius as something embedded in a particular moment: what about the genius’ context lets them see the thing others cannot?  

29. Shakespeare, William. King Henry VI: Part III. Finished 12/29/20.

Notable Comics:

Jemisin, N.K.; Jamal Campbell (Illustrations). Far Sector. See #23 above. Jemisin is amazing, and this is the best Green Lantern story I’ve read in many years.

Ewing, Al. Immortal Hulk Vol 1: Or is He Both?

The question of the title follows “Man or Monster?” It’s a great run and a terrific rethink of a classic character.

Garcia, Kami (script); Gabriel Picolo (illustrations). Teen Titans: Raven. 

Great YA novel-stye take on the Raven character by a prolific YA writer about whom I need to learn more.

Thanks for reading!

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