The semester has been winding down, and this means that I’ve been brain-dead. However, it also means that I’ve had to stay at home and not do too much that requires my computer be full-screened (so I can quickly respond to student emails – hence, no computer games.) As a result, I’ve been doing a lot of reading. This, in turn, has reminded me that I haven’t done a single book round-up this whole year.

So, yeah, okay, that one’s on me.

I tend to set my reading goal a lot lower than Edgar, for a variety of reasons. One of them is the fact that I think aiming to read a large number of books over the course of a year means that you engage less deeply with them. Or, at least, when I do that, that’s how it works for me. Still, I have read a few extremely good books this year.

Everyone’s mind’s different.

So, here we go.

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The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (Inheritance Trilogy, #1) by N.K. Jemisin.

Previously reviewed by Edgar here.

This book, (which I “read” as an audiobook via the Libby app,) is the start of the third series of N.K. Jemisin books that I’ve read, and I need to look for the followup books. It is the earliest writing by her that I have had a chance to read, and in it she develops early forms of the tropes that she makes use of extensively in the Broken Earth and Great Cities books. Notably, the wrenching dislocation from one’s home at the whims of an uncaring universe, the human in partnership with the inhuman, and the secret history tropes which form the bedrock of her narrative approach (note: just because I’m appending names to these doesn’t mean I’m bored of them or find her work predictable. She is often quite surprising, though there is a fourth trope I don’t dare name, because it could be a bit of a spoiler.)

The book itself is eminently readable, and the intrigues on display are a match for any found in books like A Game of Thrones, though less married to emulating the social realities of the real medieval period. I highly recommend it.

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American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard.

This was an extension of the crash-course in alternative American history I put myself through at the end of the last year, and which reached its apogee in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which I review later in this piece. The thesis of this book is that there are (at least) eleven distinct regional cultures on the North American continent, and that much of the history of North America can be better understood by trying to understand the jockeying for power between these distinct “nations” (which are not quite political blocs and not quite ethnic groups – perhaps a sort of [proto-]ethno-cultural coalitions.)

It dovetails quite nicely with White Trash, insofar as it suggests that the principle issue that has been baked into America since the start was the consistent marginalization of Appalachia in American settler history, and it was interesting to hear about the history of North America detailed in a fashion similar to how European history was often discussed (at the time, I was listening to a lot of the Revolutions podcast, which is quite fascinating, but in the discourse of history as it is normally examined, North America feels somewhat...lacking.)

The most enlightening section of the book concerned the settling of the inland west, which Woodard notes was slowed by the technological development of Anglo-American civilization, and which only really happened due to the functioning of private capital. Still, I might need to revisit it at some point, now that I have read An Indigenous People’s History.

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Non-Places, an Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, by Marc Augé.

I largely read this book in chunks of one chapter a week at the laundromat. This, likely, was not the best way to read it.

A fascinating little work of anthropology and theory, which proposes a theory of what have come to be called on the internet “liminal spaces”, places where image and discourses overwrite any sense of history and position in space – highways, airports, hotel rooms, malls, starbucks, that sort of thing. In the current period, what Augé called “supermodernity” (meaning, somewhat, the opposite of “postmodern”, meaning the incoherent excess of all the things that postmodernity says are absent), we are drowning in this kind of location.

One minor gripe – and this is purely my own difficulty, not something inherent to the text – is that it is profoundly French, by which I mean that it concerns itself largely with the dynamics of European francophone culture, which made it somewhat opaque. This isn’t an insurmountable difficulty, it simply meant that it was something of a double Anthropology, one of the generalized supermodern Non-Place, and one of France. For someone more knowledgeable about France, it might be somewhat more grounded.

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Sisyphean, by Dempow Torishima (trans. Daniel Huddleston).

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

A rare work of genuine surrealist fiction, aided perhaps by the fact that it was translated from Japanese. Outside of manga, I have only really read Japanese fiction by Haruki Murakami, who I understand has an idiosyncratic approach to the language. It was translated by Daniel Huddleston, who’s principally done the “Legend of the Galactic Heroes” for Viz — and who does an amazing job on this no doubt daunting source text.

Sisyphean could be a braided novel, or it could be a collection of short stories, it depends on how the narratives relate to one another, if they do at all. All of its characters are in some way distantly transhuman or subhuman, but unlike much of western science fiction, the emphasis is on the human part of the equation – not in a capital-R romantic fashion, but in a resoundingly and almost shockingly normal way.

It’s made up, principally, of four novellas The first is “Sisyphean (Or, Perfect Attendants)”, which is about a strange corporate setting – a living, but sick, office building inhabited solely by a subhuman “subordinape” named Gyo and an incomprehensible “President” who wears a business suit of woven muscle fibers. The second is “Cavumville (Or, The City in the Hollow)”, which has a plot very much resembling a slice-of-life anime (“slice-of-life” doesn’t seem to be a genre that has much currency in genre fiction, honestly), concerning what an adolescent wants to do with his life – something made even more difficult by the fact that, periodically, dead and dying mutant animals will simply fall from the sky in a great charnel torrent. The third is “Castellum Natatorius (Or, The Castle in the Mudsea)”, which is a fairly typical hard-boiled noir story set among the posthuman insect-people who live symbiotically in the folds of the shell of a city-sized snail. The last is “Peregrinating Anima (Or, Momonji Caravan)”, which is sort of a post-apocalyptic western – specifically, the story of a cattle drive in a world after some nanotechnological disaster has rendered the entire landscape plastic and ever-shifting. The livestock that they drive include the momonji, which some western reviewers have compared to Lovecraft’s shoggoths – and which were included in the torrent of dead animals mentioned in “Cavumville”.

Which, honestly, could be a motif or could be evidence that these are all different times in the history of the same world, or different layers in the same confusing simulation of real life. The ambiguity of it clubs you over the back of the head, and lends itself to the comparisons that have been made between Torishima and Phillip K. Dick – an apt, though incomplete, comparison. I’m not sure that a good comparison can be made between Torishima and any other writer – his own art, which accompanies the novel, is the best guide to the feel of it.

The office building from the first story. It is a living thing — in fact, other than the metal gantry upon which it rests, everything in this picture is meant to be a living thing. — The office building from the first story. It is a living thing — in fact, other than the metal gantry upon which it rests, *everything* in this picture is meant to be a living thing.

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The War on Everyone, by Robert Evans.

I’m a big fan of Robert Evans’s work, and this is no exception. A detailed history of the rise of the American fascist movement, though far more focused on the praxis of the far right than their theory. As such, I feel it is best read in conjunction with Dark Star Rising by Gary Lachman or Neoreaction a Basilisk.

This was actually a re-read (or re-listen, as I took it out of the Behind the Bastards feed, to enjoy the color commentary from Katy Stoll and Cody Johnston.) and this work has had a bit of an influence on my writing, as it was one of several introductions I had to “Ur-Fascism” by Umberto Eco, which I’ve referenced several times on this site. Evans really thrives as a pop historian, staring in an unblinking fashion at the dark heart of authoritarian movements in the United States. While much of it is a bit of a review, it shines once the narration moves past the founding of the American Nazi party, looking at the long tail of Ruby Ridge, The Turner Diaries, and Siege.

I have a bad habit of hyper-fixating on the dark side of history and current events, as longtime readers probably know. As such, The War on Everybody – and Behind the Bastards in general – represent a bit of a fix for that, something to slake the appetite.

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Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1) and Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2) by Tamsyn Muir.

Edgar did a review of these books here.

I am forced to realize that there is a strong chance that future scholars will have to look at the effect that Andrew Hussie – the comic artist responsible for Homestuck – has on our culture. Tamsyn Muir, the author of the Locked Tomb trilogy, is both a graduate of the Clarion Workshop and a (former?) active participant in the Homestuck fandom. The influence shows in her writing, though I think her use of language is much stronger than Hussie’s (I won’t be commenting on him here, I could not possibly decide to catch up on his work given the rapid speed he puts things out at.)

The Locked Tomb is a trilogy, though only the first two volumes have been released thus far. They were pitched – as Edgar notes – as “lesbian necromancers in space”, and they deliver.

But they don’t just deliver.

It’s hard to really explain, briefly, what makes them such masterful books – possibly the best I have read thus far this year – is the way the two books correspond. The first book, Gideon the Ninth, is about sword-wielding (and aviator-wearing) gadfly Gideon Nav accompanying her necromancer charge, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, to the “First House” – the ten-thousand-year-abandoned citadel of the Necromancer Victorious, invoked in the opening lines of both novels – where Harrow will undergo the ordeals to become a Lictor, one of the Necrolord’s most trusted servants, and it plays out as a brilliant play on gothic fiction.

The second book, Harrow the Ninth, is an inversion of this. Instead of an unknown enemy coming from within the house, a known enemy is attacking from outside of the “house” in question – so it’s something of a siege narrative, though with beats that mirror the original story.

It is this mirroring and inversion that make me feel that Muir is a genuine talent, and which has me excited for the third – and final – volume of the series, Alecto the Ninth.

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Postcapitalist Desire by Mark Fisher, edited by Matt Colquhoun.

Required reading. See my long review here.

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi.

Also reviewed by Edgar.

It was quite good. The story concerns a short period in the life of a young woman named Jam, who lives in a utopian, post-revolutionary city in the former United States, named Lucille. The exact details of the revolution are not closely considered, because the book is short and the focus is elsewhere: namely, it is an examination of what must be done to maintain utopia.

Oftentimes, when we talk about utopia, we think that things are boring (David Graeber notes, in a book reviewed later, that when everything goes according to plan, there isn’t usually a story to it,) Emezi explodes that particular question. Pet is a fantastic thriller, dealing with the arrival of a creature – the titular “Pet” – who has come to hunt monsters in Lucille. Of course, there are no monsters in Lucille anymore, are there?

The world, while only sketched, is sketched in a loving and detailed fashion, and every plot point is lovingly constructed and presented. It’s a very short read, but still, it is meant to be savored. Highly recommended.

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Agency (Jackpot #2) by William Gibson.

The second of the Jackpot books by William Gibson, a writer I’m a big fan of. Agency is a relatively self-contained narrative based on the same general premise as the first book, the Peripheral. In this series, the fundamental premise is that a form of informational time-travel was invented (or discovered,) in the early 22nd century, allowing the residents of the post-singularity society that has access to this technology to send information into the past.

It was a solid outing, but not terribly inspiring on its own – it feels to be about on the same level as the Laundry Files books that I mentioned a while back, but based on harder premises.

The plot concerns the emergence of an artificial intelligence in a parallel 2017, a prototype of which leaked out of military control and into the hands of an App tester named Verity. Because of the parameters of the artificial intelligence, Eunice, this leads to a paranoid flight from government and corporate forces that have only now come to be aware of what they have allowed out of their grip.

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An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3), by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

There are some books that weigh heavily on your mind when you’ve finished them. This book is one of those. It details American history from – obviously – the perspective of the indigenous peoples of the North American continent, beginning with a description of the broad tapestry of cultures that existed here before the start of the Settler-Colonialist project, centered largely around the most powerful nation of the time, centered in the Valley of Mexico. It begins with this lovingly-drawn portrait of a vastly different civilization than the ones we have learned about, operating on different values but achieving things on par with the great civilizations of Europe and Asia (it also does this without romanticizing: the indigenous peoples of North America practiced slavery and fought brutal wars, obviously.)

The book is largely divided into three sections: the introduction was about the pre-Columbian state of the continent, as framed through Dunbar-Ortiz’s experience teaching about Native American issues. The second portion, which is a large stretch of the book, was about the extended campaign of subjugating the continent and indigenous resistance. The third portion was about the status of the native peoples of the continent after the United States became hegemonic.

Because of this introduction, the whole history takes on the quality of watching a slow-motion car crash. From the first, it is clear that injustice is perpetrated over and over again. Dunbar-Ortiz examines the long history of the betrayal of trust by the Americans – and the people who commit the betrayals include both those I felt, previously, were villains (Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson,) and heroes (Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman.) However, just as with Plato’s cave, knowledge sometimes comes with a feeling of discomfort.

Perhaps the most enlightening element, though, was Dunbar-Ortiz’s insistence on viewing the westward expansion of the United States as part of the development of the American doctrine of counter-insurgency warfare (we were always-already fighting a counter-insurgency campaign. That’s all we ever did, because that’s what Settler-Colonial states do.

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The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception by Carolly Erickson.

A major influence on one of my recent pieces. This was another laundromat read, and one that was slightly easier to keep track of, due to the length of the chapters. This largely had to do with the philosophical, sociological, and psychological constitution of the pre-modern peoples of Europe, as framed through the issue of vision.

Erickson is a solid writer, and her treatment of the medieval period was a useful antidote to the perception that the ten centuries of the medieval period were a steady-state society (I’ve heard it described as “partly cloudy with a chance of witch-burning,” which was much more of an Early Modern phenomenon.) In contrast, there were advances and declines, elaborations and simplifications all throughout this period. For example, much of Europe was a surprisingly cosmopolitan society, not just in terms of ethnicity, but also in terms of religion, with heretical and heterodox movements being tolerated to a limited degree – something that we tend not to acknowledge in our treatment of history.

As I noted in the piece on modernity, there is a certain – and surprising – correspondence between what Erickson labels “the visionary imagination” of the medieval period and what Eduardo Castro de Vivieros labeled “perspectivism” or “multinaturalism” in his examination of the philosophical makeup of Amazonian native peoples in his book Cannibal Metaphysics.

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The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein.

I liked The Shock Doctrine much more than I liked No Logo, but Shock Doctrine is, by far, the better book. It is, also, coincidentally, one of the most upsetting books that I’ve read recently (especially in conjunction with An Indigenous People’s History of the United States.) It details the crimes of the “Chicago School Revolution”, from Chile to the rest of the Southern Cone, through Eastern Europe and China, and – at the time of her writing – in Iraq.

Largely, this is also the logic that was applied throughout the global north after the 2007-2008 Financial Crisis, and it’s very enlightening to read it during the COVID-19 Pandemic, which seems to be foreshadowed by her description of the Bush-era preparations for a future pandemic.

This book, as I note above, is very upsetting: all the more so because the atrocities that it depicts are real. Nowhere in the world was the neoliberal economic model1 imposed without violence and repression: literally no one, the world over, submitted to it without a fight, and it would never have won without support from the global north – the place to which it returned after 9/11, and where it entrenched itself after 2008.

Klein is an excellent writer, and her handling of this topic is careful and precise: it is the journalistic tone which makes it so upsetting to consider what she is saying. I would argue that this is essential reading, but it is a hard one to stomach.

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The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber.

After Klein, I needed a break. I thought I would want fiction, but I read the introduction to The Utopia of Rules and devoured the whole thing in three days. Graeber, much like Fisher, is someone who I wish I had had the chance to take a class from. Unfortunately, much like Fisher, Graeber is sadly passed.

Unlike Debt, and much more like Bullshit Jobs, this is a fixup. He combined three previously-written essays “Dead Zones of the Imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor” (Original lecture 2006, published in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory in 2012), “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” (The Baffler, 2012), and “Batman and the Problem of Constituent Power” (originally published in The New Inquiry as “Super Position” but published on the weblog De Dicto in full as a guest post by Graeber). I’m sure that the remaining portions – the introduction and the final essay, which I found well worth the price of admission – are available to people who know where to look online, but I’m not going to point you in their direction, because I don’t have it.

In this book, Graeber traces the outlines of a theory of bureaucracy, and comes the closest to realizing it in the final essay of the book (not “Batman” but the essay written for this book), which deals with why we desire bureaucracy. Graeber’s answer – presented simply, though without his insight, wit, or the gently surprising way he leads you to his insights – is that bureaucracy fundamentally works because of a fear of play, which is fundamentally the same thing as sovereignty (the power of a monarch, or of “the people”, not just to impose violence randomly and with impunity, but simply to ignore the rules we have established in our society because they are prior and superior to them.)

In the course of this, he productively wanders through science fiction and fantasy, memories of his mother’s illness and passing, recollections of his time as an activist and his field work in Madagascar, and a willingness to marry anthropology and philosophy to pop culture in a way that illuminates it all.

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Ninefox Gambit (Machineries of Empire, #1) by Yoon Ha Lee.

I read this book in the least conducive way to remembering everything possible. It was my wind-down book before bed, but have also had the bad habit of falling asleep and losing my place. It was very good, but a competent review will have to wait for me to read more of the series. Edgar did a review here.

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Cameron's Book Reviews: Early 2021