Typically when I review the list of books I have read over the course of the year I pick a best book and a worst book. The worst book is easy. It was without question Daniel Gordis’s Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. Since my intention is not to post a book review, I won’t go into the details of why I disliked this book so much. I will just observe that I have not read a less convincing history. It is useful for understanding a particular kind of ideological perspective. It falls more within the genre of apologia than historical studies.
Reading Gordis alongside Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 was a fascinating experience. They are clearly on the opposite sides of things. Khalidi is a much more sophisticated scholar and I got a lot more from his book. His concluding chapter was particularly helpful in terms of thinking through how to respond to the war on Palestine from a universalist and human rights perspective.
I wouldn’t describe Khalidi’s work as the best book I read all year though. That honor has to go to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. I read it for the third time this year. I did so as part of a reading group that I ran with Omowale Luthuli-Allen. It was a fantastic experience and helped me understand the text in new ways.
I don’t know of a better text for understanding the United States than Black Reconstruction. It has huge limitations. It is almost silent on gender. It barely engages with the continent’s Indigenous nations. And yet, it explains the origins of the basic political fault lines in the United States, offers an analysis of how white supremacist populism might be pushed back, and establishes a framework for promoting what Du Bois calls abolition democracy. It is a book that I have in the back of my head almost every week when I am preaching and which I consistently cite in my writing.
I managed to read more novels than I typically do. The highlights there were N. K. Jemisin, who I had not read before, and Octavia Butler, who I had.
Here’s the complete list of books I read last year.
The Employees, Ogla Ravn
The Light of the World, Elizabeth Alexander
Mariners, Renegades & Castaways, C. L. R. James
Shortcomings, Adrian Tomine
grievers, adrienne maree brown
The Second Letter of Peter
Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith
The First Letter of John
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
The Second Letter of John
Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty
The Third Letter of John
Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, Daniel Gordis
The Letter of Jude
Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion
The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, ed. Eliot Weinberger
Speaking for Others: The Ethics of Informal Political Representation, Wendy Salkin
AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future, Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
Preaching and the Thirty-Second Commercial, O. Wesley Allen, Jr. and Carrie La Ferle
The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, Gabriel Kolko
The Religion of the Future, Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Spent: A Comic Novel, Alison Bechdel
Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist, Ryan Hanley
The Fifth Season, N. K. Jemison
A Promise of Ankles, Alexander McCall Smith
The Peppermint Tea Chronicles, Alexander McCall Smith
The Enigma of Garlic, Alexander McCall Smith
Job
The Stellar Debut of Galactica MacFee, Alexander McCall Smith
The Obelisk Gate, N. K. Jemisin
Preaching and the Thirty-Second Commercial: Lessons from Advertising for the Pulpit, O. Wesley Allen, Jr. and Carrie La Ferle
The Revelation of John
Fisk y el Misterio del Gato Músico, Jorge A. Estrada y B. Alvarez M.
Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent, Emily Dumler-Winckler
How Not to Waste a Crisis: Quit Trying Harder, Tod Bolsinger
A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017, Rashid Khalidi
Under the Iron Heel: The Wobblies and the Capitalist War on Radical Workers, Ahmed White
Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880, W. E. B. Du Bois
No Straight Road Take You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, Rebecca Solnit
The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel
The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1975-1994, Jorie Graham
Henry Climbs a Mountain, D. B. Johnson
Saga, Vol. 12, Brian Vaughan
Emma, Jane Austen
The Simple Truth, Philip Levine
