The Things I Read in 2021
by Nancy Jane Moore
The move of the emailed newsletter from something intended to announce publishing news to a form of publication itself took off in 2021. Any number of writers, some forced out of their jobs and others looking for a place to publish their essays, began to use this medium.
It even generated controversy, when people discovered that Substack was offering sweet deals to some authors and nothing to others — though at least a few people found greater financial success by eschewing the deals.
I suspect many of these newsletters, especially the ones started by those who whine about cancel culture, are not worth my time, but that still leaves far more good material than anyone can hope to read.
Two of them were vital for me this year: Christopher Brown’s “Field Notes” and Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters From an American.”
Chris Brown also writes excellent science fiction, but his newsletter concentrates on observations he makes of the natural world, particularly the “edgelands” — places people have used and then abandoned. He lives in Austin, Texas, in an area of edgelands, some about to be rebuilt as “civilization” expands. His weekly essays are lyrical, whether they’re discussing his small daughter’s observations or the life of someone who has pitched a tent in an area where they hope not to be noticed.
I hope he’s thinking about working these essays into a book. For now, read them here: https://fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/
Heather Cox Richardson is an historian and professor who uses her knowledge of history to explain current events in the United States. She is an expert on Reconstruction and the author of How the South Won the Civil War, which is on the list of books I plan to get.
Judging by the number of people I see sharing her work on social media, I don’t think I’m the only person who has found her daily newsletter imperative reading in these crisis-laden times. You can read it and/or subscribe here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
I also read essays and columns by authors in more traditional formats. Annalee Newitz does a regular monthly column in New Scientist that I find invigorating on tech issues in particular.
For keeping up with the pandemic, I rely on the superb science writing of Ed Yong, who writes for The Atlantic. He is both an excellent reporter — one who talks to a large number of scientists and other professionals for every story — and a wonderful wordsmith. He also does the best job of crediting other writers and editors and of reaching out to a diverse group of sources of anyone writing news today.
He’d really rather be writing about something other than the pandemic — he took a break from a book project to do the kind of reporting it needed — so I hope someday soon he’ll be able to go back to reporting on a variety of scientific subjects.
Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist, is someone else I try to read regularly. At the moment, she publishes regularly on The New York Times opinion page. Her detailed work applying statistical and sociological analysis to the way the pandemic is being handled is profoundly useful. She also has a Substack newsletter.
Elie Mystal provides refreshing and strongly worded takes on legal matters for The Nation. I follow him on twitter (@ElieNYC), where he provides links to each of his articles along with appropriately snarky commentary. There’s nothing quite like sharp legal analysis coupled with references to parenting, video games, and science fiction movies.
I also just read his first book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, which comes out from The New Press in January (I’m reviewing it for the Washington Lawyer.) It’s a discussion of the U.S. Constitution written for non-lawyers and it begins: “Our Constitution is not good.” He goes on to point out that it “is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all.”
In his discussion of the various amendments, from the Bill of Rights to the Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, and 15th) that ended slavery and (supposedly) expanded rights to Black Americans, he uses superb legal analysis (he went to Harvard Law) to point out where the Constitution is falling short, particularly for Black people (though he also includes some significant discussion of issues of particular importance to women and LGBTQ folks of all races).
You can’t find a better or more readable primer on constitutional law anywhere.
Since I’ve slid into books, let me just say that the best book I’ve read all year is the one I haven’t finished yet: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by the late anthropologist David Graeber and the archeologist David Wengrow. This powerful book starts by throwing out the observations of both Rousseau and Locke — humans were neither primitive children who didn’t know what hit them when agriculture came along nor were they violent creatures with “nasty, brutish, and short” lives.
The diversity of cultures that developed even in proximity to each other — the Indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest lived very differently from those in Northern California just as one example — and the clear evidence that even in much earlier times there was trade and other dealing between different groups of people upends the narrative of primitive hunter-gatherers living in tiny bands who eventually take up agriculture and end up in a state, which then becomes what we today call “civilized.”
Their point, as I grasp it so far, is that we’re not stuck with the systems we have right now, even if we feel that way. This is must reading for anyone writing science fiction or alternate history and, for that matter, anyone who wants to change the way we all live.
My sweetheart and I are currently reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass out loud to each other. The author is Potawatomi and a botanist (and a mother and daughter) and her essays reflect all of that. It fits in nicely with Graeber and Wengrow, and also with another book, Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree, which looks at the way trees communicate with each other, much of it by the use of fungi. Simard is a forest scientist who began her career working with logging operations.
I have also been reading fiction. I’m a Murderbot devotee, so I thoroughly enjoyed Martha Wells’s Network Effect. The combination of a different approach to AI with a savage take down of the “corporates” was pleasing to my soul.
Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace was a good follow up to A Memory Called Empire. The imagination behind those works is glorious.
Becky Chambers has a gift for writing science fiction that is both gentle and deep. Both The Galaxy and the Ground Within — the last book in the Wayfarers series — and A Psalm for the Wild-Built — the first monk and robot novella — give us a thorough understanding of the way beings (human, alien, and artificial) relate to each other and plenty of drama without a lot of evil and violence. Perfect reading for our difficult times.
Turning from fiction to graphic memoir, I was enchanted with Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength. I love Bechdel’s work anyway, but this story of her physical pursuits over her life spoke deeply to the me who discovered through martial arts that physical activity was vital to her life. This book provides laughs, tears, and a philosophical discussion of the importance of movement.
And lastly, a book on writing: Matthew Salesses’s Craft in the Real World, which upends a lot of the received ideas about how to write that are drummed into us in practical guides and workshops. Salesses, an author and creative writing teacher who is of Korean heritage, adopted, and widowed, is a complex man who brings that complexity into his ideas about writing. The book is worthwhile for his suggestions on better ways to workshop stories alone, but it also makes clear how many of our ideas on what “proper” writing is were set by white male writers in the mid-20th century.
I rarely read practical “how to write” books, but I love ones like this that shake up the way I think. I recommend it for every writer out there.
Nancy Jane Moore is the author of the recent fantasy novel For the Good of the Realm. Both it and her earlier novel The Weave were published by Aqueduct. She lives in Oakland, California, with her sweetheart and two cats, and feeds a lot of crows on her daily walks around the block. She is currently working on a sequel to Realm.
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