Books Read 2022

  1. All The Stars Aflame by Malik Abduh

  2. The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting A Writer’s Life in Prison by Pen America

  3. The Devil Finds Work by James Baldwin

  4. Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood by Donald Bogle

  5. Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

  6. The Total Library: Non Fiction 1922-1986 by Jorge Luis Borges

  7. The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges

  8. On Mysticism by Jorge Luis Borges

  9. The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

  10. Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns

  11. Violent Order: Essays On The Nature of Police by David Correia

  12. If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Walla Walla: The Wacky History of Adrenalin OD by Dave Scott Schwartzman

  13. Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy by Ben Davis

  14. Watch My Smoke: The Eric Dickerson Story by Eric Dickerson

  15. The Black Agenda by Glen Ford

  16. All Hail Megatron Volume Four by Simon Furman

  17. Transformers 84’ Secrets and Lies by Simon Furman

  18. Transformers: Devastation by Simon Furman

  19. Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata by Satoru Iwata

  20. See You Soon by Mariame Kaba

  21. Notes From Childhood by Norah Lange

  22. People In The Room by Norah Lange

  23. Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men Volume Two by Stan Lee

  24. Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class by Catherine Liu

  25. Butts In Seats: The Tony Schiavone Story by Dirk Manning

  26. Transformers 84’ Legends and Rumors by Bill Mantio

  27. All Hail Megatron Volume Three by Shane McCarthy

  28. There Are Trans People Here by H. Melt

  29. We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality by Louis Moore

  30. Sula by Toni Morrison

  31. The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings by Octavio Paz

  32. Transformers: The Wreckers Saga by Nick Roche

  33. Seven Conversations With Jorge Luis Borges by Fernando Sorrentino

  34. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  35. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  36. Unveiling Kate Chopin by Emily Toth

  37. Godzilla On My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters by William Tsutsui

  38. Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism by Richard Brent Turner

  39. The Joker: A Celebration of 75 Years

  40. Batman: A Celebration of 75 Years

  41. The Aesthetic of Our Anger by Mike Dines

  42. The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World by Dave Zirin

  43. The Poems of Hesiod

  44. The Cambridge Guide To Women’s Writing In English by Lorna Sage

Books Read 2021

  • Green Arrow: A Celebration of 75 Years

  • Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold

  • Palestine: A Socialist Introduction by Sumaya Awad

  • Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America by Russ Baker

  • Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

  • Small Magic: Short Fiction, 1977-2020 by Terry Brooks

  • The Last Druid by Terry Brooks

  • I Remember Death By Its Proximity to What I Love by Mahogany L. Browne

  • Star Trek: Alien Spotlight by John Byrne

  • The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino

  • Into The War by Italo Calvino

  • The Road To San Giovanni by Italo Calvino

  • Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino

  • Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino

  • If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish

  • Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas by Henry Dumas

  • Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas by Henry Dumas

  • Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd

  • Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice by Jesse Hagopian

  • Ibsen's Selected Plays by Henrik Ibsen

  • They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie Jones-Rogers

  • We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Abolitionist Papers) by Mariame Kaba

  • Transformers: The Manga Volume Three by Masumi Kaneda

  • Eternals: The Complete Collection by Jack Kirby

  • The Battle For Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein

  • Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

  • Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language by Seth Lerer

  • Legends of Localization: The Legend of Zelda by Clyde Mandelin

  • Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 1 by Shane McCarthy

  • Transformers: All Hail Megatron Volume 2 by Shane McCarthy

  • Transformers Historia by Chris MxFeely

  • Thick: And Other Essays by Tressiue McMillan Cottom

  • The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '93: The Year of Major Beginnings and Major Endings (Wrestling Observer Newsletter) by Dave Meltzer

  • The Wrestling Observer Yearbook '97: The Last Time WWF Was Number Two by Dave Meltzer

  • The Major Works by John Milton

  • Strong In The Rain: Selected Poems by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Milky Way Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Night On The Galactic Railroad and Other Stories by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Night On The Milky Way Train by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Once and Forever: The Tales of Kenji Miyazawa by Kenji Miyazawa

  • Growing Up with Manos: The Hands of Fate: How I was the Child Star of the Worst Movie Ever Made and Lived to Tell the Story by Jackey Newman

  • Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams by Robert Peterson

  • River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Sister Helen Prejean

  • Straight Edge: A Clear-Headed Hardcore Punk History by Tony Rettman

  • Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing by Stuart Schrader

  • The Monsters and the Critics: And Other Essays. J.R.R. Tolkien

  • Star Trek: Way Point by Dayton Ward

  • Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism by Jillian York

  • Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary

  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Weekly Reader

The way things are going, they will not be going far, so it’s time to bring back the weekly reader…

Trump is a morbid symptom of this chaos, rather than its cause. The forthcoming election, which pits two gerontocrats of dubious mental acuity against each other, resembles the late Soviet era, before the regime collapsed under its own absurdities. America indeed represents a strange inversion of the Soviet collapse: the economy dwarfs that of any other nation, save China; its empire is still intact, and its military spans the globe more powerfully than any single challenger.

And not just love but admiration. She definitely earned my admiration both as a young woman who invested herself in her friendships with every emotion and who, just by existing, represented something that we don’t always get to see on TV: an authentic biracial woman who wasn’t there for a laugh or set dressing. I think her legacy will continue to be built on by way of Tokyo Cyber Squad’s message of solidarity and acceptance: “Everyone is different, everyone is good.”

The language of abuse and trauma is creeping into political rhetoric, as if every interaction between a man and a woman these days can be understood as a potential violation. Virginia Heffernan wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Sanders had gaslighted Warren over whether he told her a female candidate couldn’t win the 2020 election.” Gaslighting is a term for one person lying to their romantic partner so effectively and consistently that they start to question their version of reality. Had Heffernan simply said Sanders lied, it would not have given the accusation the melodramatic pull of centuries of stories of women being tormented and abused by the men in their lives. Lying is something politicians do. Gaslighting is something misogynistic monsters do.