Anabaptism
- Aquilus - Bellum I: black metal, neo-folk
- Boys Noize - +/-: techno, industrial
- clipping. - Wriggle (Expanded): hip-hop, industrial hip-hop, horror
- Dave Quam - Greasemania Vol 3: experimental, electronic
- Dawn of Ashes - Blood of Titans (Remixes): industrial, aggrotech
- Drumcorps - For the Living: breakcore, experimental
- Faderhead - Years of the Serpent: industrial, ebm
- Gelassenheit - Gelassenheit: black metal, christian
- Gelassenheit - …Don Thyself in the Armor ov God: black metal, christian
- Hollywood Burns - The Age of Saucers: soundtrack (to nothing), synth
- Heliocentric - Ishmael: metalcore, djent
- Keygen Church - ░█░█░░█░█░█░: electronic, black metal
- Noise Unit - Deviator: ebm
- Spiritbox - Eternal Blue: metalcore, djent
- TesseracT - Portals: progressive metal, prog rock
- Thou - Hightower: sludge, doom
- Violence - Opus I: industrial, metal, crossover
- Virtual Terrorist - Gutter Mixes Vol 2: industrial, noise
- Between the Buried and Me - Colors II: progressive metal, jazz metal
- Note: some of their music is on bandcamp, but not this album, yet. Likely a problem with their current label
- Bo Burnham - Inside: humor, satire
- Note: I also referenced the special in my 2021 Watching Recommendations
- Demon Hunter - Songs of Death and Resurrection: non-metal-versions-of-their-metal-tracks
- For King & Country - Burn the Ships Deluxe Edition: gospel, pop
- Silent Planet - Iridescent: metalcore, homework core
- The Ezra Klein Show: deep conversations on topics of the political economy
- Just Plain Wrong: hilarious reviews of Amish fiction, from 3 Mennonite librarians
- The Peter Attia Drive: health science interviews and deep dives, I am a paid subscriber
- Risky Business: cybersecurity news
- Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!: a comedic game show about the week’s news
- A Memory Called Empire: this one had some elements that ended up intersecting in interesting ways with Foundation (the show at least)
- Echo: a challenging and beautiful younger-reader book that I recommend listening to, as they do some interesting things with the audio
- Anxious People: I started off disliking this one, but the things that annoyed me at first turned out to make sense as it went on, and it ended up being something I enjoyed very much
- Altered Carbon: great start to the series, and it was good to see the written version
- The Resisters: interesting mashup of baseball and speculative fiction
- Parable of the Sower: another great series start, one that I had put off reading too long!
- Abaddon’s Gate and Cibola Burn: Expanse #3 and #4, the former of which was a very rare 5-star book for me
- Harrow the Ninth: #2 in the series…a very-challenging-but-very-rewarding “all the genres at once” book
- The Testaments: #2 in the series, and a worthy successor to Handmaid’s Tale
- A Canticle for Leibowitz: I was surprised this was written decades ago, as it feels like modern speculative fiction
- Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations: full of her cutting insights and beautiful wit
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty: summarizing how political and economic are intertwined and how extraction leads to downfall
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains: we are getting better at some ways of thinking and worse at others, and it’s important to understand the modes and tradeoffs
- Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art: fascinating look at the development of our faces, how breathing affects health, and various breathing experiments & exercises
- The End of Alzheimer’s: The First Program to Prevent and Reverse Cognitive Decline: while I’m not high risk (due to not having the genetic variants), I wanted to learn more about this topic, and this book is a very interesting deep dive full of detailed guidance and information that is relevant to any person’s health
- The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century: the description of this book made me think I would hate it, but it ended up being one of the most interesting things I read this year
- Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony: as a Methodist-turned-Mennonite, Hauerwas is probably “required” reading for me, but it took until this year for me to finally read this one
- Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit: another classic that I finally read to get back to the principles that started a movement
- The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World: highly speculative, but a fascinating overview of the various areas in which we’ll need to meet challenges
- Plough Quarterly: I love engaging with their challenging blend of radical and conservative (published by the Bruderhof, an Anabaptist common-purse denomination)
- Anabaptist World: similarly, the publication for my Anabaptist denomination (Mennonite)
- New Philosopher: a thoughtful periodical with each issue being dedicated to a topic
- Indianapolis Recorder: the best local newspaper
Malcolm Gladwell came to our executive meeting today and it was a neat conversation with our leaders.
Note: I did not play the Mennonite Game with him.
🕊I’m at RHIT to guest lecture in a classs where the professor is a Goshen Alum and Bluffton is in town for a meet. 😆
2021 Recommendations - Listening 🎶🎙
As I mentioned in my 2021 Product & Service Recommendations, I primarily use Plex + Plexamp for listening to music (and Marvis Pro on the go), and track listens in Last.fm. I listen to podcasts in Overcast.fm.
I’ll cover a little bit about my listening habits, then share top albums and top podcasts.
Music Overview
Here’s a rough map of my top genres over the year:
If none of those genres are of interest to you, you may just want to skip down to podcasts, otherwise you’re going to be scratching your head (or even recoiling) at a bunch of “weird music”.
And here were the top 20 artists:
Thanks to last.fm and tuneR, I can see that three bands were new to my top 20 this year: clipping., Silent Planet, and Joyhauser.
I got tuned in to clipping. via a friend on Bandcamp, but as I mentioned in my 2021 Watching recommendations, became a fan after watching their NPR (actually!) Tiny Desk Concert. If you start to watch the video and are like “wait, I know him”, then you’re probably right. Hamilton, Snowpiercer, and Central Park are just a few of Daveed Diggs’s major credits.
Silent Planet has been a fave of mine for a while, so I’m surprised this was the first time they broke the top 20. In addition to making great music, frontman Garrett Russell is a brilliant lyricist, delving passionately and intelligently into political and spiritual themes. (You may remember I’m slowly working on a readthrough of all the books referenced in just one of their tracks.)
Joyhauser is simply great thumping beats for when you need to focus or keep moving.
Albums
Unlike my other reviews, I restricted my specific album recommendations to ones that were released this year, so as to not have an overwhelming list.
On Bandcamp
Honorable Mentions that are not on Bandcamp (boo!)
Podcasts
🎶 Speaking of streaming services still playing Christmas music…
This is becoming my top fave, even surpassing the August Burns Red versions.
You know you need a booming black metalcore Christmas carol. #MetalMennonite
2021 Recommendations - Reading 📚🗞
Note: I’ve collected the recommended books from this post on this bookshop list, where possible. It is an affiliate link (though you can and should change to your local favorite bookshop), but if you buy any of them via my storefront, I will put that money back into getting more books and sharing the good ones.
I read 48 books in 2021. As I mentioned in my 2021 service recommendations I use StoryGraph to track reading, so you can see an overview of my reading there.
But just because I read a book doesn’t mean it was good! Here are the ones I recommend:
Fiction
Nonfiction
Periodicals
Further reading: 2020 Fiction Review and 2020 Nonfiction Review
🕊 Merry Christmas 🌟
Comment during sharing, today:
“I’ve been on the prayer list since Menno Simons was a little boy. Thank you!”
😆🕊
🕊 “How much pro-life leaders actually care about life”
A: not very much, which should not come as a surprise to any of us who have seen how they address COVID, the death penalty, never-ending wars, the drug war, drone strikes, or any number of other things
🕊🏴 Just found out David Graeber’s dad (Kenneth) was from Kansas and now I’m wondering if there were Mennonites on that side of the family.
🕊🎶 Apparently some people are losing it over how Silent Planet’s Iridescent album has an expletive in one (incredible) song…
Who wants to tell them about how John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul all use righteous expletives, too?
🕊 New co-pastor day! She’s got 🏴 leanings and I didn’t even have anything to do with it.
Got my spouse breakfast this morning because the whole team deserves something special, too.
🕊 I hear her co-pastor is pretty amazing, too.
Sunday Quote:
If you claim to be a “conscientious objector” to vaccination, what alternative service are you performing to alleviate or end the pandemic?
🕊🏴Today’s guest preacher is J. Nelson Kraybill, author of one of my favorite accidentally-anarchist books, and a rare non-cringe-y take on Revelation: 📚Apocalypse and Allegiance
We were just discussing this topic with some friends last night!
20 years ago, as we gathered in class, I expressed my fear that this would quickly become a justification to kill even more people than had already died, and that we would do to ourselves what the terrorists could not. I wish my fears had been incorrect. 🕊