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

  • 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

Nonfiction

Periodicals

  • 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

Further reading: 2020 Fiction Review and 2020 Nonfiction Review

Just thinking about how American it is to advertise sweets for three months, gyms for a month, and then sweets again in February.

2021 Recommendations - Watching 📺

  • Your local theater - enjoyed (even via streaming) renditions of Tuesdays with Morrie, Cyrano, and A Christmas Carol
  • See Season 1 - terrifying, mesmerizing, and incredible
  • Rememory - contemplative and crushing
  • Dear White People Season 2 - very well done
  • Resident Alien Season 1 - Alan Tudyk is great in this mishmash of all the genres into a single show
  • John Oliver on Raids - Raids are devastating and almost never necessary.
  • John Oliver on Sponsored Content - All ad-driven news creates perverse incentives, but sponsored content is particularly bad
  • Canadians rescue the USA national anthem - brilliant use of harmony
  • The Sinner Season 3 - more terribly haunting than the first two seasons, combined
  • The Commute: Walking 90km to Work - another incredibly documentary from Beau Miles
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 1 - in release order of Trek shows, this is my favorite, so far
  • Kim’s Convenience Seasons 1–2 - fun sitcom, though it got a little formulaic by season 3 and we got tired of the “people didn’t communicate” trope as the main plot driver
  • Endeavour Season 5 - I love the attention to atmosphere in this series. It feels like a (modern) history lesson every time, too. Warning: every episode of this show seems to end on a melancholy note, literally and figuratively.
  • I Am Mother - I’d love to discuss this sci-fi suspense!
  • The Falcon and the Winter Soldier Season 1 - This felt like the most “comic book” of the MCU so far, due to the everybody having to fight everybody, etc. Great preaching from Sam at the end of the season.
  • Venom - utterly ridiculous and a lot of fun
  • Blade - rewatched this; interesting to hear Blade will be coming into the MCU
  • Fantastic Planet - totally original french animated scifi from 1973
  • Mr. Show Seasons 1–3 - some of this didn’t age well, but I love sketch comedy and their take on the Python-esque surreal sketch transitions
  • Tenet - this was an instant purchase
  • Line of Duty Season 1 - What a wild ride! I had to space these out because they were so provocative, complex, and intense. Season 2 not recommended.
  • A Black Lady Sketch Show Season 2 - Not as good as season 1, but still good sketch comedy
  • Love, Death & Robots Season 2 - Not as mind-altering as Season 1, but still full of incredible experiments
  • Self/less - Good, interesting. Would have been even better with more of a Christopher Nolan treatment and less of a Product Placement treatment.
  • 🎶 Welcome to the Internet - “could I interest you in everything all of the time?“ Lots of good critique in this hilarious self-produced music video. Full special here.
  • Primal Fear - Very late to the party on this one. Surprised I didn’t see this back when it came out, as it was definitely my kind of movie. A little dated and a little predictable, but still very enjoyable and worth a discussion.
  • 🎶 Tiny Desk Concert: clipping. - this is the first actual tiny desk concert, and the start of my obsession with clipping. (Stay tuned for Listening Recommendations)
  • The Suicide Squad - Ludicrous, gory, and hilarious. I’m not much of a DC guy, but this was some wicked fun.
  • 🎶 Marc Rebillet and Madison McFerrin - incredible looping and improv chemistry
  • Middleditch & Schwartz - long-form improv comedy
  • Ted Lasso Season 2 - not as good as season 1, but still challenging, human, and funny
  • Foundation Season 1 - Unnecessarily brutal at at times (and I mean the storytelling, not the content…some details don’t need to be on the screen), but otherwise very good
  • Soul - Heartbreaking at times, but a beautiful movie

Further Reading:

Cheri's tips for a better relationship with the Internet:

1. I abstain from ad-supported and/or algorithmically manipulated social media.

2. I avoid websites with an endless scroll. Aka “doomscrolling.”

3. The only notifications I allow on my phone are calendar appointments.

4. I use privacy-respecting hardware and software, when they exist. When they don’t, I make do with the next best thing. (I’m looking at you, Apple!)

5. I minimize opinion-checking. That is, I form my own conclusions rather than caring what “the internet thinks” about a topic.

6. I don’t frequent places where assholes thrive.

There’s a topic I’m tentatively calling “Stand for Something”. It’s about the weakening of “filtering and alignment” capabilities in modern society.

I’ve written about it here, enabled comments, and am looking collaborators and conversation partners.

Beautiful Trouble updated their toolkit.

With the new toolkit you can slice and dice depending on what you are considering, and also create pdfs from your favorites.

This is a nice online companion to the deck of cards.

James Clear came to our all-hands meeting today and presented the story and takeaways from Atomic Habits. 👍

(previously on the blog)

📚 After reading The Shallows I’ve been wondering if there is some optimal blend between strengthening deep thinking pathways and Internet thinking pathways.

Along the lines of “explore vs. exploit”, what’s sweet spot between attentive consideration and inattentive collection?

2020: Nonfiction 📚 Review

To view other 2020 review posts (including fiction, feeds, newsletters, and magazines), visit the main post here.

I read 23 nonfiction books this year, down from 31 last year. I attribute this to a tough year, and also reading more fiction as well as reading more from other sources. I read more overall this year than last.

I prefer to read nonfiction in ebook format, so that I can create highlights and notes and have them automatically export to Readwise, where I keep all my reading notes for review. I read through the notes when finishing a book, so that I can capture what I learned in my own words (an important part of learning & synthesizing). I also have Readwise setup to surface 15 highlights from my reading every day (with a built-in “smart system” that follows my weighting choices based on source and recency of the work).

My first choice is to borrow the ebook from the local library, using Overdrive/Libby. Then I can read in the Kindle (or Kindle app). If not available there, I try to buy it as epub, and open it in iBooks. Both Kindle and iBooks are supported by Readwise.

When I read a paper book, I buy my own (usually from Bookshop.org these days, to support independent bookstores) and underline text and write in the margins. Then I also add those to Readwise using the Readwise app and follow the same process I listed above. It just takes more time, which is why I prefer ebooks.

If I’m not sure if a book is going to be relevant, high-quality, or have a lot of content that I want to highlight, I will listen to an audiobook, usually from Overdrive/Libby again (though we have an Audible subscription as backup).

I have collected my 2020 recommendations (both fiction and nonfiction) on a Bookshop list for easy perusal. That, and all of the individual book links, are affiliate links.

  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ How to Invent Everything by Ryan North - I can’t recommend this highly enough (micro review)
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Born a Crime by Trevor Noah - this had been on my list for a while, but I picked it up to read with a book club at work, after Noah came to our company all-hands meeting for a deep, insightful, and humorous interview with our company president.
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I Am Not Your Enemy: Stories to Transform a Divided World by Michael T. McRay - Resilient Review
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Deep Work by Cal Newport - How do we get meaningful work done in a world of increasing fragmentation and distraction? Newport has some ideas. (f you like this, see my in-depth Digital Minimalism reference and review)
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Four Futures by Peter Frase - What are different directions our political economy might go, especially in light of increased automation and ecological crisis? These thought experiments will help you ponder not just the author’s four directions, but others, too.
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis - Lewis brings his famous explanatory lens to high-frequency trading (micro review)
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ No Name in the Street by James Baldwin - insights from Baldwin’s life that we unfortunately still need to hear today
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ What Is Reading For? by Robert Bringhurst - A thoughtful and beautiful talk-turned-book. I bought a second copy so that I could have one to mark up on one to keep clear.
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Immunity to Change by Lisa Laskow Lahey & Robert Kegan - When actions & systems don’t change even after declaring our intent and good plans to do so, it’s usually because someone (including yourself) is invested in the way things are. Real change requires addressing that. (micro review)
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Remote by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson - As a remote-first company, the Basecamp & Hey founders share what they’ve learned. There’s a lot here that will be valuable even after more desk jockeys start returning to the office.
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim - what Kim did for Ops & DevOps in the Phoenix project, he has continued for product development in this work
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan - in this work, Pollan shares the history of “nutritionism” and ways we can reverse the trends in “western diets” and proliferation of metabolic diseases
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Imaginary Borders by Xiuhtezcatl Martinez - Resilient Review
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek - micro review
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder - I thought this was going to simply about people who lived like nomads, but it’s a look at people living precariously and the industries and companies that are exploiting them
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes - like Pollan above, Taubes looks through the history of nutritionism, especially the problems with how we adopted a high-carb diet, and zeroes in on habit change to address the most dangerous parts
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Get Together by Bailey Richardson, Kai Elmer Sotto, and Kevin Huynh - how to build and maintain community
  • ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin - powerful essays that (as with No Name in the Street above) have far too much relevance still today

Other Books

Here are the other at-least-3-star books that I read in 2020. Books that are unfinished, I abandoned, or I only gave 2 stars are omitted.

What did you read this year? What do you recommend?