It’s that time of year again, when I highlight the best books I’ve read using a fake awards-show host voice. (Stream ad-free when you use the code “POLEY22” on a purchase of a million dollars or more.)
I haven’t read quite as many books as prior years, but it’s at least partly because I needed to savor this year’s excellent reads. Get ready to set some records.
The Poley for “Highest Quality-to-Page Ratio” goes to…
- The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin. This series has all the Jemisin hallmarks — truly original fantasy, relatable and vulnerable narrators, deities, tempestuous romances, and plot twists you’ll never see coming.
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding surely doesn’t need my recommendation. It well deserves its reputation as a cryptic omen of beauty and terror. But the thing that keeps me coming back to this book is Golding’s masterful command of English — every paragraph is a poem.
The Poley for “Oops, I haven’t showered and I’m three hours late to work” goes to…
- Red Rising by Pierce Brown is at first blush just another Hunger Games imitator, full of unsupervised adolescents acting in horribly violent ways amidst an impossibly tidy dystopian sci-fi setting. Red Rising distinguishes itself admirably by using this hook as a thinly-veiled, but refreshingly complex, allegory for class warfare and capitalism. The emotional stakes are compellingly true to the allegory, too. Just… make sure you rent all three from the library at one time, because you won’t want to stop.
The Poley for “Most Novel Novel”
- I am late to the bandwagon of Madeline Miller’s Circe, but I am jumping on happily. It is a superbly written feminist reclamation of Homeric epics, breathing new life into timeless myths. It is to the Greek tradition what midrash is to the Tanahk.
The Poley for “Words and Pictures” goes to…
- Judas by Loveness and Rebalka. Also a form of midrash asking a simple question: what happened to Judas in hell? Haunting Dantean art and compassionate human emotion elevate this story into a paragon of the medium.
- Batman: The Impostor by Tomlin, Sorrentino, and Bellaire is the most honest superhero comic I’ve ever read. This Batman is grief-stricken, manipulative, sociopathic, and obsessed, and we watch his crusade tear down all the pillars of his mythos, until all that’s left is something truly new.
- Transmetropolitan by Ellis and Robertson is part satire, part mystery, part thriller, and all bizarre. Robertson’s hyper-detailed Sunday-funny-pages art style really elevates and complements Ellis’ whip-smart writing. One of the few comics to make me laugh out loud one panel, and gag the next.
The Poley for “Furniture Scaffolding” goes to…
- That old Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. After seeing my wife direct The Lightning Thief: The Musical at a local high school, I was filled by some treacherous nostalgia and decided to give The Lightning Thief a re-read. Big mistake. The characterization was paper-thin, the chapters vignette-esque, and the plot extremely deus ex machina. Some childhood book series hold up (Redwall foremost among them), but this isn’t one of them.
- Star Wars novels are almost exclusively so bad. Maybe it’s the tie-ins to other media; maybe it’s the need to invent villains that exist outside the visual canon; maybe it’s because books as a medium are inhospitable to Star Wars’ brand of wishy-washy spirituality. (The exceptions to this rule: Ken Liu’s The Legend of Luke Skywalker, Claudia Gray’s Lost Stars, and Michael Stackpole’s X-Wing series.) In any case, Star Wars’ new publishing initiative The High Republic is inventive and cool, but it reeks of a “cinematic universe” approach to storytelling that’s frankly exhausting.
The Poley for “Superlative Dinner Conversation” goes to…
- Boom Town by Sam Anderson is about my least and most favorite city, Oklahoma City. It’s also about basketball, and decent men, and would-be tyrants. Suffice it to say there’s anecdotes for any situation.
- A trifecta of books about design were top of my nonfiction lists this year: A Pattern Language by Alexander et al.,The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, and Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph Hallinan. All contain enough nuggets of portable wisdom to be considered textbooks (except that they’re fun to read).
The “Concessions to a Pandemic” Poley
- I got to play Pandemic: Legacy this year with some friends — my first foray into “Legacy”-style board gaming, where players transform the rules as they play over many sessions. It rewards a consistent and invested playgroup with excellent emergent storytelling.
- FTL: Faster than Light is the hardest video game I’ve ever played. It took me over 50 hours of playtime to beat the 2-hour campaign even once… on the default difficulty level! The gameplay decisions you make as the captain of the Federation’s messenger are agonizing; the galaxy you explore is quirky and mysterious; and the taste of victory has never been more satisfying. If you pick up this excellent game, just remember one thing — giant alien spiders are no joke!
The “Dangerously Likely to Change my Life” Poley goes to…
- Falling Upward by Richard Rohr is a rarity: a book about spirituality which is true and liberating at the same time. Rohr isn’t peddling some get-to-heaven-quick scheme, or a form of self-regulating social control. He’s just sharing what it’s like to open up one’s life to wisdom and selflessness and love.
- I have mentioned this series in years past, but the remaining two books of Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty came out in the past year. It changed the way I think about… pretty much everything. Liu is not just telling a gripping, humane fantasy epic in these books. He is re-deriving modernity from scratch, better than ever, like Einstein reinventing Newton. Through his characters, Liu shows how stories are the quantum mechanics of human life, undergirding everything from tech to love to death and the avoidance thereof. Liu’s readers, as they slowly awaken to the power of Story, will find their life newly full of wonder and potential.
I have literally recommended the Dandelion Dynasty to everybody I know. I’ve kidnapped my parents (yes, even them!) and read aloud the first chapters of the book, hoping to hook them. I plan to kidnap them again this year to try again. There is no conversation I will not commandeer, no tactic I will not tender, no rhetoric I will not recycle, to laud this series. Read it. Have a great year, and come back next November to tell me I was right.