Pacific Crest Trail through-hiker memoir. Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust is a good companion to Americana. Makes me want to read Wild, which Healy mentioned reading to prepare for the trail. Americana is also yet another indictment of the USA’s shitty & evil immigration regime (although Healy did not recount any especially traumatic immigration experiences). Bolsters my feeling that through-hiking the entire PCT is not for me (even though I would like to be the sort of person who could). Hiking the entire PCT (or even most of it) in one go is an incredible feat of physical & psychic strength, & would be a wonderful source of smug satisfaction, but I feel like it would be hard to appreciate & explore many of the areas the PCT passes through while keeping up the pace necessary to make the whole trail in a season. Americana is a great endorsement of the camaraderie to be found on the PCT.

This book is more of an introduction to queer thought, theory, & philosophy than a history. As such, it is very useful and mind opening. I wish I could have read this book earlier, especially the stuff about the queer rejection of binaries. Foucault’s “do not ask me who I am, & do not ask me to remain the same” is the perfect response to any number of introductory icebreaker questions, & I wish I could have pulled it out at any number of parties & functions (even if it is a paraphrase)! Fits well with other graphical guides to philosophy.

Graphical & graphic accounts of various people caught up in the Guantanamo Prison, both on the inside and the outside. The various stories of the prisoners, their advocates, & the military officials provide a much needed picture of the monstrosity hiding in plain sight that is the Guantanamo prison. The actual art and pictures, provided by a dozen different artists (most of them as seen on thenib.com), are amazing too. In addition to being America’s model village of rogue state lawlessness, Guantanamo is a great monument to American cowardice. While the existence of Guantanamo Prison surely serves some purpose to the national security establishment & its various fascist enablers & hangers-on, I get the impression that entire edifice has been maintained mostly by an endless sequence of craven CYA decision making. Maintaining the barbaric status quo threatens no-one’s career, only the lives of the prisoners. Redeeming the prisoners, however, indicts the national security establishment. Acknowledging the scale of the injustice indicts everyone who enabled & enables it. Even allowing the prisoners into the court indicts the law.

Kind of a “behind the journalism” account of a reporting trip to Turkey, Iraq, Syria by some Seattle area journalists. Glidden’s main question during the trip is “what is journalism?”, but I feel like the bigger question Rolling Blackouts raises is “how can individuals help the suffering of the Iraqis whose country we destroyed?” (The answer probably does not include joining the Marines.) The result is an interesting look at what the work of independent reporters actually looks like. It is also an interesting picture of the region right before the Syrian Civil war blew everything up.

Collection of urgent warnings in essay form from 2012-2014 by Sarah Kendzior. Not really just about flyover country, because the economic & social dysfunction Kendzior describes can be found absolutely everywhere in the US. Reading these essays in 2021, it’s hard to imagine a time when they seemed far-fetched. I suppose they still might be to someone sufficiently oblivious & privileged, which describes many a well-paid syndicated opinion columnist. Reminded me of Mike Davis’s collection of Bush-Era essays, In Praise of Barbarians, but View From Flyover Country was more current & down to earth. In Praise of Barbarians had more essays that were about specific places or historical events, while the View From Flyover Country essays focused on the effects of political & economic collapse that are felt throughout the country. Was an easy, but infuriating, read.

Bleak & (sort of) humorous surrealist comic narrative of the end of the world by the animator behind such hits as Rejected (which had it’s own sort of end of the world narrative) & Billy’s Balloon. Feels very relevant to 2021, even though it’s from 2013 (although I don’t think you had to be a prophet to have had some idea where we’re heading now). Uses simple drawings on paper, which is sometimes torn or crumpled to create interesting effects. Makes me want to seek out more of Hertzfeldt’s books, and also go back and watch some Happy Tree Friends, Bill Plympton, & the other Spike and Mike’s & Animation Show faves. Perhaps the most appropriate read on the 4th of July?

Comix rendering of Joe Frank stories (story?). Has many of the things I expect to find in a Joe Frank episode: dreams, Israel/Palestine, lovers, the phrase “make love”, absurdity, existentialism, etc. Kind of felt like the stories were all dictated to Novak as he was drawing the pictures, with the purpose of tripping him up. Most of the stories felt like every line changed the direction & feel of the story, like it was trying to shake me off & disorient me, which is really what I’m looking for from Joe Frank. I should have read this while listening to some Jon Hassell, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, & Brian Eno (ambient Brian Eno).

In laying out all of the governmental ways residential segregation has been carried out up to the present day, Richard Rothstein makes the case for reparations in words white people can understand (partly by not using the word “reparations”). Color of Law patiently takes apart a number of white mainstream misconceptions, assumptions, & myths about the history of urban segregation & housing discrimination. While I had some idea of the history Rothstein covers in Color of Law, I have to say I was surprised by a few things, or at least at the scale at which they took place. I was surprised at the degree to which the urban geography of places so familiar to me, such as the SF Bay Area, were created by State, Local, & Federal government efforts to discriminate against Black people. While I knew that the Federal Government favored suburbs with the interstate highway system & encouraged them in other ways, I was surprised at how completely suburbanization was created & directed by the Federal Government. Finally, I was most surprised at the level & consistency of mob violence faced by Black families attempting to integrate white neighborhoods & suburbs. I knew about burning crosses & harassment campaigns directed against some people, but I didn’t know that Black people moving into white neighborhoods were & are commonly besieged by enraged white mobs who subjecting them to bombings, shootings, & arsons, even into the present day. I guess that’s my privilege. The endnotes & FAQs were worth reading. Rothstein’s answer to the question about black people not wanting to live in integrated communities with potentially white racist neighbors was partly convincing to me (“African Americans’ avoidance of integration cannot be considered a free choice”), but also felt “off” (“To achieve an integrated society, African Americans too must take greater risks”). Overall a worthwhile read.

I really liked this novel. I'm always amazed by LeGuin's imagination. It's kind of based on an outdoor hiking trail version of a "Wardrobe" (as in, the Lion the Witch, & the Wardrobe) through which one can access a sort of alternative life in a twilit world that where time almost stands still. Mysteries and questions abound in this book. If unanswered questions bother you, the Beginning Place will probably bother you quite a bit. There are many roads not taken in this book. There is a lot to be read between the lines. Lord Horn made me think of Christopher Lee in Wicker Man. The "romance" part of novel is the least important part. I feel like it's there to make the ending more upbeat. The Beginning Place was a quick read for me, but I think I should read it again.

July 2021 update: Re-read partly so that I could satisfy a challenge for my Local Library's summer reading program, & partly because I had the idea to write a song based on the book. Upon re-reading, I've decided Lord Horn looks more like the late great Max von Sydow. If anything, Master Sark is more like Lord Summerisle.

An Office Race Politics-Horror novel. Can kind of be described as Sorry to Bother You + a bit of Devil Wears Prada + Stepford Wives (or Invasion of the Body Snatchers) + Get Out (of course). The Other Black Girl is a page-turner that I can see being made into a movie, maybe even a good one, depending on who does it. Makes the NY publishing work sound nuts, in addition to the racial politics at play, which should be recognizable to anyone who works in an office in the USA.