What I Read in 2021, H2

January 1, 2022

Reading was very light these past few months. The words of long books swam on the page, and I couldn’t get past more than a page or two. I let myself go back to old comforting books and blogs, mostly comics. I particularly enjoyed Ben Orlin’s Math with Bad Drawings for interesting math stuff weaved into whimsical nerdy jokes.

I did manage to read one of Ben’s recommended novels, This Is How You Lose the Time War – it was interesting and written in a very visually descriptive manner, but it feels like recently everyone is using the format of writing multiple separate storylines that eventually converge. I think what’s notable is that Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone built the story collaboratively by each writing one of the protagonists: it might be worth reading for that alone.

Next, a book I read for coursework but on a subject I have truly been wanting to find out more about; Heidegger and the Media by David Gunkel and Paul Taylor. It’s a contextualized way to understand Heidegger that’s fairly easy to read and digest.

Mm, what else? Leading up to the movie, I finished the last two Dune novels written by Frank Herbert – Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune. Uh, extremely odd, as other commenters have noted. I don’t think Chapterhouse is as bad as some people make it out to be, but these last two are just…not as creative, and perhaps even a little cheap. Not a hard pass if you’d like to finish up the series, but I think it’s perfectly fine to stop at GEoD and not taint your impression of the series.

Oh, how could I forget! I finally got around to finishing The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov’s celebrated satirical piece. It is as captivating as people say it is, though most of the deeper commentary probably flew over my head. But I very much enjoyed reading about ridiculousness such as a cat named Behemoth riding a tram-car.