In Perhaps the Stars, things get weird. And for a series that OPENS with a sage being restrained by a serial killer after witnessing a boy resurrect a toy soldier, that’s saying something. New themes of identity and destiny join familiar ones like gender, violence, sex, and religion, and author Ada Palmer pushes them all to twist the plot in unnerving directions. Due to catastrophes in critical infrastructure, it plays out in a context that’s surprisingly distinct from the preceding three novels.

In The Road to Unfreedom, historian Timothy Snyder attempts to explain the state of Western democracy in 2018 with an analysis of Russia, Ukraine, the European Union, and the US. Although he casts a wide net (reaching back 1,000 years to the Viking King Volodymyr/Valdemar), he gets a surprising amount of mileage by focusing on “just” the last decade or so. But it’s easy to fool a historically-challenged computer programmer like me.

On Tyranny is a short collection of lessons learned from the study of authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. It was written in 2017 by Timothy Snyder, a professor of European history. In 2021, it was re-released as a graphic novel, and that’s the version I borrowed from the library. The illustrations and photos certainly fit the mood: uniformly creepy and occasionally disturbing. Unfortunately, they’re also over-emphasized at times, intruding on the text in pages with more inventive layouts.

Physician/anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer was remarkably committed to the idea of a preferential option for the poor. While his rock-solid conviction may be easy to summarize, its application is anything but. The context–the culture of those impacted–is historically obscure. The work is logistically ominous and tragically political. And the personal ramifications are a strange mix of awkward, disappointing, and inspiring. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, author Tracy Kidder adapts some conventions of the biography in an attempt to fit it all in.

There’s been a lots of finger-pointing about the US’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It can be tough for a layperson to sift through all the different takes on which experts let us down and how they failed. Everything I’ve read from Michael Lewis (one book on early Internet adoption, another about professional sports team management, and the third on Wall Street tomfoolery) is mostly lower-stakes than that. While their subjects aren’t matters of life-and-death, the books all demonstrate a clean style and an aptitude for critical thinking.

The Will to Battle is the third installment of author Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota tetralogy. After reading Too Like the Lightening and Seven Surrenders, I opened it expecting some answers and a bunch of new questions. I got both along with a few surprises. The narrator is maybe the most compelling challenge. Mycroft Canner’s writing style is by now familiar, which is not to say that it’s easy. It’s formal, emotionally unstable, laden with rich metaphor, and intentionally abstruse when it comes to gender.

History is not my strong-suit. Like the stereotypical “STEM” student, I opted out of the humanities whenever possible and doubled down on math. I’ve been trying to balance that out in recent years, though. Thanks to works like All the Sha’s Men and Stamped from the Beginning, I’ve come to recognize Harry S. Truman as a real class act. I’ve wanted to understand him on his own terms, though, especially when it comes to the use of the atomic bomb–a decision which I considered to be the most difficult ever made by a US President 1.

“It says speechSynthesis.speak returns ‘void.’ What’s ‘void?’” “It says that? Well…” I tried to think of an answer that was both honest and helpful. I settled on, “some people use the word ‘void’ to mean the absence of a value. For JavaScript code, they really mean undefined.” Cat, ever focused on the task at hand, took my hand-waving for what it was and continued working on her web application. But that interaction stuck with me.

Collecting the articles (and videos) that stuck with me this year. It’s disappointingly incoherent, reflecting a somewhat unscrupulous news diet on my part. “American democracy” is not a heading I expected to require at this time last year. Here’s hoping for a more equitable year in 2022. American democracy Denial Is the Heartbeat of America - Kendi challenged my early attempt to internalize the riots The American Abyss - my introduction to Timothy Snyder–a historian whose words I found myself reading all year long.

Climate change is notoriously difficult to reason about. There’s this enormous threat, and even though we routinely see evidence of its existence, we still struggle to quantify it. Some people say we’re doomed. Others might disagree, but even the most optimistic can’t muster more than “it’s maybe not that bad.” I got to feeling like the only sure thing is that we need to be scared. That position probably won’t motivate action, it very likely doesn’t inspire logical thought, and it certainly isn’t going to help you appreciate your good fortune in the present.