The Five Best Books I Read in 2021

 

As 2021 slides gently into oblivion like a moonlit funeral barge on a wine-dark sea, let’s reflect! 2021 was a complicated year for me but even in the midst of the madness, books were – as they always are – a tremendous comfort. Let’s have a fond look back at the cream of the crop; the five best books I read this year!

Have you ever had a friend who is preternaturally good at recommending books? I’ve got one of those! Credit where credit is due: my friend Astrid brought more than one of these to my attention, as well as others that I did not include because of space constraints. Thus, she has earned a special “thanks, buddy!” from me in this post. With that slovenly act of praise out of the way, let’s get to it!

 

5) King of the Vagabonds by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson is a monstrously talented writer. Before The Baroque Cycle, I’d read Snow Crash (as everyone ought to), but I hadn’t dipped a toe into his sprawling historical series until good ol’ AKM recommended I do so. The Baroque Cycle takes place during the dawn of the Enlightenment, and features a cornucopia of real historical figures ranging from King Louis XIV (the Sun King) to Isaac Newton. The books are, collectively, so good that I was in awe of Stephenson’s erudition, wit, and eclectic areas of interest and research – and that was before I learned that he wrote the whole thing longhand!

 

King of the Vagabonds focuses on one of the series’ main protagonists, a wastrel, thief, occasional soldier, occasional bandit, and all-around scoundrel “Half-Cocked” Jack Shaftoe, AKA King of the Vagabonds, AKA L'Emmerdeur, AKA my favorite literary character in recent memory. Vagabonds places a lot of focus on Jack, and while my favorite Jack Shaftoe adventures take place during the books that track his travels through late-17^th to early-18^th century India, Japan, and points beyond, King of the Vagabonds gives readers the best distillation of Jack’s lovable but amoral characteristics. The whole series is amazing – give it a go!

 

4) Slaves to Darkness by John French

Warhammer 40K! The grimmest, darkest grimdark tabletop role-playing game – or, at least, the original grimdark TTRPG! But let’s spin the clock of the 40K universe back a mere ten thousand years to the year 30,000 (or so), an age of civil war among posthuman supersoldiers and their demigod warlords! Sound over the top? You have no idea. The novelizations of this civil war are part of a sprawling series (60 main books, with 30+ books of additional apocrypha) known as the Horus Heresy, and I read the whole. Goddamn. Thing. I’ll be writing about that experience in depth, so stay tuned, but for now let’s focus on the volume with the best necromancy and black magick: Slaves to Darkness!

John French is one of the better Horus Heresy authors (along with reigning champion Dan Abnett, runner-up Aaron Dembski-Bowden, and even the ever-problematic Graham McNeill), and Darkness has some top-notch sorcery in it. If you can get past (or, in fact, relish) all of the flaying, human sacrifice, blood drinking, candles made of human fat, and other delightful atmospheric touches, the tale of Lorgar Aurelian’s quest for apotheosis and his brother Perturabo’s quest to bring the demon-prince Angron to heel is fascinating and full of heavy-duty (and very weird!) metaphysics. I loved it!

 

3) Children of Time and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This was another Astrid recommendation, and I know, including two books as one entry is cheating, but guess what? You are correct – I make the rules on this blog, motherfucker! This duology by Adrian Tchaikovsky answers questions that I’ve posed to fans of both science and science fiction for years. Questions, to keep it brief, about alien species and how different they would be from Earth life. The way I usually phrase my trepidation about extraterrestrials goes something like this: “Humanity has more in common with a cockroach or single-celled organism than we would have in common with any species that visited us. At least the roach has a common ancestor with humanity somewhere back in the primordial past. The roach has DNA just like we do…” and so on.

Not to spoil anything in the plot of either book, but Children of Time and Children of Ruin chart the parallel evolution of other life forms from Earth, and asks intriguing and illuminating questions about the varied nature of consciousness among different neurological and social arrangements in other forms of highly evolved intelligent life. They feature meditations on artificial intelligence, cognitive enhancement, linguistics, biology, and just about every other subject you can imagine. I strongly recommend them for nerds of all stripes: biology nerds, philosophy nerds, sociology or anthropology nerds, you name it!

 2) Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right by Dr. Ronald Beiner

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m working on a nonfiction project (don’t get too excited – I aim to have it finished by 2024 or, at the very latest, 2025). Dangerous Minds has been indispensable in refining the thesis of my project, and is invaluable to anyone who wants to understand where the current rise of far right groups (AKA “Nazi pigfuckers”) originated. When I was a political science student specializing in political theory, I was taught both Nietzsche and Heidegger. I read the latter in a graduate-level course called “The Concept of Ideology,” which is one of the best classes I ever took. Despite the overall excellence of the course and the impeccable lefty and intellectual credentials of the professor teaching it (he was a mentor to me), he taught Heidegger in an irresponsible way. To be fair to him, this is my sole criticism of him or the way he taught any thinker.

Dr. Beiner’s book digs into why the intellectual left has a love affair with Nietzsche and Heidegger, despite the content of their philosophy and the ruinous consequences of their theories’ application. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger were beloved of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi bigwigs, and Heidegger himself was literally a Nazi, and what’s worse, was unrepentant about his party membership and support until the day he died. As late as the 1960s, Heidegger was still unwilling to apologize – to a Holocaust survivor! Fuck Martin Heidegger. Dangerous Minds does an exquisite job of illustrating where the ideas of these “great thinkers” led and still lead, and how they’ve been misinterpreted, excused, and generally whitewashed, masking the poisonous content of their work. Give it a read, even if you haven’t read either philosopher – Beiner’s book is quite readable to laypeople and theory nerds alike.

 

1) Dark Star Rising by Gary Lachman

Gary Lachman is, as I pointed out in yesterday’s post, not only a scholar of Western Esotericism and the occult, he’s also the OG (i.e., before they made it big) bass player for Blondie, among other New Wave bands. He is a renaissance man! He’s also one of the few authors of whom it can be said that he saw the bizarre 4/8Chan-magick conjunction coming in advance (a warning about this type of confluence was included in his 2008 book Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen). Lachman’s thesis – that magick and the occult are deeply intertwined with political power and always have been – holds, whether you believe in “the unseen” (i.e., the supernatural) or not. As noted elk-chili amnesiac Alex Jones so often says, “It doesn’t matter if you believe it. They believe it.” While Jones’ “they” refers to a ridiculous supposed cabal of “Luciferian” liberals, if you interpret “they” as politically active and influential people from the halls of power to the very turf of the grass roots, it’s more or less true. What people believe, what thoughtforms they pass to and fro amongst themselves, matters.

Dark Star Rising freaked me out at first, to be honest. Not because of its description of the role that magick and the occult played in the rise of Donald Trump, but because he came within striking distance of the thesis of my own upcoming project. Fortunately for me, Lachman left something for the rest of us! His analysis of postmodern magick and a “post-truth” political culture is spot-on. Lachman, however, is separated from me by a generation. He wasn’t there on the forums where racist shit-website 4chan was born (not to mention subsequent child-porn and mass murder manifesto cesspool 8chan/kun). I was. He also wasn’t (as fa as I know) neck-deep in online Chaos Magick culture during Trump’s rise. I was. Dark Star Rising will, without a doubt, inform much of what I have to say on this subject – Lachman is, after all, a much more accomplished student of the occult than I am. If you have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about, it’s worth picking up Dark Star Rising. It’s accessible, informative, and doesn’t wander far enough into high weirdness that it will scare casual readers away.

There you have it! Wave a fond farewell to 2021 (or kick it in the ass on its way out the door – dealer’s choice) and buckle up for 2022! New year, new books, and new adventures! I say we embrace the possibilities and potential!