59 Brief Reviews (The Books of 2011)

1. The Evolution of a Cro-Magnon, by John Joseph. By far the best book I read all year. There are a few books I've read that I can honestly say were in some way "life changing." (Karen Armstrong's The Case for God comes to mind, as does Daniel Quinn's My Ishmael, a small handful of others). This one goes on that list. Written by John "Bloodclot" Joseph, the singer of the 80s hardcore band Cro-Mags. It's a beautifully written memoir, full of pain and ugliness and horror, but deeply inspiring. The son of an abusive father and a drug addicted mother, in abusive (physically, psychologically, sexually) foster homes as a child, living on the streets of NYC by the age of 14, in and out of jail, in and endless string of fights, homeless for years and years, often addicted to drugs, occasionally living in Hare Krishna monasteries... the guy had a pretty wild, rough life, but managed to pull it together. Now he's a 47 year old nutritionist, triathlon running vegan, straight edge, feeding the homeless in the park, writing books and screenplays, occasionally doing shows with old bands. The book made me want to get my own life in order-- I mean, the obstacles I face are nothing compared to what you read here, so what's the excuse? This book got me running, lifting weights, and pushed me to join Big Brothers Big Sisters. Excellent read.
2. Meat is for Pussies, also by John Joseph. His second book. Nothing like the first. If you've heard of the wildly popular book Skinny Bitch, this is sort of Skinny Bitch for guys. Mean guys, maybe. It's a health and fitness book with some vegan recipes, some brutal attacks on the food industry, additives, bullshit diet fads, etc.
   
3. Skinny Bitch, by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin. So, speaking of Skinny Bitch; yeah, this was written for a female audience, but whatever. I read it, and man, it's a very good book. I've met people who went vegan because of this book, and after reading it myself, I can see why. It's an argument for veganism from a health (and sexiness) perspective, not a lot of the ethical stuff thrown in (though it's in there too). Basically, if you want to be healthy and sexy, stop eating dead animals, drinking from a cows tit, and forcing sugar, caffeine, alcohol, aspertame, and other toxins into your body. Very good stuff.
4. Jesus Wants to Save Christians, by Rob Bell. I started 2011 not knowing who Rob Bell was, ended it having read four of his books, watched a handful of his NOOMA videos, and seeing him speak in Ithaca. This book, a gift from my Uncle Bill (a Methodist pastor and a big Rob Bell fan) was the first. Wonderful stuff. I could go on and on and on about it, and have in other places. This book presents the Christianity that should be, sadly not quite the message that too many preachers, pundits, politicians, and churches push. Absolutely loved this book.
5. Love Wins, by Rob Bell. The book that got underwear twisted up in knots in churches all across America. In Love Wins, Bell takes the outrageous position that God might not be an asshole. Evangelical conservatives all across the country (many of them deeply committed assholes themselves) were furious. Give it a read. It's not what people like to say it is.
6. Sex God, by Rob Bell. Another good one. Not my favorite, but good. And though not my favorite, maybe the one whose message stayed at the front of my mind for the longest, the one that had the most tangible impact on my thinking. It's about sex. And God.
7. Velvet Elvis, by Rob Bell. Picked this one up at the State Theater in Ithaca after seeing Bell talk. He was there to sign books, but I've never been one to ask for signatures. Makes me feel a little corny and needy. So I read it unsigned. His first book. Quite good.
8. Little Bee, by Chris Cleave. Another author I'd never heard of before this year, and now I'm dying to read more, wishing he would write faster. My wife got this out of the library and made me read it when she was done. I'm glad she did. It's brutal, tragic, painful, but beautifully done. Told through the eyes of two women (Cleave writes brilliantly from a woman's perspective) whose lives intersect tragically and violently. Makes you angry when you're done, makes you want to shake your fist and maybe even change the world.
9. Incendiary, by Chris Cleave. His first book. Told as a woman writing a letter to Osama bin Laden. Her husband and their 4 year old son were killed in a London terrorist attack orchestrated by bin Laden, and her long, rambling, often crazed letter tells a painful story, not just about terror and violence, but about the pain of life, of poverty, of loneliness, misused sexuality, and so on. Brutal book, absolutely wonderfully done.
10. The All New Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew. A straight forward how-to sort of book. Followed the directions, planted my gardens, and a damn squirrel ate my corn.
11. The Runner's Handbook, by Bob Glover, etc. A book about running. I don't know that a book about running needs to clock in at 700+ pages. There were times that it was a little rough. I mean, that's close to War and Peace length, and it's about... running. But, then, it's quite thorough. It's hard to think of a question about running that isn't addressed in this bear of a book. I read it before I started my running routine, and I'm glad I did.
12. Bossypants, by Tina Fey. Funny stuff. A memoir of sorts. Made me laugh. Out loud. Often.
13. Eating Animals, by Jonathon Safran Foer. Another beautifully written book, by the author of Everything Is Illuminated. A very different approach to the topic-- Foer doesn't come across as preachy or narrow-minded, doesn't even seem to have his mind solidly made up as he approaches the topic. It's more a series of questions, a slow unfolding of answers. The only veg book I can think of that spends a lot of time talking about a Jewish grandmother surviving in the forests, eating what she could as she fought to escape the Nazis. The writing is just unbelievable, poetic. I strongly recommend this to anyone even remotely interested in the topic. It's just... kind. It is a kind, loving, moral book.
14. Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peg Orenstein. Great book on the "princess" culture, the pink-ization of little girls. I don't have a daughter, but I heard Orenstein talking on NPR, loved what she was saying, and had to read this.
15. World War Z, by Max Brooks. An oral history of the zombie wars. Written with a straight face. Intelligent, clever, at times suspenseful. Very good book, more so if you love you some zombies.
16. The Great Hunt, by Robert Jordan. My brother Todd bullied me into reading the "Wheel of Time" series. This is the second installment. Of fifteen. There are fifteen damn books in this series, and none of them are short. It's a roughly 12,000 page fantasy story. That's sort of obnoxious, really. And now I'm sort of hooked on it. It's not great fiction, but it's good, and once you get started, you really want to see how it ends. This is better than the first book-- it picks up quicker, doesn't waste a lot of time setting things up.
    
17. The Dragon Reborn, by Robert Jordan. Book three in the series. Not bad.
18. Grudgebearer, by Gav Thorpe. A "Warhammer" novel. You know what? I don't even have to pretend that this stuff is "good." It is what it is-- low brow, pulpy, canned fantasy. About Dwarfs and Goblins and wizards and the like. And I like it. It's not "good," but it can sometimes be fun.
19. MYTH-ion Improbable, by Robert Aspirin. When I was in high school, I read one of Aspirin's "MYTH" books. I liked it. Didn't love it, but liked it. A couple of years ago, I found one cheap at a used book sale, and read it in the hammock in my back yard out of nostalgia. And really, really enjoyed it. Since then, I've read a lot of them. Not all of them, but most. Four this year. I can rarely remember the plot of one from another, but they are all well done for what they are. Aspirin was a good writer, and these are generally witty and clever and fun to read through. The adventures of a dimension jumping wizard named Skeeve, his demon mentor Aahz, and their band of friends.
20. MYTH Conceptions, by Robert Aspirin. See above.
21. MYTH Directions, by Robert Aspirin. More of the same.
22. MYTH Inc in Action, by Robert Aspirin. More of the same, but told from the perspective of one of the minor characters, not Skeeve himself, which lets Aspirin write in a slightly different voice.
    
23. The Time Machine, by HG Wells. After having read CS Lewis' glowing review of First Men in the Moon, I picked up a copy at a used book store and loved it. I then stocked up on HG Wells books. Finally got around to reading some this year. This wasn't as good as First Men in the Moon, possibly in part because I was already so familiar with the plot, which has become sort of part of the cultural awareness, and so there really weren't any surprises. But it was decent.
24. The Invisible Man, by HG Wells. The first half of this dragged. I was ready to put it away, but forced myself to continue on... and then it got really, really good. Great book. Right before reading this, though, I read a little bio piece in The New Yorker about HG Wells, and throughout this book I just kept thinking about what an absolutely horrid person Wells was, which was kind of a downer.
25. Night, by Elie Wiesel. Painful. An account of survival in a Nazi camp. Rough. Brilliantly good book. There's a reason you've heard of this. Awful, but must-read stuff.
26. The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman. The brilliant graphic novels, Maus I and Maus II, detailing Spiegelman's father's life, the rise of Nazism, survival in the concentration camps, life in a new world after the war. Graphic novels, sure, but the material is amazing, and somehow the format makes it easier to process, easier to remember the message.
    
27. "Breaking the Silence." More a "tract" than a book, really, maybe 50 pages or so. Testimonials from Israeli soldiers serving in occupied territories. Accounts of brutal treatment of Palestinians, soldiers throwing shock grenades into groups of playing children just because it's funny to watch them stumble and scatter, that sort of thing. Lots of ugly stuff. Strange to read this after reading Night and Maus.
28. Rules for Radicals, by Saul D. Alinsky. The same uncle who gave me Rob Bell's book gave me two books when I was 17 and leaving for college-- an NIV translation of the Bible, and Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. I loved it when I was a kid, but hadn't read it in twenty years. Then I started seeing bizarre letters to the editor mentioning the book, accusing Obama of being an "Alinsky-ite." It sounded like Glenn Beck's followers doing their homework assignments (clearly they'd never read the book and were parroting someone else's nonsense). Looked online, and sure enough, found some crazily ignorant Beck stuff attacking the book. Which made me want to read it again. And it was exactly as good as I remembered. It's Machiavelli's The Prince, but with more scruples, and for people without power.
29. Father Mychal Judge, by Michael Ford. The biography of Father Mychal Judge, who died while trying to help victims of the September 11 attacks. Father Mychal Judge was a gay, recovering alcoholic Catholic priest. Interesting guy. A decent book. Interesting. Happened upon it at a table at the Westcott Fair, and the people selling it seemed nice, so I had to support them.
30. Pigs In Heaven, by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver's just fantastic. If you haven't read her stuff, you should. You need to. Wonderful writer. This is a sequel to The Bean Trees, which was just a fantastic book. I've got lots more Kingsolver novels downstairs, and I really need to read them in 2012.
31. "Ion," by Euripides. When I was 19 and living in an apartment in Syracuse, barely eating, drinking more than anyone could think was healthy, trying hard to lead the starving artist lifestyle, I stumbled often into the OCC library and borrowed Greek tragedies. I was really, really into Greed tragedies at the time. The one that I remembered the best in later years was "The Bacchae," by Euripides. So this year, almost 20 years later, I decided to read some Euripides again. I haven't read any Greek tragedies at all in at least 15 years, so it was kind of fun getting reacquainted. I started with "Ion." Decent play. Not the best, but decent.
32. "The Women of Troy," by Euripides. This one is beautiful. The women of Troy gathered together after the war, prisoners of the Greeks, about to be taken away, made into slaves, raped. Mourning the deaths of their husbands and their children. A fantastic piece of anti-war literature.
33. "Helen," by Euripides. Also terrific. Made me want to write two songs, one from the view of Menelaus, one from the view of Helen. I mean, if I was in a band again. Menelaus, disappointed that Helen isn't as beautiful as he remembered, has aged, isn't the ideal that he came searching for. Later, Helen, basically saying "how dare you, you selfish bastard," knowing that he only ever loved the idealized her, not the real her, telling him that that's why she left with Paris, Paris who continued to love the real thing. Not that that's the message of this play. It's more of a comedy than that. But that's what it got me thinking about.
34. "The Bacchae," by Euripides. Not as amazing as I remembered it being, but I can see why I once loved it. An anti-prohibition play.
    
35. Stuart Little, by EB White. I never read this as a kid, but I've read it to my kid twice now. It's one of his favorite books, and I think it's as enjoyable for adults as for someone his age. Just a nice, sweet book.
36. The "Geronimo Stilton" series. My boy is really into chapter books these days, and I read him many, many chapter books this year. I won't mention most of them in the list. But the Geronimo Stilton books are stand outs. He loves them. And I have to admit, I really enjoy these too. They're written from the perspective of Geronimo Stilton, a mouse who runs The Rodent's Gazette, and often finds himself sucked into crazy adventures. They're clever, cute, fun. We read about a dozen of them. We have more set for 2012.
37. Return to the Hundred Acre Wood, by David Benedictus. I don't know the intended audience for this book. Kids? Or adults, who loved the originals when they were kids? I read this to Sam, but I think I enjoyed it far more than he did.
38. Bunnicula Strikes Again, by James Howe. I'm going to admit it: I didn't read this to Sam. I'm James Howe's #1 fan. Having read this (I found it at a used bookstore, cheap), I can now say that I've read all of the "Bunnicual" books. Some of them more than once.
39. It, by Stephen King. Read a lot of Stephen King when I was a teenager, recently started getting into his stuff again. It is terrific (as I'm sure most people are already aware). The best stuff has nothing to do with the murderous clown-monster, though. The scariest stuff is the bullies, the childhood traumas, the distant parents, the social tribulations of youth.
40. 'salem's Lot, by Stephen King. Just finished this one on New Year's Eve. Stayed up way too late more than once. The book sort of pulls you right in. And there's a brilliant scene on faith. Father Callahan's faith, his frustration with a church that has turned into a "social justice" club, that has lost the awe and mysticism of religion. That's just some fantastic stuff there.
41. True Love, by Thich Nhat Hanh. I've read a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh's stuff over the years, and a lot of it's very similar. It's kind of like going to church. Same message week in week out, maybe a different spin. True Love was okay. Not amazing. Not different from a number of his books. A refresher on the topics he writes on again and again.
    
42. For a Future to be Possible, also by Thich Nhat Hanh. This one, on the other hand, is a stand out book. It's a long discussion on the Five Precepts. There are responses from other Buddhist teachers and writers, different perspectives on the topic. One of his best books. I read it during my little "retreat" at the Farm Sanctuary, and was glad to have it there with me.
43. Awakening Loving-Kindness, by Pema Chodron. Another book that accompanied me on my brief retreat. Writings on "metta," the loving-kindness of Buddhism, by Pema Chodron. Compiled from a month long series of her teachings.
44. Buddha, by Karen Armstrong. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God is one of the most important books I've ever read. This doesn't rise to that level, but it's good. A life of the Buddha. Pretty straight forward, essentially a biography.
45. Dharma Road, by Brian Haycock. A nice book on Buddhism, as practiced by a busy cab driver. I liked this a lot.
46. The Heart of the Revolution, by Noah Levine. Good book by the author of Dharma Punx. I have a ton of respect for Noah Levine, the things that he's doing. This is his third book. All are good. In my opinion, Noah Levine and Brad Warner are the future of Buddhism. (Along with John Joseph and Rob Bell, they're the four most inspiring "spiritual" guys out there right now, people that we should be listening to.)
47. The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, by DT Suzuki. The only book I picked up this year and couldn't finish. I hated it. Absolutely hated it. I don't know if it was his writing style, or the topic. I've read him before, liked what I read. But this was god-awful horrible.
48. Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. A writer's book, with exercises and commentaries meant to inspire, make the writing process easier. Writing from a Buddhist perspective. It didn't work for me. I read the book, but I still didn't write my novel.
49. Sit Down and Shut Up, by Brad Warner. Author of Hardcore Zen. All of his stuff is good, but this is my least favorite of the four books I've read. Still worthwhile. A little more "scholarly," for lack of better words (and really, that's not a great word for it). It's a conversation on Dogen's Shobogenzo (Dogen being the guy who put Soto Zen on the map a long, long time ago).
50. Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate, by Brad Warner. This book, on the other hand, was great, almost as good as Hardcore Zen. Warner is at his best when he's personal, teaching Zen from his own life experiences. This book is full of that.
51. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki. I've read this before, and read bits and pieces often. A collection of parables and koans that I read this year as sort of a devotional.
52. The Dhammapada. One of the great Buddhist classics, meant for lay practitioners. Again, I've read through this often, read it again this year as a devotional.
53. The Little Zen Companion, by David Schiller. Sort of a silly book. I bought it twenty years ago when I didn't really know for sure what Zen was. A collection of quotes and brief (very brief) essays. I read this as a devotional, too.
54. Teachings of the Buddha, compiled by Jack Kornfield. I've read this a few times. A nice devotional book.
55. Gandhi on Non-Violence, compiled by Thomas Merton. I love Thomas Merton. I love Gandhi. I hated this book. There just wasn't much to it.
    
56. Voluntary Simplicity, compiled by the Northwest Earth Institute. I used this book for a study group I organized and lead. Honestly, not nearly as good as the earlier version they put out, but it still had some nice material in it.
57. Sober Living for the Revolution, by Gabriel Kuhn. I've always been sort of into the whole straight edge scene in hardcore (no drugs, no cigarettes, no alcohol, no casual sex, etc). I was never straight edge myself when I was young-- I really liked ladies, and cigarettes, and beer, and the occasional adventure with contraband goodies. A couple of years ago, I gave up alcohol and caffeine. I'd grown out of recreational drugs prior to that, and quit smoking almost 10 years ago (around the time I met my wife, which meant I quit chasing after ladies 10 years ago too). So now I'm basically the vegan straight edge guy, sort of by accident. This book is a nice study of straight edge living combined with radical politics. It's a collection of interviews and articles with or by people in the leftist straight edge scene. By design, it avoids a lot of the straight edge bands I loved the most, as they are not "progressive" or "leftist" enough. It's a good book, but it has a lot of faults. It's too narrow, too dismissive of bands and thinkers that don't share every point of the writer's ideology. It's hypocritical at times (complaining about scenes that excluded women to some degree, while this book is almost entirely about and by men itself). I'd love to go on and on about it, but won't. It was basically a fun book to read. And it started off with Ian MacKaye, one of my heroes, so there you go. That makes it good stuff.
58. My Baby Rides the Short Bus, by Yantra Bertelli, Jennifer Silverman, and Sarah Talbot. A collection of writings from dozens of authors, most of them women, dealing with the difficulties (and sometimes the joys) of raising children with developmental disabilities. This is from a left perspective-- it's the stories of mothers who were already "different" (gay, or punk, or tattooed, or living on a commune, etc), and who then found themselves different in a new way when their kids were diagnosed. It's a topic that's dear to me given the work I do, and I enjoyed the (often painful) opportunity to see things from the side of the parents.
59. Animal Farm, by George Orwell. Would you believe I never had to read this in school? What a very good book this was. Glad to have finally read it.

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There you go. The books of 2011. Surprisingly, not a lot of the classic literature that I usually love-- no Hemingway, no Tolstoy, no Camus, no Hesse, no Burgess, no Kerouac, no Dostoevsky. Not much philosophy-- didn't touch that pile of Nietzsche sitting in my office. And no civil rights stuff, not a lot of anything political. Not many books by women. Or by people of color. Lots of stuff by white men. Go figure.

I've got a lot of books waiting for me in 2012. Things I've been dying to read. Can't wait to get started. Never quite know where to begin.