The Antisocial Socialist

blogcutter asked "What do you think about Australia prohibiting social media for the under-16 set?

Can our postal service (snail mail) be saved? Would postal banking help? And would it maybe get rid of all those payday loan shops that are a blight on our urban landscape??

How do kids' and people's hobbies change from one generation to the next? What are the practically obsolete ones (stamp collecting? penpals?), the current ones like online gaming, and the emerging ones or the ones we haven't yet seen?"

Those are all really good questions.

Social media ban for kids

I'll start with three statements, which I believe to be true but which are also contradictory.

1) Social media corporations and Big Tech in general are evil and actively detrimental to the existence of life on earth.
2) Children are human beings and deserving of freedom, autonomy, political opinions, and privacy, albeit at a graduated basis based on their maturity (not necessarily the same as their numerical age).
3) The fact that I can go on the internet and encounter the opinion of a 15-year-old is a crime against humanity.

Which is to say that it's complicated. And also basically impossible. I would like them to ban Nazis from social media, and of course they can't manage to do that, so there is not really any way to stop a semi-intelligent 15-year-old with a VPN from avoiding the ban.

While I do think that social media is harmful to kids (and here I would already get more nuanced, because Tumblr is social media, but it's not harmful in the way that Instagram is harmful, and Instagram is not necessarily harmful to all kids), I don't for a second believe that Australia's social media ban, or any other proposed social media ban, has much to do with actually protecting kids. I think it has to do with fear that kids could turn out to be trans, or support Palestine, or learn that their government did and continues to be involved in horrific genocides. "What about the children!" has been a rallying cry since time immemorial for people to shut off their brains and get on board with the latest moral panic, and especially with one of the most slovenly pseudo-researchers of our age, Jonathan Haidt, cited as the eternal expert on this, I just don't trust these people.

I also believe that social media addiction is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is a lack of community connection and public space. That's why it worsened over covid. We long for connection with others. Neoliberalism has restricted the sphere of the public—where are the parks? The community centres? The union meeting halls? The community concerts and dances?—and this goes even further for adolescents, who don't even have a mall to loiter in anymore.

Normal kids would much rather spend time with their friends in meatspace, but we don't let them do that anymore, do we? Scoff at the hosedrinking Gen Xers all you like but at least we were able to walk to school and stay at home by ourselves without our parents being arrested for child neglect. We went to all-ages shows and got fake IDs and went to better shows, we drank underage, and we were mostly better adjusted for it. It worries me much more that none of my students have fake IDs to get into punk shows than it does that they spend time on TikTok, which is one of the few paths of affordable entertainment and socialization open to them.

Furthermore, we have eroded education into credentialing. Kids don't get involved in extracurriculars because they love it and want to meet new friends; they do it because they're resume-padding to get into competitive programs. They're over-scheduled and under-challenged. They're both over- and under-parented. They have no privacy. Their only space to be themselves is to take their phone into the bathroom—the one place where there's probably not a camera—and sneak an un-surveilled conversation with a friend. So of course they get addicted to their one escape.

I often complain that my senior students don't know history, which is to say that there is one compulsory history class, in Grade 10, and it mostly covers WWI. When I ask them what they learned outside of school, the only ones who know anything that has happened ever in human history—let alone contemporary politics—are the ones who spend a lot of time on Tumblr, Reddit, and TikTok (formerly Twitter but now they just get Nazis). That's not to say that every kid is using social media for that, just that social media is filling in for where institutions have failed miserably.

I would love to see more regulation and breaking up of Big Tech monopolies—I think that would create a stronger, more diverse social media landscape. And I'd like to see the traditional media regain its credibility and staffing. I think if we opened up the black box fuelling algorithms it would create positive change for all of us, not just kids. Because as harmful as social media can be for under-16-year-olds, it's not as bad as the genocides that Facebook encouraged adults to perpetrate in Myanmar and Ethiopia.

I also think we should concentrate on harm reduction and teach responsibility rather than ban things.

For more thoughts on this, selki posted this great nuanced episode of Tech Won't Save Us, where Paris Marx interviews Australian journalist Cam Wilson, and it sums up a lot of my feelings as well.

Saving Snail Mail

I love snail mail and I love posties and Canada Post is in fact a very good idea even if its current management can go fuck itself. Full support to Canada Post workers even though I have several cool things in the mail that I would really like to get sometime soon.

I like the idea of postal banking a lot, and this would bring infrastructure to remote parts of the country. Apparently it works really well in Japan. So yes, I'm in favour of that. If it gets ride of payday loan places, so much the better.

I also think that things like mail are necessary for civilization and we shouldn't cede them to Amazon.

Uhh that's about all I got on that one.

Hobbies

You know, when I ask the kids what their hobbies are, they claim to not have any. That's been the case for my entire teaching career though. I'm not sure I conceived of my hobbies as hobbies when I was that age either.

I would say gaming takes up most of their time. Which makes sense—it is very time-consuming and immersive, it can be both social and allow for social avoidance, and there's such a variety that it appeals to all of their interests.

They're individuals, though. Some of them like sports, of course; some enjoy cooking or baking, others podcast or make YouTube videos, some hunt and fish, some build and paint miniatures. I can't generalize. I don't think any collect stamps but a lot collect things like plushies or those awful Funko Pops. Penpals I'd say might still exist in a sense, as some of them have internet friends, which I think is the same thing but you don't have to pay for a stamp.

I normally don't just post a link but I need everyone to read the Magneto essay that's going around so we can talk about how great it is. It's one of the best pieces of literary analysis I've seen in a good long time.

The Judgment of Magneto

 Well, this will be quick and easy, as I only saw three new films this year, and one of them sucked. I don't know why I can mainline a million TV shows and not watch a single movie, but I think it's because I can only really sit still for an hour at a time. Anyway, the three whole movies I saw were:

El Conde: This is the one that sucked, unfortunately. You would think the premise was bulletproof: Pinochet is actually a vampire and gets dragged out of retirement even though he wants to die. That's ripe for political satire. This film has two problems. First, the characterization is muddled and so the satire is muddled. I think it wants to show some nuance and complexity and how fascism can appeal to even those who oppose it, plus the obvious vampirism = capitalism, but it ended up mired in pointless nihilism. Sometimes you have to be blatant in your satire. The other problem is that it's told almost entirely in voiceover narration. It's a stupid choice that's not justified once you realize who the voiceover is, which is also not a big twist. In some alternate timeline there is a good version of this.

Nimona: I liked this one quite a lot! I'm not a big cartoon fan, and I'm particularly not a fan of this particular cartoon style, but the story is good enough to overcome my aesthetic dislike. It's good for all the same reasons why the comic is good—it's a cute, subversive, queer fairy tale with memorable characters. My only issues were that I would prefer it if it were animated more like ND Stevenson's drawing style, because I like that more, and that I don't think the changes at the beginning work as well as the comic does. It's far more fun to discover Ballister Blackheart's backstory as Nimona does—this is one case where I think the story benefits from doing an obvious twist. It ends up softening the story quite a lot by not depicting any of Blackheart's villainy, though I guess that makes it more appropriate for the kiddies. I guess.

Cocaine Bear: Okay I can't believe I'm saying this but this ended up being the best movie I saw in 2023 because unlike the other two, it didn't have any flaws. It made us a promise—you get to see a bear on cocaine that kills a lot of people—and delivered exactly that. It's a massively self-aware film. It's hilarious. Sometimes all you want is to watch a bear that is higher than any living thing has ever gotten in existence eat a bunch of people and then try to get more cocaine. Unlike the other two it is an improvement over reality/the source material, as the actual story behind this is sad rather than funny.

I'll try to watch more movies next year. The key word is "try."

In the interstitial period between Christmas and New Years, I traditionally do lists of things that I read, watched, and listened to. But since covid it's been increasingly a problem. What aired in 2023? What even is time? Do I even remember all the things I watched?

Okay here are the things I liked the most, in no particular order except for the last two.

Atlanta
I think this ended in 2022, but I only saw it this year. What starts as a kind of cool slice-of-life show starring the guy from Community and that "This Is America" song ends up being...not that. I heard it described as "Twin Peaks with rappers" and that's essentially it. Not that the first season is bad per se—it's got a real "city-as-character" vibe and really compelling writing, but as the show spirals into further levels of surreality, it gets brilliant. It's like Black Mirror if Black Mirror had kept the quality of its first season instead of turning into "what if cell phones were your mom." The less you know about it going in, the better. But truly one of the most inventive, incisive TV shows I've seen. 

Doctor Who
I'm as surprised as you are to see this back on my list. It was only specials this year, but after several years of the show being really bad, I am pleased to announce that it is good again. Like I am actively looking forward to each new episode instead of it being something to slog through in hopes that it will change back to the thing that I liked. It has now changed back to the thing that I like. (Obligatory note that this has nothing to do with 13 being a woman and everything to do with Chris Chibnall being the showrunner and turning the Doctor into a neoliberal cop.)

The Bear
A show about a chef who tries to save his dead brother's neighbourhood restaurant with the help of an ambitious sous chef. I had no idea what this show was about when I started watching it—someone just said that I'd like it, and I did. It's like those baking shows that I watch, except it has an actual plot. It's very low-stakes drama that makes you feel how huge the stakes are for the characters. And it involves a lot of competence porn, which is a thing I adore.

What We Do In the Shadows/Our Flag Means Death/Good Omens
These are all the same show and I like it a lot. I would say that WWITS did the best job of continuing from strong earlier seasons and GO did the worst, but they were all very fun to watch. Middle-aged slow burn queer longing is kind of my favourite thing and I like that there are three shows that give me what I want in that regard, even if they are determined to torture every other viewer who doesn't want that. Too bad. They can have all the other shows that have nonproblematic gays who have healthy relationships in them.

Andor
This was not a show I expected to like, since it was Star Wars, which has worn out its welcome for me, and on Disney+, which is not exactly the home of radical politics. But instead it was Leftist Infighting Simulator: The TV Show, and actually amazing??? to the point where I kept asking if anyone at Disney was checking, because I don't think they were. I think someone who had read a lot of Marxist and anarchist theory (and has possibly spent time in radical organizations) somehow ended up in the writing room and just got away with putting all of that in the scripts. Even if you don't like Star Wars this is very much worth your time.

Weirdly it is also the most true to the initial themes of Star Wars, which included a Viet Cong-inspired anti-imperialist teddy bear uprising, but the franchise has kind of lost the plot since then.

Succession
My other favourite thing are shows where absolutely no one is a good person and they all do terrible things that you don't want them to do, and yet you still end up feeling sympathy and attachment to the characters. American shows tend not to do this, whereas British shows do it splendidly, so I was not surprised when the showrunner turned out to be the guy from The Thick Of It who wasn't Armando Iannucci. This is just one of the most well-written character dramas I've ever seen and takes a sharp scalpel to the bloated corpse of the American ruling class. Everyone is hateful and compelling, and I couldn't look away. The way the show plays with your sympathies, focusing on one sibling as the Least Bad Person Who You're Kind of Liking only to turn it around on you and reminding you what little billionaires are made of is just masterful. The election episode was probably in my top five episodes of TV ever, where every character has a chance to do the right thing and fails to do so in exactly the way you'd expect, while paying off every bit of characterization established in the rest of the series. Capitalism is bad, actually, and inevitably leads to fascism. God this is good, and would have ranked as my favourite TV show of 2023 were it not for...

Reservation Dogs
Obviously this takes the #1 spot for a third year in a row as it's one of the best things on TV ever. It came to a close this year, which I think everyone was a little sad about, but look. You can have three perfect seasons or you can drag it on forever until it sucks, and they made the right choice here. And it really was perfect—a story that in the end is about the bonds and responsibilities of community, and what we owe to generations to come. I was sobbing through multiple episodes but in a good way. It does the thing that great literature does where the themes are universal but the characters and setting are so highly specific that their world and inner lives are immersive. I'm glad it ended where it did because I don't think they could top the final arc. I do hope that everyone involved goes on to be in a million other things that I can watch, as the level of talent involved at every level, from writing to cinematography to music to of course acting, is just off the charts.

How about you? What are your telly thoughts?

Warning! This is a very half-assed theory post about some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head lately and should not be taken as any more than that. It's punching up but since it has to do with public shaming, humiliation, and embarrassment, as well as discussions of transphobia and racism, I am putting it all under a cut in case that's a trigger for folks.

If you want to read about how I'm a good person, this isn't a post about that. And if you want a more deeply considered opinion from a smart person, check out ContraPoints' video about cringe, which a better blogger would have rewatched before wading back into this Discourse.

( brace yourself, discourse is coming )

 This being Wednesday, my dudes, let's talk about some books I read!

I read a lot this year, exceeding my goal of 50 by quite a margin, and not including (for the most part) betaing works that were not quite in their final form (I did include two in the list that were basically ready fo publication). So it's hard to pick favourites! I'm at a place in my life where the vast number of books I read are quite good, actually, because my reading list comes from friends who know my taste. If you want to read more extended raves, you can search my "books" tag to get more details about what I thought.

Otherwise, I'll briefly talk about eight books that made enough of an impact that I can't not talk about them. I'm focusing on newer books, but not exclusively—my favourite read of the year was published in 2016 but I'd never heard of it before a co-worker dropped it on my desk.

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa. This is a dark, meditative fairy tale on the nature of memory, grief, and loss. On an island, citizens are regularly ordered to forget certain concepts—birds, perfume, flowers—and dispose of any in their possession. Only a tiny minority of people retain the ability to remember the concepts. The narrator is not among them, but her mother was, and was disappeared by the Memory Police, who enforce the collective amnesia. And so is her editor, who she hides in her basement as she struggles to finish a story while words still exist. It's surreal and haunting and very much captures the 2022 mood of being perpetually gaslit.

Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin. Sometimes you can judge the value of a book based on who it pisses off. If you mention Manhunt, TERFs and conservatives will get angry because in a throwaway sentence, it offs JK Rowling in an extremely entertaining way. Tenderqueers will get angry because Felker-Martin is a brutal writer who does not write her characters as Queer Role Models and Good Representation and this is a violent, angry howl of rage with zero punches pulled. And also, it is really good. Manhunt is about a gendercide apocalypse that kills off anyone with a certain amount of testosterone, sparing most (but not all) cis women, trans women on hormones, trans men not on hormones, prepubescent children, and nonbinary folks depending on hormone levels. The remaining men are transformed into hideous cannibalistic monsters. But they're not nearly so scary as the culty TERFs who have made it their priority to purge the world of trans people. It is dark and gory and relentless and I couldn't put it down.

When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill. Two little girls in 1870s Montreal, who happen to be the reincarnations of Marie Antoinette and the Marquis de Sade, fall in love, fall apart, feud, and reenact the French Revolution. It's relentless and scathingly funny from a master of blackly satirical writing.

Assassin of Reality by Marina and Serhiy Dyachenko. The latest mindfuck from two brilliant authors, Assassin of Reality is the sequel to my favourite fantasy novel, Vita Nostra. It continues Sasha's story as she wrestles with the nature of what she's become, adulthood, love, and magic. All of it is grounded in a gritty post-Soviet small town. No one, for my money, captures the uncanny and unsettling the way the Dyachenkos do, or injects strangeness into the everyday with such skill.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is one of those thiccboi books that is meant to readjust your thinking. Some of the research is apparently sloppy. But the fundamental thesis—that there is no linear evolution from hunter-gather bands to globalized capitalism and nation-states—is solid and important. Early human history is stranger, more diverse, and more interesting than I thought possible. As I read about it, I thought about the high school teacher who really ignited my interest in ancient civilizations and felt the temptation to look him up to see if he'd read it and what he thought about it. It's one of those books that makes you think about human ingenuity and potential and what the shape of future civilizations could look like if we got our shit together. 

A Short History of the Blockade: Giant Beavers, Diplomacy and Regeneration in Nishnaabewin by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. This is so short, you can read it in an hour and you definitely should. It's about Indigenous land stewardship and defence, and ecosystems, and kinship, and beavers. It's non-fiction but it's also poetry. It's a provocation. It's inspiration.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide by Steven W. Thrasher. This is a non-fiction book both gentle and scathing, exploring the role that race, class, and sexual orientation play in pandemics—particularly HIV and covid. It's full of profound insights and simmering rage at how populations and individuals are abandoned to die. I would pay money to put a copy in the hands of every public health official if I thought there was any chance of them reading it. You owe it to your own survival to check it out.

Finally, my favourite book of the year:

LaRose by Louise Erdrich. I've been thinking a lot about Great Literature and what it means for a novel to hold the kind of meaning that makes it timeless and important. And obviously that's a very fraught discussion that lends itself to disingenuous arguments. But. This book.

It's about two families, one Ojibwe, one white, whose fates become intertwined after one man accidentally shoots the son of the other, and offers his own son in exchange. It's about generational trauma and intergenerational healing, our duty to end cycles of violence, and how reconciliation is an action, not a state of being. It's about choosing a nonviolence that is anything but passive. It's about justice and what that looks like—not in the abstract, but grounded in the specific reality of fully-realized human characters.

This is a special kind of book. This is a book that contains layers of meaning and unfolds like a delicate flower to reveal itself. This is a book that makes you better for having read it. I could probably read it a thousand times and find something new it it to talk about, and I just might.

 As in previous years, I didn't watch a ton of movies, but there were a few notable films, including one standout last-minute entry.

Everything Everywhere All At Once: I don't have a lot to say about this one. If you like that kind of thing, you've probably seen it a million times. Personally I found it bloated and overlong, with a troublingly uneven tone that held some nasty implications about fatphobia and mental illness. But on the plus side it had a lot of Michelle Yeoh, and I will take an ambitious hot mess over the vastly inferior Marvel equivalent, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, which was shit other than every moment that Wong was on screen.

Day Shift: This was a movie I did not actually expect to be any good at all, and that I forced my friends to watch after we watched The Invitation (which was also a 2022 movie about vampires and race and class, and also highly enjoyable) for two reasons, and two reasons only. There is a third, and a fourth, unconfirmed reason to watch it, but let's talk about the movie first. It stars Jamie Foxx as a down-on-his luck vampire hunter who must re-ingratiate himself with the vampire hunting union so that he can get enough money to pay for his daughter's braces before his wife leaves him. The first reason to see it is that the union that organizes the vampire hunters is the IWW. It's really a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo but if you think the online left cares that it's only there for a split second, you haven't met the online left. The second reason is that one of the other vampire hunters is played by Snoop Dogg, who is absolutely hilarious in it. Anyway turns out it's good, actually? The vampires' evil plan is gentrification and it's part of a growing number of horror movies, and vampire movies in particular, that have working class Black leads and monsters that are metaphors for white supremacy and capitalism. The third reason to see it is that the soundtrack slaps. The fourth, unconfirmed reason is that apparently it's an adaptation of Night Watch and Day Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko, which I enjoyed in their translated and subtitled versions respectively. At the very least, it shares the bonkers sensibility of "let's play urban fantasy tropes completely straight."

RRR: This was, up until last night, going to be my movie of the year. It's a Tollywood (Telegu language) movie that's an absolute fucking masterpiece. Before I get too far in, there are some problematic politics about it that would probably be better analyzed by someone who is actually from India. I'm coming at this with as a white Westerner who knows slightly more about the early Indian Independence movement than the average white Westerner because I read some really horribly translated Marxist books about it.

Anyway, RRR is about two revolutionaries, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, who never met in real life and did not actually have superpowers and also never demolished the British in a dance-off in the 1920s. But look. It would have been better if they had. You know it would have been. There are musical numbers and CGI animals and imperialists get absolutely pwned and it's a delight that's manages to get some solid politics and heartfelt drama into a spectacle of a movie that is relentlessly entertaining for its entire 182-minute run time. Both of the leads are charming as all fuck. There's even a shout-out to my favourite Indian revolutionary, Bhagat Singh, at the very end.*

So that was going to be my pick as best movie of the year but yesterday I saw Women Talking, which is going to live rent-free in my head for the rest of my life.

I haven't read the Miriam Toews book that it's based on but I've read some other work by her, and Sarah Polley is a hell of a director so I went into it with no idea what it was about but figuring it would be great just based on who was attached to the project. Given the bleakness of the subject matter, the title almost feels like a bit of a joke or at least a play on the Bechdel-Wallace Test. Which, obviously, it passes with flying colours; there are two men with speaking roles in the film and they're both confined to the margins of the narrative for different reasons.

The film takes place on an isolated Mennonite colony in 2010. The women of the colony learn that for years, their husbands, brothers, and sons have been drugging them and violently sexually assaulting them in the middle of the night. The elders of the community not only participate in the coverup, but eventually take almost all of the men to town to post bail for the attackers and insist that the women forgive them. The only men left behind are the schoolteacher, who has only recently returned to the colony after his family was exiled, and a trans man who is in charge of supervising the children.

In the absence of the men, the women vote on a course of action with three options: do nothing, stay and fight, and leave. Doing nothing is ruled out by almost all of the women, but staying and fighting and leaving are tied. Two extended families are appointed to debate between the remaining options, while the schoolteacher takes minutes because none of the women can read or write.

What follows is nearly all dialogue and silences, which nonetheless manages to be visually captivating as well thanks to Polley's direction, the incredible acting, and an understated, heartwrenching soundtrack. The debate encompasses faith and theology, pacifism and nonviolent resistance, family, and female solidarity. The subtle use of light creates a gripping tension and urgency—the autumn day never feels long enough to grapple with the enormities facing these women. Every character is beautifully brought to life with a compelling viewpoint and poetic dialogue. And if you thought "Daydream Believer" was not a song that could ever bring you to tears, well.

This is one that was worth seeing in theatres because the cinematography is jaw-dropping, and worth watching multiple times because there are layers upon layers in a film that's 95% a group of women having a debate in a hay loft. Utterly brilliant.

* What's that you say? Not everyone has a favourite Indian revolutionary? What's wrong with you people?

 If you want to understand why this country is so fucked up, just look at the news and compare the following stories.

1. The FluTruxKlan, a convoy of extremist truckers representing under 10% of the industry and endorsed by high-profile sociopaths like Elon Musk, are taking their plague trucks to Ottawa.

2. The Williams Lake First Nation has discovered at least 93 unmarked graves of children, murdered by the Canadian state and their church allies.

Guess which one has been the top story all week?

 Late addendum to my film roundup post. 

Don't Look Up was absolutely my favourite film of 2021 and one of the best films I've seen in ages. I will be happy to take questions at the appropriate time.

I'm at 57 books (not including poetry and comics) and will definitely have one, maybe two or three more before the year is up, but it is Wednesday my dudes, so we shall talk about books. What I'm reading and what I thought were the best things I've read this year. I do try to keep it recent-focused but I don't buy a lot of books so I'm dependent on the public library system and am thus frequently several years behind on my reading.

Just finished: Britain, a Prophecy #1: Traditional Moral Values, Elizabeth Sandifer and J. Penn Wiggins. This is the first issue of a very promising new comic written by Elizabeth Sandifer (the TARDIS Eruditorum blogger and author of the stunning Neoreaction A Basilisk). Either the concept or the author alone would be enough to make me want to buy the thing. On the eve of the election where Margaret Thatcher will win a third term and in the midst of the AIDS crisis, a gay social worker has to track down a teenage runaway who happens to be a fairy princess. The social worker is also a fairy, and the brother of the Ancient of Days, who has his own plans for Britain.

This is very much the type of comic that made me get into comics in the first place, channelling Moore and Gaiman and Morrison and all the good stuff. It's queer dark 80s goth-punk. I alas do not care for the art style at all, but it's such a good story that I want to read more of it.

Currently reading: Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey. I am almost done this one and then there will be no more Expanse novels. SOB! But it's really good. As the war between the Laconian Empire and the remnants of the Transport Union rages on, the missing Laconian dictator, Duarte, reemerges with shiny new protomolecule powers. Meanwhile, the civilization that wiped out the gate builders is killing vast swathes of people and causing all kinds of weirdness. And a new existential threat emerges—a merging of consciousnesses that spreads like a certain virus, threatening to change humanity beyond recognition. I realize that this summary makes zero sense if you haven't read the books or seen the show at all but it's appropriately epic.

And now for the best books I've read this year.

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. This is an absolutely brutal book about those who survived residential schools and those who didn't. It's a narrative of trauma, resistance, and survival with compelling, memorable characters and gorgeous prose. It won the Governor General's Award and absolutely deserved to.

The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker. A wonderfully inventive fantasy about immigrant communities in New York and the mythologies they bring with them. A weird, sprawling novel that breaks all the rules of genre fiction and thus endeared itself to me. I also liked the sequel, The Hidden Palace, though I felt the ending of that one was weak.

The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. A Regency romance with magic by one of my favourite authors. How was I not going to absolutely love it?

When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo. An adorable novella about a weretiger and the scholar who falls in love with her. It's not only a hilarious and romantic story in and of itself, but a very clever take on the idea of whose stories get to be told, and by whom. Every word and every character are a delight to read.

Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin. This is high-quality investigative journalism, with a Jewish writer going undercover in online fash groups to discover how they work and how the chuds in them think. It's riveting reading and despite the grim subject matter, quite a fun read owing to Lavin's skillful and funny writing.

My absolute favourite books of the year:

Fiction: Generation Loss/Available Dark by Elizabeth Hand. I'm grouping these together because I can. Aging disaster bisexual punk photographer meets cosmic horror. If you made a laundry list of things I want in a book, these two would tick pretty much everything. Cass Neary is the kind of fucked up, engrossing protagonist that genre fiction tends to be afraid of showing us, and the prose is so fantastic that it almost made me give up writing. I still haven't read the third one but if it's anything like these two, I will love it.

Non-fiction: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I can't think of any other non-fiction book that has made me cry not because the subject matter was sad but because of how jawdroppingly beautiful the writing was. Kimmerer's love and respect for the plants she writes about bleed through the page. This book absolutely changed my life.