These are the books I read in October 2021 with a rating reflecting my opinion on them. I am leaving books not available in English out for your convenience. At the bottom, I will be sharing some recommendations that fall under the category fiction, non-fiction, or non-fiction political. These recommendations are books I have not read myself, so proceed with caution as I cannot speak to their actual quality.
Read
And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
I started reading this book for a term paper but embarked on a far bigger journey. Only the first 150 or so pages were relevant for the work, but the rest was as quickly devoured as a 650+ page book allows. This is an extremely detailed and narratively well-executed insight into the first few years of the AIDS epidemic. A particular focus on 1980-1985 and its late 1980s publication as well as the political and medical insight make this book an absolute standout. While long and certainly filled with statistics and numbers, what most affected me was the personalities within the pages. ‘A monumental history’ indeed.
Minecraft: Construction Handbook by Mojang
This was definitely more of a lookbook and unlike the newer Minecraft Guide series not quite as aesthetically pleasing. I enjoyed learning more about stone builds as well as a few other bits (mainly the ships) but the book overall was a bit messy and overwhelming to look at.
Recommendations
Fiction
Daughter of the Deep by Rick Riordan
“Ana Dakkar is a freshman at Harding-Pencroft Academy, a five-year high school that graduates the best marine scientists, naval warriors, navigators, and underwater explorers in the world. Ana’s parents died while on a scientific expedition two years ago, and the only family’s she’s got left is her older brother, Dev, also a student at HP. Ana’s freshman year culminates with the class’s weekend trial at sea, the details of which have been kept secret. She only hopes she has what it’ll take to succeed. All her worries are blown out of the water when, on the bus ride to the ship, Ana and her schoolmates witness a terrible tragedy that will change the trajectory of their lives.”
Time and Again by Jack Finney
“Science fiction, mystery, a passionate love story, and a detailed history of Old New York blend together in Jack Finney’s spellbinding story of a young man enlisted in a secret government experiment.
Transported from the mid-twentieth century to New York City in the year 1882, Si Morley walks the fashionable “Ladies’ Mile” of Broadway, is enchanted by the jingling sleigh bells in Central Park, and solves a 20th-century mystery by discovering its 19th-century roots. Falling in love with a beautiful young woman, he ultimately finds himself forced to choose between his lives in the present and the past.”
Political
Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell
“For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police. From community policing initiatives to increasing diversity, none of it has stopped the police from killing about three people a day. Millions of people continue to protest police violence because these “solutions” do not match the problem: the police cannot be reformed.
In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing.”
Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could by Adam Schiff
“In Midnight in Washington, Schiff argues that the Trump presidency has so weakened our institutions and compromised the Republican Party that the peril will last for years, requiring unprecedented vigilance against the growing and dangerous appeal of authoritarianism. The congressman chronicles step by step just how our democracy was put at such risk, and traces his own path to meeting the crisis – from serious prosecutor, to congressman with an expertise in national security and a reputation for bipartisanship, to liberal lightning rod, scourge of the right, and archenemy of a president. Schiff takes us inside his team of impeachment managers and their desperate defense of the constitution amid the rise of a distinctly American brand of autocracy.”
Nonfiction
Never Say You Can’t The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage by Drew Magary
“Drew Magary, fan-favorite Defector and former Deadspin columnist, is known for his acerbic takes and his surprisingly nuanced chronicling of his own life. But in The Night the Lights Went Out, he finds himself far out of his depths. On the night of the 2018 Deadspin Awards, he suffered a mysterious fall that caused him to smash his head so hard on a cement floor that he cracked his skull in three places and suffered a catastrophic brain hemorrhage. For two weeks, he remained in a coma. The world was gone to him, and him to it.
In his long recovery from his injury, including understanding what his family and friends went through as he lay there dying, coming to terms with his now permanent disabilities, and trying to find some lesson in this cosmic accident, he leaned on the one sure thing that he knows and that didn’t leave him–his writing.”
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber & David Wengrow
“It’s hard to give up on the feeling that the life you really want is just out of reach. A beach body by summer. A trip to Disneyland around the corner. A promotion on the horizon. Everyone wants to believe that they are headed toward good, better, best. But what happens when the life you hoped for is put on hold indefinitely?”
The Congressional Report 