I read 109 books this year only if you count the four series I read (George Smiley, A Dance to the Music of Time, Jinny at Finmory and the Vorkosigan saga) as one each, so there’s probably another 20 or so in there. Looking back, the books that have made the biggest impression were Dan Ozzi’s Sellout, a venture capital story and the perfect accompaniment to My Chem’s Long Live the Black Parade tour; Elaine Pagel’s Miracles and Wonder, which I like so much I’ve started a podcast about it, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

I’ve been annoying my loved ones by thinking aloud that Origin may be the most profound book ever written in English. I first tried to read it when I was fifteen (my older kid: “Why did you try to read it when you were fifteen?” Jeremy: “You know what she’s like.”) Coming back to it forty years later is like returning to La Sagrada Familia with the stained glass windows in; it took my breath away. You may know that of all fictional characters my most ardent affection is reserved for Stephen Maturin. Brilliant, fussy, fretful Darwin is his original.

Origin of Species sees Darwin assembling forty years of patient, painstaking, insightful work in natural history, corresponding with a vast web of respected peers, and synthesizing a staggering amount of data into a careful, considered and powerfully supported argument. At the same time, he understands what the evidence points towards, and what its implications are. Christianity will never be the same again.

Darwin and his wife Emma buried their favorite child Annie when she was ten years old. There’s a glib way to read this – that the loss caused Darwin to turn against God. My impression is quite the opposite. Despite what the promise of resurrection held out to him, and to his beloved wife, Darwin perceives the world with tremendous integrity. One cannot reconcile the account of the creation as written with our current understanding of geologic time. His clarity on this point, and what it cost him, breaks my heart. He stands at the end of a Church of England ontology and with great courage, faces a new and chaotic modernity –

My older kid: “So what you’re saying is, he reminds you of your Dad.” Me: “HEY now. That is UNcalled-for.” Jeremy, sympathetically: “Oh no, have you been perceived?”

English, which had started out as a language of the oppressed, had become an oppressor.

Were there schools? A few, to train servants of the empire.

It was pleasantly cool in the room. The old gentleman took the lid off the iron kettle, which had begun to boil, and as he did so there was a terrible flash of bluish-white light outside. It seemed to rush past from east to west—from the built-up part of Hiroshima, that is, toward the hills beyond Furue. It was like a shooting star the size of hundreds of suns. 

Bring me the bones of Australian babies, the more the better.

I sometimes wonder if all those English country gentlemen who built themselves big houses with long sightlines and high walls did it because they were afraid of people coming across the seas for vengeance. I hope they were terrified.

…just as people in colonized India and Africa often created ways of communicating that remained unintelligible to their European occupiers, so Jesus often hid from outsiders, especially from the Roman occupiers, what he wanted to reveal only to those who, he said, “had eyes to see, and ears to hear.”

I had one trajectory and that was to get out.

You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.

Sold the Prius to a friend and got an all-electric car, which I may be enjoying a little too much. I have already driven it to Los Angeles and Portland, and am heading up to Seattle next week. In between there was a quick trip to Detroit and Toronto. Charlie and I spent a good part of the summer following American rock band My Chemical Romance around for a while, just to see what they would do. Interesting things, it turned out, at least to me and Charlie and a few hundred thousand like-minded souls.

My dear friend Yarnivore asked me to tell her a little bit about My Chem and why it matters to me, which prompted a lengthy monologue, and I’ve been fretting ever since that I failed by saying both too much and not enough. For example, I forgot to say that you can get a fair sense of what the band is like by watching six of their music videos. There’s the one that’s like all of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore condensed into three shouty minutes that end with a kiss; the one where they bury their beloved grandmother, who raised them to be artists; the one where the bassist is killed on the beach during the invasion of Normandy; the one where the band itself is become death, destroyer of worlds (of all their songs, this is the one you probably already know); the one where they burn it all down; and a personal favorite, the post-apocalyptic one shot in the desert, drenched in color like a Saturday morning cartoon, with a cameo from my beloved comic book writer Grant Morrison.

Each video is a perfect little jewel of a story about beauty and love and fear and grief and hope, not necessarily in that order. They riff on gender and queerness and mental illness and loss and guilt and complicity and rayguns, all things that I spend a lot of time thinking about, you may not be surprised to hear. These narratives are embedded in the larger narratives of three truly excellent albums, themselves embedded in the fucked-up and transcendent narrative of the band itself, or at least what we know of it, which is a great deal and also almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. My Chem is the kind of phenomenon Anne Helen Petersen calls a rich text. Pull on any thread and you’ll find yourself talking about socioeconomic class or ghosts or Joan of Arc. There’s so much to say about it that Charlie and I have listened to fourteen hours of an excellent podcast exploring the discography through a critical theory lens, and we’re only sorry it isn’t longer.

I’ve talked before about My Chem as a map out of hell, but that’s only half of it. I’m drawn to the band when I’m in terrible pain, suffering loss or rejection or the banal horror of another fascist presidency, but their music also spurs me into trying to make sense of things, trying to make stuff of my own, silly little stories about love and grief and rayguns. I’m an agoraphobic misanthrope but this band can get me out on the road and onto a dancefloor. Thanks to them I’ve seen the Getty Villa and the Detroit Industry Murals and been reminded that art matters to me so, so much.

On this current tour My Chem are wrapping their existing narratives into another grand and mysterious and operatic story that is being revealed a little at a time, in teasing and affectionate interactions with an audience they trust to figure things out. What a gift to see them live at all (this band broke up, not very amicably, in 2013, and it turns out has only reformed because the rhythm guitarist had a particularly vivid dream). What a gift to be in this relationship with them and the other fans. What a gift to be weird and queer and arty and to hear the voices of the dead as they travel through time. It’s not just a map out of hell. It’s a reason to live.

…all was well. Well enough. The world still ached with beauty. The birds kept chirping, leaves clattered in a breeze, the late-afternoon sunlight, thick and pale, slanted in from the south.

…she was struck by how private American forces of mercy were straining to offset America’s public agents of cruelty.

Looking at the bright light on the horizon, your first thought was: well, that’s it then. Nuclear war. Sydney’s gone.

…the ‘ancestors’ and the ‘communities’ we believe we have shucked off (where I come from, at least) are still present. They haunt us, not least because they make it possible for us to be alive.

British colonisation was the beginning of the end for natural Australia.

The plunders and even the occupation of earth by the Europeans violated the land. Bennelong hoped they could be taught that fact. It might have been one of the reasons he stayed so long in Sydney Cove, and risked his soul.

The enduring lesson of the Rum Rebellion was the power of the big men of New South Wales.

Like many others who went through that time, he was gripped by what he could think of only as a numbness, though he knew it was a feeling compounded of emotions so deep and intense that they could not be acknowledged because they could not be lived with. It was the force of a public tragedy he felt, a horror and a woe so all-pervasive that private tragedies and personal misfortunes were removed to another state of being

This was Katherine May’s pandemic book, a book haunted by lockdowns and mass death. Needing to feel grounded, May dug into the earth beneath her feet. Not in an ickily sentimental way – she makes it clear that Whitstable’s stone circle is modern, and that the sacred spaces of Dungeness are its WW2-era sound mirrors and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. She admits that her garden is a mass of weeds and that staying up late to watch meteor showers is tiring and chilly.

May’s pragmatism makes awe accessible. She learns the names of wildflowers (viper’s bugloss! Known to Australians as Salvation Jane or Paterson’s curse) and attends a class on bees. I listened to this book between drives to Rancho Viejo and bike rides to Heron’s Head, my own sacred landscapes. Big storms are coming. There’s no way out but through, and enchantment is one of the ways through.

Few and far between are the writers that can kick off an authentic hyperfixation, alas, but Adam Higginbotham has done it to me twice now. His Midnight in Chernobyl is up there with Svetlana Alexeivich in the definitive bibliography of that clusterfuck. Now he takes on the other great engineering catastrophe of the first half of 1986. His is an oddly specific niche.

I am so profoundly torn about the shuttle program. It represented the democratization of space. Its astronaut class, the thirty-five new guys, was the first to include women and people of color. Dad and my brothers and I got up before dawn to watch Columbia’s first launch. When I took the kids to see Endeavour in Los Angeles, I cried. This awkward camel of a spacecraft made the universe bigger: no shuttle, no Hubble Ultra Deep Field. I’m such a fucking fangirl, I have NASA plates on my car.

But NASA straight up murdered the Challenger 7. The agency’s budget peaked during the Apollo program, and the diversity of astronaut class eight was an attempt to build public support for space exploration. It kind of worked! Everybody loved Sally Ride, the hot bi butch with the name right out of Mustang Sally! That line of reasoning led to putting a social studies teacher on top of a missile and, in the presence of her parents who were on camera as these events took place, blowing her up.

NASA’s position was: look at all we can do, with how little money! Everyone can play, even the girls and the brown people! Just keep letting us fly rockets. Politicians were all, I wish to associate myself with these impressive feats! But no, you can’t have any more money. Meanwhile engineers at Morton-Thiokol knew the O-rings would fail at low temperatures. There was an impassioned conference call about it the night before the launch. NASA had so many chances not to kill these seven incredible and accomplished people, and it missed them all.

And then seventeen years later, it did it again.

I think this particular book hit so hard in this election year because we are all of us helpless passengers on a spaceship out of control. Anyway, my hyperfixation – after this book I borrowed everything the SFPL had on the space programs. My standouts: Michael Collins is the best writer of the Apollo astronauts – as somebody somewhere said, his Carrying the Fire reads like EB White got a trip to the moon. First Man is an extraordinary, very literary biography of Armstrong, adapted into maybe my favorite space movie since The Martian. (Armstrong was a near-contemporary of the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, whose An Angel at my Table made a striking compare-and-contrast to First Man. Tl; dr much better to be a weird clever man in the 20th century than a weird clever woman.)

Bringing Columbia Home is the kind of awkwardly written but almost unbearably moving account of the recovery of those astronauts. Leaving Orbit, about the last flights of the shuttle, has a similarly elegiac mood. Finally, the podcast The Space Above Us, which deals with crewed space missions one at a time, kept me and Jeremy enthralled on an entire 12-hour road trip home from Portland. A gem of the genre.