Teresa's Bookshelf: January 2021

Today I awoke from a most beautiful dream. I was surrounded by such a sense of love and well-being. It was incredible and it carried me through the day. Until the news kicked me in the teeth.

Today, a day that started to auspiciously is in fact a day of sedition. Sedition incited by the president of the United States of America. Fucking incited by the fucking president!!

I've lived half a century now. I've seen terrible things in my life. I was born shortly after my father returned from fighting in the Vietnam War. We moved to Okinawa right after we returned control of it to Japan after having had control of it since WWII. An SR-71 crashed close to my home when I was 3 or 4.

I watched the Soviet Union invade Afghanistan and then I watched the Iran hostage situation play out for a year or so on the TV, all while my dad was sent to Saudi Arabia when I was in 5th grade. Argentinian mothers protested the disappearing of their sons by the military. Starving children in Ethiopia after a massive drought. The massive earthquake in Mexico. The nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. Chernobyl in 1986.

Aerosol cans were destroying the ozone layer and human rights violations flooded the news when I was in high school. Everybody quoted Wall Street- Greed is good! The evils of apartheid were on the news. Flashes of American history mix in with those images. Segregated everything, whispers of race riots, fire hoses, and assignations- Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy.

Exxon Mobile's Valdez caused a massive oil spill when I was in college. I had just finished my freshman year when the tanks rolled on Tiananmen Square. Trying to save the spotted owl in Oregon leads to violent encounters. A Black man was tied to the back of pickup and drug around behind it until he died in Texas when I was in college. We bombed Iraqis as part of Desert Storm while I was in college. Rodney King was severely beaten by the LA Police while I was in college.

The endless and senseless war on drugs. Three strikes laws guaranteeing people life in prisons for what? Just say no. Republicans dismantling public education in the US.

Sarin gas attack in Tokyo. The Kobe earthquake that killed thousands- the fires that burned for weeks afterward.

Planes were flown into the Twin Towers of New York and the Pentagon and people stopped them by crashing their plane in Pennsylvania. Dick Cheney brought torture to our shores in a way that I never could imagine. Endless war in the Middle East... The glorification of the military. Endless glorification of the military. Firefighters and police dying from the debris they breathed in trying to save people on September 11, 2001.

The tsunami that hit Thailand. The devastation of the flood that was hurricane Katrina. People living in squalor because FEMA's response wasn't good enough. People dying because they weren't saved.

Trayvon Martin murdered because... because.... he had skittles? A hoodie? Michael Brown murdered because... because... Eric Garner killed because he was selling cigarettes? Killed because he was selling cigarettes? Tamir Rice killed because he as a child with a toy gun? Sandra Bland died because... because? Stephon Clark killed in his grandmother's backyard because he had a cellphone?

I've seen a lot of horrible things in my life. The Chilean miners trapped. The Fukushima Tsunami and the nuclear disaster afterwards. The earthquake in Nepal that killed 9,000 people. The Korean ferry that sank and killed so many. Ebola in Africa. Sars and Avian flu in Asia. Then we got to 2020 and the worldwide pandemic. AND STILL we had George Floyd murdered because he was Black. Breonna Taylor killed in what I cannot call anything other than state-sanctioned murder because what the hell is a knockless warrant but an excuse to kills someone? And Ahmaud Arbery's murder brought back that Black man drug behind a pickup truck in Texas every damn time I think about it. And I regret I don't remember that man's name. But that day in college was the day that I learned lynchings are American as apple pie. And I didn't need more reminders. I didn't but since my list of all the Black people killed because they dared to exist is woefully tiny and woefully incomplete. And I just can't. I just can't cope. And it's not even the only reason I say I've seen a lot of terrible things in my life. It's not even the reason I'm saying it today.

Taiwan has only had 7 people die from the coronavirus. We've had 357,000. Donald Trump is responsible for that. But worse than that, he is actively and vigorously inciting a coup. And every fucking Republican that supports him is a fascist. And as repulsive as this is, I have family that support him. And I never thought I would live to see the day the president of the United States incited his supporters to storm the capitol of the United States and they killed someone. They killed someone. And the president is inciting this and the Republicans who stood by him and did his bidding because it meant they could stack the Supreme Court they way they wanted and they could grab power are fascists. FASCISTS!

I want to recognize the amazing books and authors that I read every year, so in 2016 I started a tradition of giving an award to the 5 best books I read that year. This is a completely arbitrary award with no meaning to anyone but me. But it's a tradition I quite like and look forward to it each year!!

2020- the year of our plague- has been such a strange reading year for me. I read 8 books in January and 7 in both February and March, so you can see that is a normal-ish amount for me to read in a year. I started doing audiobooks because I couldn't take a lot of media and my normal podcast consumption got subsumed by audiobooks this year and I read 22 books in October in great part because of my audiobook habit!! But I also wasn't good about keeping up with my blog. Normally I'm happily updating it every 5 books. Boy that didn't happen this year at all!! And normally are start thinking about the Trixie and Moai award in December but here it is January 1st and I'm only now doing this!! Yikes!! What a year 2020 was!! (Understatement!!)

Moving on!! I read 129 books this year so there are a lot of finalists for the fifth annual Trixie and the Moai Book Award! A lot!! Here you go- my favorites of the year!