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Books I Read in 2021 & Think You Should Read in 2022

Nothing has brought me more comfort in my life as a good book, and almost nothing has brought me more joy than when someone enjoys a book I recommended to them.

In 2021, I read 101 books, and I’ve consistently read around ~22,000 pages for the last several years. Of course, this does not count the many times I read my own book as I went through rewrites and edits or the pleasure of reading my friend Max’s unpublished first novel.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how many books you read in a year, only that you are reading and you are enjoying what you read. Goals help me. My primary goal was to read at least 40 books I’d had on the to-read shelves since 2020.

For my friends who struggle to read books:

Whatever reading assignment made you hate reading in school, don’t do that. You can stop reading a book at any time, say, “Not today, Satan,” and put the book in a free little library because it might be someone else’s cup of tea.

Can’t focus: try audiobooks. That’s reading too!

And perhaps, most importantly, carve out time for reading. I read before I sleep, and it helps me sleep better. But my favorite reading is stolen moments when I cannot put the book down, and I’m supposed to be doing something else (usually working or doing chores).

Now, for my reader readers, maybe we challenge ourselves with “assignment” reading. For me, it’s usually work-related or self-improvement or a worthwhile book, but the text is dense or the prose style different than we’re used to. Sometimes, I might take notes! Other times, it’s one chapter at a time, and then I can go back to reading cotton candy fun.

Especially since we’re still in this terrible pandemic, it’s perfectly acceptable to put a book down. Maybe it goes in the Did Not Finish pile to get rid of — or maybe you march it right out to your little library in front of your house (oh, hi, it’s me) — or maybe it goes on pause as you read something else for a while. A while can be a couple of days or six months.

Okay, let’s get to those books.

My Top 10 Books from 2021

1. Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Detransition, Baby by Torrey PetersGenre: contemporary fiction

In his essay, “Smaller Than Life,” James Baldwin reviews a biography of Fredrick Douglass, and he argues that the book is terrible, not because it’s poorly written, but because it doesn’t show Douglass in all of his humanity with all his flaws. Thus, turning Douglass into a heroic representation of his race instead of a human with whom people can empathize, especially people who are not Black and especially white people. Baldwin argues that this heroification does an incredible disservice to Douglass and the project of racial equity.

I think about this essay a lot in terms of my writing and the types of books I’m drawn to, such as the book in question: Detransition, Baby. Baldwin’s assertion certainly applies to any minority group. The characters and situation in Detransition, Baby are messy. They don’t apologize to cishet people. They are very human, and none of them are or can be a heroification of a trans woman or the model of what it means to a woman. They just are. Continue reading “Books I Read in 2021 & Think You Should Read in 2022”

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Magneto Was Right

Community, Karl Popper’s the Paradox of Tolerance, Mutant’s Rights, and learning to apply history

This week, a friend of mine reached out to me about a community management problem. Last newsletter, I’d linked to an article about how to improve your communities by banning bigots outright, and he’d been curious about how to do this when your community is both online and offline.

His community had a new member, who seemed fine at their in-person gathering, but then proceeded to post ‘COVID-19 is a hoax’ nonsense and became further abusive toward the moderators when they removed the posts. He was worried about a possible confrontation at their next in-person meetup. As we discussed various possibilities, scenarios, and some of my own experiences banning people from in-person events, my friend left our conversation with a good plan for dealing with this person.

Our conversation made me consider all the times I hadn’t outright banned someone when I should’ve because they already told me who they were. When a white cis man sealioned about men’s suicide statistics in a post about equal pay, I didn’t ban him. Then that same man left conference “feedback” around how all the women speakers were of lower quality than the men and how we cheapened the conference with speaker binary gender parity. (Ironically, when his individual speaker scores were tabulated, he didn’t actually rate the women any lower or higher than the men on average.) And then, friends, this same man tried to get hired at this company.

Popper’s Paradox

This summer, my mother hit me with a right-wing talking point about how intolerant I am of bigots and intolerance and isn’t that just so closed-minded of me. In fact, I was possibly the most closed-minded person she knew. I hadn’t had my morning tea, so I wasn’t exactly on my toes to discuss Karl Popper’s the Paradox of Tolerance. I probably yelled something about how I’m not going to tolerate people who want to kill me and others.

Popper wrote in 1945: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” Continue reading “Magneto Was Right”

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Bye, Bye to Heartbreak City

How I turned down a dream job because I’m worth more.

I said no to a dream role last Monday. I was in the candidate process, and a job requirement crossed a hard boundary: it wasn’t remote and required relocation somewhere I don’t want to live.

My 8-year-old self screams at me. Like in the corner throwing a full-on body tantrum with tears streaming down their cheeks and pointing at the posters on their walls as if to explain to me what a fool I am.

My 23-year-old self glares at me from their daily commute up and down I-5 from Tacoma to Renton and back again. Reminding me how our job requires us to photoshop in “sexy” white or Asian women on email marketing and banner ads.

My 30-year-old self loves our job and team, but this would be the one opportunity they think we should snag. A breakthrough into an industry we aren’t part of and something we have loved our entire lives. Passion means you’ll never have to work a day in your life, right? (Wrong.)

But here we are. I wished the recruiter good luck, and she asked if she could pass along my resume to other remote teams hiring for similar roles.

Why did I say no? Continue reading “Bye, Bye to Heartbreak City”

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The Value of a Story

Transgressing the story I’d told myself about my own queer stories.

In between my college courses, student groups, and work in the early 00s, I wrote a lot of fanfiction. Fanfiction is the writing of stories about characters from one’s favorite media, and it can be found across the internet for any and every type of media — movies, TV, books, celebrities culture, etc., — or fandom that you can think of. Fanfiction sculpted me as a writer, perhaps more than a fancy Creative Writing degree.

I wrote about Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, the X-Men, Stargate: Atlantis, Grey’s Anatomy, and a whole host of media properties I loved. Writing is about practice. Fanfiction gave me a lot of practice.

While not every fanfiction author seeks to better their craft, that was part of my desire. I got to play with characters and worlds that were not my own, but as a queer person, I also got to transgress them.

My fanfiction was a lot of queer romance. It had a lot of sex. It reflected my own experiences in dating and romance, and sorry for the TMI, but in my book, getting naked together on the first date has never been ruled out because it was the first date like so much media plays out. Whether Meredith and Cristina had shower sex at Seattle Grace or Angel and Wesley joined the mile-high club (under special necro-tempered glass!), my fandoms were my playgrounds.

Even today, there aren’t a ton of queer characters on TV, my primary fanfiction outlet. But there were fewer in the early 00s, especially on network TV or programs. And even the softest kiss — fit for a Disney Princess between two queer characters — gets labeled “for adults” and put in a bucket marked “for queers only, so there is no market.”

As someone with a 15 years+ marketing career, I could spend many words debunking that notion.

But for me, the damage hit internally. For me, it was being told that the only place I’d ever have an audience would be the secret corners of the internet, writing based on a fandom, under a pen name, and I’d never make a cent off it. Continue reading “The Value of a Story”

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Following the Paths of Grief

(kick me under the table all you want, I won’t shut up)

Grief has kept me away from this space, away from engaging in the writing I love, and away from what seems like the barest minimum of human connections. A grief that shuts down, just as much as it can hone.

I didn’t write here, but I did write a lot about organic electro-optic materials in photonic computing, coming to a website near you. Even in grief, you must pay the bills.

My cat Hermione died. Her cancer came back, and there was nothing we could do. Hermione knew it was time, even if I still don’t want it to ever be time.

Me, Hermione, and Jacob
My precious baby Hermione

Continue reading “Following the Paths of Grief”

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A Gardening To-Do during Quarantine: Simple Tips and Five Foods in Less Than 30 Days

My summer garden 8x8 feet full of green veggies
My small garden with two beds that are 8×8 feet. This is from August 2019.

Every time I open my phone, there’s another confirmed Coronavirus (COVID-19) case, or sadly, a death in the Seattle region I call home. Our governor’s declared a state of emergency, and our shops are selling out of face masks, hand sanitizer, toilet paper, bottled water, and milk. People are asking themselves what they can do.

Besides, wash your hands. Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and water.

Might I suggest starting a garden? Even starting a small garden in your windowsill. Continue reading “A Gardening To-Do during Quarantine: Simple Tips and Five Foods in Less Than 30 Days”

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Bittersweet Goodbyes and New Trails

David Spinks and Erica McGillivray at CMX Summit 2018
David and me on stage and goofing around after CMX Summit 2018.

Every community professional knows: the hardest thing about job changes is leaving your community and team. Leaving the people you’ve met, interact with daily, and hopefully, have been able to help along their paths. Saying goodbye to your community, and to the team(s) you’ve worked with, is bittersweet because, at the end of the day, it’s the people who matter.

After two and a half years, last Friday, July 5th, was my final day with CMX/Bevy. When you work at startups — the incredible ups and downs — can feel even more impactful. In my time with two major programs, CMX Summit and the CMX Pro membership program, the team went from 0 to 100 mph, iterated in different ways, led with our hearts, and joined the Bevy crew.

I’ve been lucky and privileged to work in the most meta of communities: a community of community professionals. Which means putting together programs and working with the best minds in the industry — those tackling huge problems or on the innovated edges — like those at Amazon, the Coral Project, the Alzheimer’s Society, and more. They pushed me to be a better community manager. Continue reading “Bittersweet Goodbyes and New Trails”

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A Community Approach to Leadership and Teamwork

Hope with lights
Hope lights, photo by Ron Smith

If you scroll through Nobel prize winners — particularly those in science — you’ll noticed multiple winners and shared rewards. We’re at a point in civilization were major breakthroughs and innovations are created by teams. They are built on the work of others. They are solved by a group of different minds with different backgrounds and experiences coming together on one problem or project.

We have great looming, global problems to solve. Climate change — ignored by the vast majority of the government in the US — being one that may utterly destroy all life on the planet in my own lifetime. Problems of this scale won’t be solved by one great leader, or one amazing scientist with one answer, but hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of people with good approaches and behavioral changes. It is scientific breakthroughs, as much as it’s policy changes, regulation of large polluters, and community leadership.

Anyone who calls themselves a leader — from world leaders down to small companies — needs to address how they think of teamwork, and have active conversations about what teamwork looks like at their organizations. How do people communicate? How is power and rank distributed through the hierarchy? How are decisions made? How are teams operating? What is most efficient and successful? What is not? How can leaders empower teams and empower others with specialized knowledge to make company and industry-impact? How can an individual members achieve career goals, while the organization achieves their mission, vision, and goals?

If a leader cannot answer these questions with more than a work ethic philosophy, then they will not be able to scale and they will not be conscious of their impact on their teams or the world. Continue reading “A Community Approach to Leadership and Teamwork”

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Consent and The Lovely Bones: a Book Review

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
Rating: 2/5 stars
#52Challenge prompt: a book with a “y” somewhere in the title

Lovely Bones book cover

This freaking book — I waffled on what to rate it and I ended up rating it the lowest of my zillion Goodreads friends who’ve also read it. Because I tend to read comic books that are badly marketed, distributed, and have like no reviews, when I do read a “popular” book, it can be an odd experience. Like will someone call me out for not liking it? Not that Goodreads is call out culture…yet…maybe if they fixed their interface and put it on faster Amazon servers.

The Lovely Bones is set in the late 1970s and about Susie Salmon, a girl who’s murdered by her neighbor and serial killer. Continue reading “Consent and The Lovely Bones: a Book Review”

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A Menagerie of Three Stars: Mini Reviews

Ah, the three star, right in the middle. Some three stars books are there because they’re slightly disappointing. Others get three stars because they’re interesting and decent, but not quite great. They may even be the start of a series I will enjoy greatly, but they’re by first time novelists or finding their footing.

My late 2018 summer reading was full of three out of five stars. And let me be clear, all of these books, I’m very likely to continue reading the series (if applicable) and following the author’s work. Continue reading “A Menagerie of Three Stars: Mini Reviews”