Death by Owls: 2021
“Reading this at the age of 13, I understood that fantasy, the place I was looking for, is not to be found in dragons, ghosts, or magic wands. It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart.”
— An excerpt from one of my favourite things: this utterly timeless article by Sofia Samatar on the rich language of fantasy and how it crafted her into a writer (with reference to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast)
Happy Hogmanay 🎆🥂
A digital raindrop-in-the-ocean love letter to my favourites of 2021…
Time War will forever be scribbled all over my psyche, as will many of the short stories in Ken Liu’s peerless collection The Paper Menagerie, from souls disembodied as cigarette boxes and ice cubes to metallic centaurs and vast solar sail arks soaring through interstellar space…
The Vanishing Half also caught me totally by surprise, one of the most universally lauded books of the past two years that somehow still concealed scintillating unseen depths.
No surprises however from evergreen auto-buys Angie Thomas and Casey McQuiston, who were both as viscerally and spiritually healing as expected 🖤
Honourable mentions again to those corkers consumed via ebook and audiobook and thus not represented in the photo above: A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi, The Gender Games by Juno Dawson, Black and British by David Olusoga, and A Life On Our Planet by David Attenborough.
🎶 Song of the year: Bad Love, KEY (almost overtaken twice in the *eleventh* hour by Sting’s What Could Have Been feat. Ray Chen then LAY’s Flying Apsaras)
🎬 TV show of the year: Dickinson (podium positions also to Arcane, We Are Lady Parts, My Name, and It’s A Sin)
Respect and salutations too to the sister’s favourite reads of the last twelve moons:
RIP 2021 ✨
This has been a punishingly difficult year. But in the words of Tony Kushner: “hope isn’t a choice, it’s a moral obligation, a human obligation, an obligation to the cells in your body”.
For me it’s foraged from books like Time War, because you have this vast incomprehensible conflict spanning millennia, worlds, dimensions through its time editor combatants, constantly editing and rewriting and erasing whole swathes of history as they travel up and down these threads of reality waging this unwinnable war… one that is totally unending and totally without hope… but then it reveals itself to be all a masquerade… this elaborate disguise, a space opera trojan horse for the epistolary love story concealed within… so despite the fact you have this longest most brutal of wars… look at what one person’s love for another can do.
And then there’s something that happened here in Glasgow just last May, a made-for-Hollywood stand-off between the community of the Southside and the Home Office that the Jacobin magazine dubbed the Battle of Kenmure Street and that now has its own Wikipedia page…
It started at 9:30am when a van marked “Immigration Enforcement” pulled into a street of flats in Pollokshields, one of Glasgow’s most diverse neighbourhoods… Minutes later the officers had dragged two men – Sumit Sehdev and Lakhvir Singh – from their homes and thrown them into the back. Luckily, however, due to years of grassroots organising and community solidarity a group of activists from The Unity Centre had been tailing the van since the early hours of the morning and had already mobilised the network and lit the torches, so moments after the assault another activist who’d made it to the scene from the No Evictions Network jammed himself under the van… with neighbours and other locals immediately pouring out to help… The police still outnumbered the protestors at this point but they physically couldn’t move the van without literally running over a human. An hour later there were over a hundred people there; by lunchtime there were five hundred, and it was trending nationally, with chants and megaphones and food carts and impromptu tuck shops and hot drinks and snacks and a huge Palestine flag going up over the van… By 4pm, the crowd completely overwhelmed the street and the police had brought in 30 riot vans as well as a team of police on horses… But every single action they took to try and clear the van’s path or manoeuvre it out of there or coerce or force was foiled by the activists who were prepared and trained for all of it. By 5pm human rights lawyer Aamer Anwar had successfully negotiated the release of the two men… The police were then forced to give them an escort for their 200 metre walk to the local Gurdwara.
So something like this, especially now, when the Home Office has just pushed through another fascistic amendment to UK immigration law with Clause 9 of the Nationality and Borders Bill, which essentially gives them the power to strip people of their citizenship without warning, notification, or any kind of rigorous legal recourse or consultation…
Especially now, this gives me hope.
Because a bunch of people on Glasgow’s Southside stood up and said these men are our neighbours, and if you want to take them you’ll have to shed our blood to do it.
I strive every second of every day to be like those people, and to be worthy of the label: Glaswegian.
“Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep fighting. We’re all still here.”
— This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
