The big change for me in 2021 was, naturally, moving to Lubango, Angola to serve as a missionary. It's an unusual time to be overseas, what with the coronovirus still a major concern. But with all the spare time I've wound up with, it's given me great opportunities to read and watch films. Here's what really stood out in 2021:
I read a few great books about Angola, with David Birmingham's A Short History of Modern Angola being the most succinct history of Angola I've read yet. I also enjoyed Daniel Metcalfe's travel book, Blue Dahlia, Black Gold.
I read more books by Adam Hochschild, including a terrific set of essays in Lessons from a Dark Time which proved to include some nice supplements to his great book King Leopold's Ghost. I was also very surprised at how much I enjoyed The Mirror at Midnight, his 1990 book about South Africa at the time apartheid was coming apart. He really had a knack for finding interesting people and perspectives on South Afria, it is one of the better books about South Africa I've read!
Some other interesting non-fiction topics were Ruth Ben-Ghiat's Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present and Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The former is concerned with authoritarian leaders and the common traits between them; the latter book argues that the USA has a caste system but is largely unaware of it and explores how the social problems of the country could be better understood if the principles of caste were applied. Both books made very compelling arguments and gave me a lot to consider.
I read a few great Christian books during the year. N. T. Wright's God and the Pandemic is the best christian response to the pandemic that I've seen. His most compelling teaching point with a larger application is that post-resurrection, God comes to us in the shape of Jesus, which I certainly agree with. I also enjoyed Joshua Butler Ryan's The Pursuing God, which makes a great point about how we often speak of seeking God when, in reality, it's God who is seeking after us. Finally, the podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill led me to the book When Narcissism Comes to Church by Chuck DeGroat. That book does a great job of simply explaining narcissism and the different ways in which it appears in human behaviour.
The best books about comics that I read were Mark D. White's The Virtues of Captain America (which has its own blog that is a lot of fun), and Abraham Riesman's True Believer. The latter book is the first critical biography of Stan Lee and it's a very strong read - not something many fans want to read, but it is a terrific bit of scholarship about Lee that, I think, is even-handed in covering what he did well and what made him difficult to appreciate.
I saw a number of great movies about Angola. The most enjoyable was Jeremy Xido's Death Metal Angola, a documentary about a rock concert being organized in Huambo. It's easily the best slice-of-life story I've seen told about Angola. Another great documentary was Independencia by Mario Bastos, which is focused on having Angolans tell the story of the war of independence. It's best enjoyed in DVD format because the bonus features telling how the film was made are as fascinating as the finished product. Finally, there's the odd live action/animation hybrid film of Another Day of Life which I wrote about elsewhere on the blog.
I watched two great films by Aaron Sorkin - Molly's Game and The Trial of the Chicago 7. I enjoyed the former film the most as it was stylish but unlike Sorkin's usual body of work (especially lacking in his usual authorial tics). The latter film is a much more conventionally centirst work by Sorkin but it had great performances.
I saw two great pictures starring Richard Widmark - one the terrific Cold War thriller The Bedford Incident by James B. Harris - it's a terrific picture and I'm amazed I hadn't heard of it before. I also really enjoyed Night and the City, a noir picture set in England which was one of the better noirs I've seen.
Dipping into the past, I watched the 1951 Argentinian adaptation of Native Son, which I enjoyed and I intend to read the novel soon. I watched Spike Lee's BlackKklansman which is first Lee joint I've really genuinely liked. Finally, I watched David Fincher's Mank which was an interesting biographical portrait of Herman J. Mankiewicz.
I don't watch much television programming but a few series caught my eye: Ted Lasso is everything I heard it was - funny and enveloping. I'm cautiously enjoying For All Mankind, being all-too aware that as a Ronald D. Moore production it could go off the rails at any time. And the Netflix series Gloria was an interesting Cold War spy thriller, though the dark climax wasn't entirely to my liking.
In comics, I'm continuing to follow Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, which has never dipped in quality. I liked Evan Dorkin's new Beasts of Burden mini-series, "Occupied Territory," although the series is at its best when set in Burden Hill - outside that it becomes just another fantasy-adventure series. And I continue to enjoy Larry Hama's G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, which spent most of 2021 telling done-in-one stories which was a very nice change from the usual ongoing plots.
I haven't had too much to do with Marvel since I quit working for them but I'm gradually giving them another chance. It helps that they brought back Christopher Priest for a U.S. Agent series which was everything I hoped for from Priest. I tried Kieron Gillen's Eternals series thanks to my lingering love of the Eternals; it's not really what I want from the Eternals, but I do like that Gillen (unlike Gaiman) knows his Eternals lore. Al Ewing's Immortal Hulk has wrapped up - I could have easily seen it going for a few more years; it's hard to imagine how the Hulk can continue without dealing with the cosmic horror elements Ewing brought in. Kurt Busiek's new series The Marvels is basically Astro City in the Marvel Universe and I'm here for that. And I tried the first two stories in X-Men Legends, really just to enjoy seeing new super hero work from Fabian Nicieza and the Simonsons.
The best graphic novels I read included the Out of the Blue books by Garth Ennis and Keith Burns, which were typically great war comics from Ennis. The Department of Mind-Blowing Theories is Tom Gauld's latest humour book and it was as amusing as his other collections. Paying the Land by Joe Sacco is another great piece of comics journalism, this time referencing the First Nations of Canada, which is especially timely for us Canadians as we're intentionally seeking to heal the wounds we made. The Girl Who Married a Skull was a fun anthology of African myths rendered by a variety of artists. The Harrowing of Hell by Evan Dahm was an interesting imagining of what Jesus' descent into Hell was like. Poochytown was another weird and wonderful Jim Woodring book starring Frank. And Showtime at the Apollo by Ted Fox told the history of the Apollo Theater, all of whih was new information to me and very informative.
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