The year or so that I spent living in France (alongside another year or so in French-speaking Switzerland) was under very particular circumstances—working with a group of mostly Americans doing volunteer work for a U.S.-based church—that led to some idiosyncratic experiences in the country. Perhaps one of the oddest was a small, shared, and superficial obsession with Marshal Ferdinand Foch of World War I fame. This grew out of the fact that the church we were working with rented an apartment on the boulevard Maréchal Foch in Grenoble; those of us who had been assigned to work in that area and live in that apartment had really fallen in love with Grenoble, which translated into constantly talking about Foch (the street) as a superior place to live. We didn’t know much about Foch (the person), but we knew he must have been pretty cool to have a street named after him, and we knew—with all the confidence of Iraq War-era Americans—that he must be better than Marshal Pétain, since Pétain had been a coward who surrendered to the Germans. (That Foch had been dead for nearly two decades at this point wasn’t really on our minds).

• Walkaway, by Cory Doctorow, because it’s a story of radical hope in the face of bleak reality
• The Bezzle, by Cory Doctorow, because I’m going to need to keep up my frustration with self-enriching amoral tech bros
• The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States, by Jeffrey Lewis, because it compellingly portrays the danger of entrusting nuclear weapons in the hands of any president but especially one who is particularly petty and impulsive
• The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth, because it so compellingly describes the soft edges and semi-plausible deniability that American fascism would inevitably be draped in
• Superman Smashes the Klan, by Gene Luen Yang, because it’s unapologetically pro-immigrant and anti-racism (and implicitly argues that churches should be, too)
• Practical Anarchism: A Guide for Daily Life, by Scott Branson, because it advocates for solving problems of care and support on our own when it’s clear that the government won’t do it for us
• The Kingdom of God is Within You, by Leo Tolstoy, because it argues for loyalty to all of humanity over loyalty to any country
• the March trilogy, by John Lewis, because reading it the first time made me realize that I might well have been a “surely it’s not that bad” bystander during the Civil Rights movement, and I refuse to be that guy over the next four years

There are, of course, a number of books that I want to read for the first time in response to last night, and I probably need to prioritize those for a number of reasons. If I can find the time, though, these are the ones I want to come back to.

A friend of mine recently asked whether I had a list of books “that have been particularly impactful or interesting,” especially in the realm of spirituality and religion—and suggested that if I didn’t already have such a list, I could put one together for one of my next blog posts. It took me a while to actually put the list together, but it’s ended up being a really interesting exercise. Of the forty books that I’ve picked, some have been more influential than others. There’s also a bias toward the recent, and I haven’t shied away from the idiosyncracies of my reading habits (that is, there are plenty of comics and plenty of French books on the list—not to mention at least one French-language comic). Nonetheless, I hope this is helpful to other folks looking for a book to read in these domains!