Academic Reading Challenge Recommendations: Fiction about Non-Human Animals

 I've been too busy to do a recommendation post for a while, but here I am again wtih recommendations for category 12:  A book of fiction in which a non-human animal is a major character, or in which non-human animals feature significantly in the plot. 

At first I didn't think there would be that many books that would fit this category, but then I realized that there's so much to choose from in this category. There are many books written from an animal's point of view, books about alien animal species, books in which animals figure significantly without being central characters, and science-fiction books about "uplifted animals" who have been genetically modified to have human-like intelligence. 

I got some excellent suggestions for this category from members of the reading challenge Facebook group, as well as a new "bookish" social group that a friend of mine has created for his friends that like to read and talk about books without being members of a regular book club. It also just so happens that the science fiction book club that I'm in chose to read a book about uplifted animals for our March meeting, so I got some ideas from that list of options as well. 

This post's theme-song is Foals' "Providence" 

 

1. One of my favorite books,and one of the first to be recommended by a member of the challenge facebook group was the science-fiction book, Borne by Jeff VanderMeer. This book began a series and all of it includes significant animal characters, so any of them could count. VanderMeer's interest in animals and ecology would also make some of his other writings work for this challenge, including the excellent Southern Reach trilogy.  

2. Another alien-animal series begins with Nicky Drayden's book Escaping Exodus which includes an organic space-ship. It comes recommended by another challenge participant. The same member of the group also recommends The Last Animal, which she described as addressing a number of fascinating issues such as cloning, research ethics, grief, and sexism. 

3, Because I was reading their review of Borne, Publisher's Weekly's algorithm just suggested this forthcoming book by Julia Phillips, author of The Disappearing Earth. If you can wait until June to read this category, why not try out Bear, which sounds like it's influenced both by ecology and fairy tales. 

4. Also from the facebook group, comes a recommendation for Bernard Malamud's God's Grace which, like some of the others listed here is also a dystopian novel, and according to the challenge participant "gets weird." 

5. I thought of this entire category because I recently stumbled across the book Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth. It's not written from an animal point of view, at least as far as I know, but the whole thing is about a heist by two egg auditors to "steal a million chickens in the middle of the night." I bought it because the cover caught my eye and then the description made it sound like a lot of fun. 

6. There are many classics written from the point of view of animals, and any of them would be great for this category. Consider, for example Watership Down, Animal Farm, Call of the Wild and White Fang; Charlotte's Web, the Metamorphosis paired with lesser-works by Kafka, such as "Josephine the Mouse Singer." There are many children's books in this category, including the Black Stallion books, or, more recently, the huge "warrior cats" series. Just remember that challenge books should be about 200 pages long, so you might need to read a couple to fill the category. 

7. The most classic work in the "uplifted animal" sub-genre is Planet of the Apes, which began as a book in French in 1963. Other works to consider in this category, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, which features a terraformed planet populated by accidentally uplifted spiders and ants, Despite being pretty horrifying as a concept, this book, which I'm currently reading for the SF book club I mentioned, is really good. Some other good uplifted animal books you might consider are Clifford Simak's City, in which dogs narrate the end of human civilization,  Lawrence Schoen's Barsk; The Elephant's Graveyard, and Robert Repino's Mort(e): War With No Name, featuring a house-cat turned assassin.   

8. Many of the members of the bookish club recently read the short novel, Open Throat written from the point of view of a mountain lion in the Hollywood Hills, which is part of this year's Tournament of Books. They really, really liked it, finding the animal's point of view narrative very interestingly non-human.

9. I've already mentioned this book in my recommendations of Nobel Prize winners, but Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is another great book in which animals feature significantly in the plot without being point-of-view characters. 

10. Sigrid Nunez's The Friend is another non-science fiction work in which an animal figures significantly in the plot. This book is as much about relationships among humans as it is about animals, but it explores the importance of animal companions to humans.

I think I'll stop there, but if you find something else that looks good, feel free to mention it in the comments. 

Academic Reading Challenge Recommendations: Books About Conspiracy Theories or Conspiracism

 

Category ten this year is a “book about conspiracies or conspiracism.”  Because of the research I’ve been doing on opposition to the far-right, this is one category where I’ve read enough to make some general observations about the scholarship.  It’s also a category in which new books, and new editions of old books come out at a fast clip, so there’s just a ridiculous amount to choose from. As usual, I’m including a mix of journalistic and more academic works, though I’ve only included one novel.

My general observation about scholarship on conspiracy theory is that it’s closely tied to scholarship on populism, and thus tends to be divided in similar ways to that scholarship. The books that come to the quickest and easiest condemnations of conspiracy theory are by defenders of liberal democratic institutions who find both left and right populisms to be dangerous to liberal democracy. Richard Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style in American Politics, while written mostly in opposition to right-wing populism, also identifies left populism as paranoid, and is the foundational work for most liberal critics of conspiracy theory. Frederic Jameson’s description of conspiracy theory as a “poor person’s cognitive mapping” is a Marxist analysis similar to Ferdinand Kronawetter's description of anti-Semitism as the “socialism of fools" (this phrase is often attributed to August Bebel). Jameson rejects conspiracy theories while also advocating for left critique of liberal capitalism. Since the 1990s, academic analyses of conspiracy theories have largely aligned either with one of these two central arguments or have been written against them. Those scholars influenced by post-modern theory oppose Hofstadter thesis for its own defense of establishment common sense and Jameson’s for what they see as “dismissal” of popular anti-establishment ideas and over-zealous rationalism. I would call these recent critics of anti-conspiracy theory writers as more populist than leftist as they are defending conspiracy theorizing on the basis that it represents an “anti-establishment” position, while depicting even left critics of conspiracy theory as aligned with various “authorities.” They argue for the radical potential in conspiracy theory, sometimes by pointing out that “real conspiracies” do exist.

 My own view is that left scholars accommodate conspiracy theory and repudiate efforts to disprove or debunk them at our peril. Conspiracy theory may be understandably anti-establishment and even exhilarating, but that’s what makes it more dangerous than more traditional conservative politics. The problem is not that it is “pseudo-conservative,” to use Richard Hofstadter’s term, so much as it is “pseudo-left.”  The left populist academic effort to salvage conspiracy theory for as imanent radicalism fails to account for right-wing populism. I think this blindness to right-wing anti-establishment discourse is related to this group's general emphasis on opposing liberalism (and sometimes Marxism) as more hegemonic than they are. Their identification of liberal and left enemies as the most important ones means that they have a relatively simple understanding of right-wing politics. This also means that their analyses of fascism are similarly wrong-headed. 

The conceptual battle-lines in this case are not between liberalism and populism but between Marxism and populism. Populism is not “almost” Marxism or on the way there, but this idea causes some leftist writers on this issue to be overly charitable to conspiracy theorizing for its anti-liberalism. Rather than leading to more leftist positions eventually, conspiratorial understandings of power may be helpful in explaining why someone who once seemed to be on the left - say, Tom Watson in the 1890s - could become such a vicious right-wing demagogue such a short time later. The answer may be that the person did not “switch” from the left to the right at all, but was the same all along – a populist who aligned with the left on some issues, but with the right on many others. Their underlying analysis was never truly anti-capitalist in most cases, but against specific capitalists, or monopolies, or particular branches of capitalism. Close-reading of these popular "left" thinkers who later shifted right would likely real a consistency in their thinking over time. We don't always see it because many of us just “want to believe” that socialist analysis is more prevalent in popular culture than it is. But, like specific anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories in general represent “the socialism of fools.”

 Conspiracy theories themselves will more often lead to right-wing xenophobia and anti-Semitism than to leftist analysis of power. Regardless of whether the theory is held on the right or the left, conspiracy theory always leads to an impoverished account of how power works, and thus leads to bad political strategies, if not outright right-wing xenophobia. My point here is not that there are no left populists or that left populists couldn’t change over time and develop better analysis, but that there’s no point in protecting that bad analysis, as if a left critique would somehow hurt the left, or align with power, or as if conspiracy theory were a kind of necessary step on the way to radicalization instead of a problem to be solved.

And with that, here are my recommendations for category 10:

 

1. Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger was the blockbuster in this category for 2023. It’s the most personal of her books, beginning with her experiences of being confused with Naomi Wolff, the former feminist who became an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and now regularly appears on Steve Bannon’s show. This book will be especially interesting for anyone interested in public people (such as Klein’s former colleagues Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, who are never mentioned in this book) who have made what seem turns from left to right in recent years.  She draws on Quinn Slobodian’s work on what is called “diagonalism” in Germany to explain this phenomenon. Klein’s statement that conspiracy theorists “get the feelings right but he facts wrong,” is a pithy and helpful framing of what goes wrong with conspiracy theories.

2. A related book, which I haven’t read, but know a lot about because I listen to their podcast regularly is Derek Beres, Matthew Remski’s and Julian Walker’s Conspirituality: How New-Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Public Health Threat. The podcast and the book try to explain how health and wellness influencers became increasingly conspiratorial around the Covid-19 pandemic. This book will likely be the best one to read if you are interested in anti-vax politics or Yoga cults, or trying to figure out how legitimate critiques of “big pharma” can go awry.

3. One of the most frequently cited academics on the phenomenon of “conspiracism,” and included in the notes of many journalists’ accounts is Joseph Uscinski, who has written a number of books on conspiracy theories for a variety of audiences. The shortest and most accessible of these is probably Conspiracy Theories: A Primer. He’s also the editor of a very big (500+ pp) collection called Conspiracy Theories and the People Who Believe Them that provides a good survey of differing academic arguments about conspiracy theory, from the Hofstadter supporters to the populist critics of “conspiracy panic.” As with most anthologies, the quality of these pieces varies, but this is a decent book for getting a sense of how social scientists in general write about conspiracy theory and belief. Uscinski’s own most controversial claims are that conspiratorial thinking exists equally on the left and right, and that the amount of conspiracy theorizing hasn’t changed in the last few years. He bases these claims on polls that he’s conducted – so everything rests on whether his polls are reliable.

4. Katheryn Olmstead’s Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 is another academic book that has become nearly canonical in scholarship on conspiracy theory. Her general argument is that conspiracy theories by lay-people are related to the existence of real conspiracies and deceptions by people in power, so much of her book cites both the conspiratorial language of the government itself and the existence of actual conspiracies that have justified people’s paranoia.  This book is limited by its focus on the United States and to my view, is overly populist in its approach. That said, it’s still very much worth reading. The book was originally published in 2009, but the new anniversary edition (2019) includes a chapter on the 2016 election, and I’d be curious to see whether Olmstead has become less sanguine about conspiratorial thinking in recent years.

This week's theme song is Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me" 

5. Political scientists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum’s A Lot of People Are Saying: the New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy offers a counter-point to Uscinski’s argument that conspiracism exists equally on the left and right and makes the argument that conspiracy thinking is more common, and more dangerous than ever, on the far right. Although it is written by two political scientists, this is a short and punchy little book written for a popular audience. I haven’t read it, but it’s in my TBR pile right now.

5. Much denser is Thomas Milan Korda’s . Conspriacy of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America. He also takes the position that conspiracy theories are more a characteristic of right-wing thought, adopting Richard Hofstadter’s concept of “pseudo-conservatism” in his introduction. Korda’s is the first major historical account of American conspiracy theories by an academic since Olmstead’s. He’s not a historian, but a political scientist, and I haven't read this, but he seems to fall on the more liberal, anti-populist side, winning praise from Michael Barkun.

6. While it’s not entirely about conspiracy theories, I’m including Peter Pomerantsev’s book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible on this list because of how well it explains the rise of popular conspiracism in Russia, given the prominence of Russian disinformation efforts internationally. This book is based on the author’s work at Russian television station in the 1990s and connects conspiracism and the Russian government’s use of media. Pomerantsev has also written a new book called This is Not Propaganda – you can hear him talk about it with Joey Ayoub on his podcast, The Fire These Times

7. If you want to understand both the origins of Alex Jones’s infamous theory that the Sandy Hook preschool shooting was a “false flag” and how that affected the families of children killed there, read Elizabeth Williamson’s Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy

9. Journalist Anna Merlan’s Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and their Surprising Rise to Power is an informative, deftly written, and entertaining overview of recent conspiracy theories, beginning with 9/11 conspiracy theories and including discussions of Seth Rich theories, Pizzagate, Sandyhook, anti-vax theories, and UFOs.  Merlan also includes a chapter on “Russiagate.” The book came out in 2019, so it doesn’t include anything about covid-19 or the 2020 election, but it’s got a good general analysis of Trump’s uses of conspiracy theories and the broad appeal of conspiratorial thinking.

10. Mike Rothschild’s The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, a Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything was the first of a handful of left reporters’ books on QAnon to come out. It’s a good guide to understanding the phenomenon and its basic history on the internet. Although Rothschild does seek to identify the main people driving the “Q” movement, he is also interested in the rank and file members and how they come to believe in these bizarre theories. He writes about people who “have fallen down the rabbit hole” with sympathy and gives advice to readers who are seeking to help relative and friends leave the “Q” cult.  He continues to be interested in conspiracism’s impact in society. His new book Jewish Space Lasers is about the Rothschild family and conspiracy theories about them. (As he says in his by-lines, he’s no relation).  

11. Kelly Weill’ s Off the Edge: Flat-Earthers, Conspiracy Culture and Why People Will Believe Anything is a journalists’ account of Flat-Earth conspiracy theories. This book is super interesting as an exploration of how conspiratorial thinking works, how communities are built around conspiracy beliefs, and how the internet works to spread even the most bizarre conspiracy theories. Weill also writes with practical goals, and includes a discussion of various debunking techniques and methods that every day people can use to combat conspiracism.

12. Graphic novel champion and comic writer and artist, Will Eisner’s last book was his comic history of the creation and circulation of the infamous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It’s called simply, The Plot It’s a really remarkable achievement in graphic story-telling and includes a comprehensive bibliography and notes, as well as introduction by Umberto Eco.

13. Of all the fictional accounts of conspiracy theories, I most recommend Umberto Eco’s Foucault's Pendulum. Eco has himself been interested in the problems of conspiracy theory and has written extensively about fascism in culture, particularly in response to the rise of the European New Right. I read this book over 30 years ago, in between my shifts as a linecook, but I remember it as being something between a wild romp and a philosophical exercise. 

Academic Reading Challenge Recommendations: Books about housing, homelessness, and/or the use of urban space

 The reading challenge category 4 is "A book about housing, homelessness, and/or the use of urban space." When thinking of books for the challenge, I realized that the "use of urban space" really opens the category widely to almost any work in urban geography or urban studies more broadly, but I tried to keep these generally connected to issues of inequality in urban space. 

Here are my recommendations for books that could work in this category:

1. Mike Davis is one of the first authors I think of when I think of writing about cities. He was a rare scholar who produced a large number of books that were also really, really good. Many of these books are about cities - in particular, Los Angeles. I read his most famous book on LA, City of Quartz in my first year of grad school in the 1990s, and I still think of it as one of the best books on urban life in America. I have not read his Ecology of Fear, also about Los Angeles, though I could count it for the cateogry "book you've owned for a long time, but never read." Nor have I read his more recent Set the Night on Fire, co-written with Jon Weiner, and about Los Angeles in the 1960s, but that would also work in this category. 

2. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is co-founder of the abolitionist organization, Critical Resistance, and the author of Golden Gulag, a now classic work in the study of the political economy of prisons. Her newest book Abolition Geography, a collection of her essays written over the last 30 years would be an excellent choice for this category for anyone interested in the abolitionist activism, economics and geography of the carceral state. 

3. I live in Atlanta, so of course Dan Immergluck's Red Hot City about Atlanta's rapid gentrification and its broader impact on the city's people has been on my reading list since it first came out. Perhaps ironcially, I found a copy of it in a Little Free Library in my neighborhood. 

4. In 2019, LA Family Housing published an interesting reading list about homelessness that includes both fiction and non-fiction, classics and newer books. From that list, I've read Righteous Dopefiend, which is about a community of drug users living under a freeway overpass in San Francisco. It's an incredible work of ethnography and photography, though more about addiction and harm reduction than urban land use. 

5. A geographer friend of mine reminded me that science-fiction author and socialist, China Mieville has written many novels about very strange cities. Of these The City and the City is my favorite. In it, two cities share the same space, nearly cross-hatched and rubbing shoulders against eachother, but the residents are officially, legally, invisible to each other. He explains the ideas behind the book in this interview with Geoff Manaugh for Bldgblog: it started with the idea of different species living in the same space but experiencing it differently (humans and rats in London) or jurisdictional boundaries in urban spaces. It's all complicated sounding, but the metaphor works and the book is both entertaining and thought-provoking. 

6. Another book that would also work for the category "book written in the 1960s" (but remember only one category for book!) is Lewis Mumford's  The City in History, which comes highly recommended by my geographer friend. I recall reading pieces of this for my doctoral prelim exams, but also reading his much shorter Sticks and Stones - for the same seminar that introduced me to Mike Davis's work. Mumford's a really elegant writer and his work is a great introduction to thinking about architecture and urban space.

7. The title Homelessness is a Housing Problem by Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern sounds promising. This book is a quantitative explanation of something that seems fairly obvious - homelessness is higher when rental housing markets are tight, and this factor more than any other (poverty rate, drug addiction, etc) causes higher rates of homelessness in a given location. 

This entry's theme song is Living Colour "Open Letter (to a Landlord)" 

8. There are several interesting books in this list of past prize winners from the Urban Affairs Association. Go to the above link to check out Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design;  Lawrence J. Vale, Purging the Poorest; Japonica Brown-Saracino, A Neighborhood that Never Changes and Jennifer Clark Uneven Innovation. 

9. If you haven't read it, Jane Jacobs The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a classic work that continues to be an influence in urban planning

10. It's on every list, so why not this one too? The Pulitzer Prize winning Evicted by Matthew Desmond has been part of the conversation about homelessness in the US since it came out in 2016. I haven't read it, but many people really like it.

11. Another exploration of the anti-state-state is John Arena's Driven from New Orleans. I haven't read this one, but the description says it's about how non-profit organizations drive poor people out of the city and contribute to privatization. 

12. Kristian Karlo Saguin's book about Manila is the most recent winner of the American Association of Geographer's Meridian book prize. It's called Urban Ecologies on the Edge

13. Don Mitchell's book Mean Streets sounds really interesting. The linked review from the Urban Geography Journal summarizes the argument of the book it is not a failure of the system, but "the effective operation of capitalism that creates homelessness."

13. Several years ago I read journalist, Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers which is based on interviews with people living in a slum behind the Mumbai airport, not far from several luxury hotels. It's a devastating book about poverty amidst plenty and one of the most memorable indictments of neoliberalism that I've encountered. 

14. The novelist Aravind Adiga writes about similar themes in fiction. His novels White Tiger (his debut and a Booker Prize winner) and Last Man in Tower are both excellent portrayals of poverty, wealth and corruption in modern India. Last Man in Tower in particular is about housing and real-estate as you might guess from the title.  

15. Another excellent and devastating book is Ann Petry's The Street. I read this book one summer when I was a teenager and all I remember about it is that it I read it in a short period of time and that I became depressed as a consequence - but also loved the book. Might be time to revisit.

Academic Reading Challenge Recommendations: Books by Palestinian Authors

 The challenge's category two: book by a Palestinian author was the number one category in this year's voting, which doesn't come as a surprise. The US is supporting Israel's terrible military assault on the Palestinian people, and in current US media coverage of that war, Palestinian voices have been few and far between. At the same time, universities and literary organizations have been more than usually brazen in their silencing of supporters of Palestinian rights since last fall. 

A number of organizations and bloggers more knowledgeable than I am have already published lists of things to read by Palestinians, including this recent one from Words Without Borders and this list of "40 Books to Understand Palestine" from Lithub, as well as this much shorter list from Five Books.

I finally decided I would go ahead and give my own recommendations, though I haven't read a lot of these. I figured that it would be worth doing since I'm including academic books as well as some older, but not 1960s classics that might get less publicity from most other book blogs. To find some of these I looked up the publications of Palestinian authors who signed a link denouncing Mahmoud Abbas for statements about the Holocaust in September of this year.  I also got a huge list of recommendations from one of the challenge's long-time participants in our Facebook group. If you join that group, you can see his list there.  

This week's musical theme song is the late Rim Banna's "A Time to Cry: A Lament Over Jerusalem" 

 

I'm going to start with Edward Said, just because he's the author in this category that I'm the most familiar with. I have been reading his work for years, and was lucky enough to see him speak in the 1990s when I was a graduate student. He was eloquent and inspiring, introducing ideas that may have been old for many, but were new and revelatory for me at the time. The most influential of his works in academia is Orientalism, originally published in 1978. On the more immediate situation in Palestine, I would recommend The Politics of Dispossesion, though all of his books are relevant and worth reading.  

A more recent academic book on the history of settler colonialism in Palestine is Sherene Seikaly's Men of Capital which is about Palestinian capitalists under the British mandate. Rashid Khalidi had this to say about it: "Men of Capital is a remarkable achievement. Sherene Seikaly introduces us to the class of Palestinian capitalists, a group too often overlooked in histories of Palestine and Israel, and brilliantly puts them into the context of their time, exploring their group consciousness, hopes, and aspirations. Examining their failures to break through the iron ceiling of Britain's colonial commitment to the Zionist project, Seikaly offers a powerful critique of the strait-jacket of settler colonialism."

Speaking of Rashid Khalidi, I see from the challenge spreadsheet that one of our members has already read his Hundred Years War on Palestine which is on the top of many reading lists for obvious reasons. it looks like a great comprehensive introduction to the history of settler colonialism in Palestine.

Another recent academic book by a Palestinian author is Ashjan Ajour's  Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes. It won the Palestine Book Award in 2022 and has already been recommended by another challenge participant for this year.  Other winners of this prize would also make great choices. You can see a complete list of these book awards here

Published in 2015, so relatively recent by academic standards, Lila Abu-Lughod's Do Muslim Women Need Saving? while not specifically about Palestine, addresses a discourse that is used to justify colonialism in the Middle-East in general. Less recent, but more obviously about Israel and Palestine is her 2008 book, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory Abu-Lughod is a highly-respected feminist anthropologist, and is also the author of the now-classic Writing Women's Worlds about Bedouin women.

Paying homage to Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish's title, Palestine as Metaphor, is the highly-lauded 2016 essay collection Gaza as Metaphor edited by Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar. Not all the authors in the collection are Palestinian, but editors Dina Matar and Tawil-Souri are, and many of the authors of individual essays are as well. Matar has also written a collection of the stories of everday people in Palestine under the title What it Means to be Palestinian

 If you're looking for a novel, Adania Shibli's Minor Detail would also be timely. Shibli was recently  disinvited from the Frankfurt Book fair, and the book fair canceled the celebration of the novel's winning of the 2023 LiBeraturpreis prize for an author from Africa, Asia, Latin America or the Arab world.  

Because I've met her and followed her work for a long time, I'm recommending Suheir Hammad's Born Palestinian, Born Black & the Gaza Suite. Hammad is a poet who was part of the spoken-word scene in the 1990s, and has also been a long-time activist in New York City. To hear and see Hammad read from her poems on Gaza, go to this video from the Palestinian Festival of Literature. 

Probably no list like this would be complete without Mahmood Darwish, a legendary and prolific poet. Here is the profile of him from Words Without Borders. I have not read his work, but if I were going to choose something at this moment, I think I would agree with Lit Hub's recommendation to read his book of interviews, Palestine as Metaphor. Or maybe I would read his collection In the Presence of Absence. 

Another major Palestinian writer whose works are considered classics is Ghassan Kanafani, whose work was popular in the 1960s. He was assassinated in Lebanon in 1972. His 1966 novella All That's Left to You is set in Gaza and just came out along with some of his stories in a new edition this fall. Some of Kanafani's writing would also work for the category "book written in the 1960s" if you are looking for a way to expand the number of Palestinian writers on your reading list for this year. 

Ghada Karmi was born in Jerusalem and was exiled with her family in 1948. She now lives in London, where she practiced as a doctor with a specialization in medical treatment of refugees. She has written a number of books, including two very well-received memoirs, Return and In Search of Fatima, as well as a 2007 book about the Israel-Palestine conflict entitled Married to Another Man which is based on what seems likely to be an apocryphal story of two rabbis who visited Palestine in the 1890s and remarked that the "bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man." Whether or not the title is based on a fable, Ilan Pappe, whose opinion I tend to trust, called this book a "must read."   

 For a new work of fiction originally written in English, Susan Muaddi Darraj's book Behind You Is the Sea looks interesting to me, though it seems to be more about Palestinian-Americans than about Palestine itself. It's been getting very positive reviews.

Another more recent book popular with literary bloggers and revieweres is Sharon and My Mother in Law: Ramallah Diaries by Suad Amiry. According to review it is about the absurdity of living under occupation, and is described as "hilarious." I thought that might be a good way for those feeling too much despair from the news reports of Israel's ongoing crimes against humanity.  

Academic Reading Challenge Recommendations: Book by a winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature

As before, I'm writing my recommendations in no particular order. Category Eight: book by a winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature is in some ways, quite easy. There's a list of all the prize winners - and it's a finite list of possibilities. On the other hand, there are so many great writers and books to choose from, that choosing just one book to read seems daunting, and reading the list of laureates is guaranteed to give you "FOMO" when you finally choose something. 

In honor of the prestige of the Nobel, this entry's theme song is "The Greatest" by Cat Power: 

Here are my top-ten, some are chosen because they're authors whose work I already know and love. Others I've chosen because I've never read them, but want to, and some, well, I chose because they have particular relevance for work I'm in the process of doing right now.

1. As suggested above, it's an easy choice to read a book by Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved is, to my mind, the greatest American novel of the 20th century. If you've already read that one, she has many other books to choose from, several of which have been in the news lately because her work has been targeted by right-wingers.

2. Abdulrazak Gurnah is a writer I'm not at all familiar with, but the themes identified by the Nobel Committee seem appropriate for our current moment. Here's a review of his book Paradise which is set in colonial East Africa.

3. Jose Saramago is someone whose work I'm very interested in, have heard a lot about, but I've never had the pleasure of reading. Recently, another participant in the challenge recommended his novel Raised from the Ground as a great option for the "rural life" category, though remember if you read him for this category, that book won't also count for the "rural life" category. Only one category per book. 

4. Derek Walcott is a wonderful poet and has many collections of poems that you could choose from. He's also a playwright. Here's an example of his work that you can read on his page at the National Poetry Foundation website. 

5. I was shocked when Olga Tokarczuk won a Nobel, simply because she is so young. However, her book Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead which I read for a book club, was one of the best novels I've read in the last ten years. 

6. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is an other easy, much beloved choice. If you haven't read One Hundred Years of Solitude it's simply a fantastic, unforgettable novel. The last time I read it was over 30 years ago  - maybe it's time to revisit.

7. Thomas Mann is a writer who I'm particularly interested in reading right now, but more because of his extra-literary activities. Despite being deeply resented by less famous and more radical members of the community, he was an important spokesman for the anti-Fascist German emigre community in the United States during WWII. 

8. Isaac Beshevis Singer is an old favorite of mine. I read several of his novels when I was in high school - I can't remember why. I'd go back and read The Family Moskat which I believe once started, but never finished. 

9. A less-well known literary anti-fascist (because he was trapped in Spain after Franco's victory and his works were banned there) is 1977 winner, Vincente Aleixandre.  I had never heard of him before perusing the Laureates list, but he looks very interesting.

10. Wow, this list has a lot of men on it. My tenth recommendation is for Annie Ernaux particularly in this moment, because of her outspoken feminism and support for Palestinian rights

Academic Reading Challenge Recommendations: Books about Rural Life

 This year I'm trying to write on this blog more frequently, both about books and music, and I also want to do more to publicize the academic reading challenge. If you're looking for ideas for things to read for the different categories, I'm going to post a set of recommendations for each one as regularly as I can. 

Since I am better read in some of these categories than others, I'm not going to go in numerical order by prompt. Today's prompt is category 7: A book about a rural location or rural life in general (in any country)

Since a lot of the books I found are about the integration of rural areas into broader global economic circuits instead of being seen as isolated and remote, I thought Lucinda Williams' classic "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" would be a good into to this entry.  

For me the first thing that comes to mind when I think of academic books about rural life is Marxist literature on peasant societies, but of course, there are many others types of books one could read. Here are some interesting ones, both academic and not. Note: I have not read all of these!  

William Garriot, Policing Methamphetamine: Narcopolitics in Rural America,  I read this several years ago and wound up using a chapter of it in a class I teach on prisons that is organized around rural, urban and suburban settings. It's both academically rigorous and easy to read - a short ethnographic account of the impact of meth policing in Appalachia. 

Navied Mahdavian, This Country I haven't read this one, but someone in my social media networks is reading it, and it looks pretty cool. It's a graphic memoir about an Iranian-American cartoonist's move from San Francisco to rural Idaho with his wife, a documentary film-maker. The link goes to his website, where you can see samples of the artwork.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Petals of Blood is a classic novel set in a village in post-colonial Kenya. Originally published in 1977, it led to the author's imprisonment by the Kenyan government, and an international protest campaign on his behalf. 

E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act I read this book for the 2nd year of the reading challenge - though I don't now remember what category. I am a huge fan of E.P. Thompson, as most left historians are. This book is about rules of property and criminal law in 18th century England, and it's just an excellent book about class and criminal justice. 

Also about rural England, I have it on good authority that Vron Ware's Return of a Native is "fabulous" from cover-to-cover. Here's a cool video of her talking about it with another great scholar and writer. 

Another of my favorite historians, Robin D.G.Kelley's book, Hammer and Hoe,is not entirely about rural life, but is mostly so. It is a fantastic history of Alabama activists in the Communist Party during the Great Depression.This was and still is a hugely influential book in American left and labor history - and Kelley is another historian who's influenced by the work of E.P. Thompson. 

Speaking of  Thompson's Whigs and Hunters, I recently saw it cited in a book I read for the challenge last year -for the category "a book about the natural environment that draws on academic research." That book was Lyndsie Bourgon's Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods. The rural life in this described is mostly in the Pacific Northwest, as her main subject is timber poaching around the Redwood National Forest. She also has a brief discussion of the impact of the timber industry and poaching practices in the Amazon.

In my search for books about Africa by African scholars, I came across Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger National Park by Jacob Dlamini, which looks really interesting. Dlamini is from South Africa and won the AHA's Martin Klein Prize for best book in African hisotry in 2021 as well as the University of Johannesburg Book prize for this book.  

If you're interested in African history, the Ohio University Press's "New African Histories Series" includes a number of fascinating titles.  Alice Wiemers' Village Work looks like it would be an interesting one for anyone interested in village life with an emphasis on the state.  There are another couple of books in that series that might be about rural life, though it's hard to tell from just the titles and brief synopses. Check out the series page. An older book by one of the series founders (but with a different press) is Jean Allman's I Will Not Eat a Stone: A Woman's History of Colonial Asante,

I found several other interesting sounding books by searching for prize-winners in rural sociology and anthropology, and doing some keyword searching for book reviews on JSTOR. 

Coffee and Community by Sarah Lyon won a prize from the Society for Economic Anthropology. It's an analysis of a Mayan farm cooperative in Guatemala as a case-study analysis of the fair trade movement as it is experienced by producers.  Kristen Phillips won the same prize for her study of Tanzanian subsistence farmers, An Ethnography of Hunger. Another prize-winner from this organization is Sarah Besky's The Darjeeling Distinction which is about fair-trade tea plantations in India.  (note - any of these three books could be read for the "book that won an academic prize" category if you're looking for something for that category, but then they can't count for the "book about rural life" category.)  Not a prize-winner in this category, but in a similar vein is Sarah Osterhoudt's Vanilla Landscapes which is an ethnography based on vanilla farming in Madagascar. Another book about rural economies is Kathleen Schwartzman's intriguingly titled The Chicken Trail which follows migrant workers across the Americas through the poultry industry.

For work on USian farmworkers of various types, a good friend suggested Frank Bardacke's Trampling out the Vintage as the best book on the United Farm Workers. Other recommendations from this friend on American rural labor include Jarod Roll's Spirit of Rebellion and H.L. Mitchell's classic, Roll the Union On about the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Conversely, if you're looking for a book on rural conservatism, you might want to read Katherine J. Cramer's The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. This book came out before Trump was elected and is among the most prescient of the books on "red state America" that have come out in recent years.  

  

2024: The Tenth Anniversary of the Academic Reading Challenge - Categories Below!

Hello my reading friends, 

It's a new year, which means it's time to share the categories for the 2024 academic reading challenge. Since I organized the first challenge for a few friends in 2014, this is officially the 10th year that we've been doing this. I'm going to try to be a little more active in getting people engaged in the challenge this year and have done a few things differently to celebrate the anniversary. Mainly, I've added two "TBD" categories of extra-credit that people will have a chance to vote on in June. If you want to participate in decision making and interact with others about the challenge, we have a Facebook group. If you're not on Facebook, but still want to participate, comment below and I'll get in touch with you. We have a spreadsheet too! 

Who and What the Academic Reading Challenge is for: 

This is a challenge for academics who feel that their reading has become over-specialized and possibly joyless, who want to read more literature for pleasure, who want to broaden the way they approach their own research and teaching, who like to talk about reading with each other, who are interested in interdisciplinary reading, and who want to support their friends and colleagues by reading their books. You don’t have to be a professor to do the challenge. Maybe you graduated from school but you miss reading academic books. The challenge runs for a year and emphasizes reading across academic disciplines. If you are a professional academic or public intellectual outside the university, this challenge is meant to give you a structure for reading outside your area of specialization - including reading literature - and to provide a space to talk with others about the experience. If you are a general reader who likes reading serious works of non-fiction, this challenge is also for you. It's a structure that you can use to read works of the type that you might not have encountered since you were a student.

And now, here are this year's categories, with points in parentheses

1. A book by a friend, colleague, former teacher or former student (10)

 2. a book by a Palestinian author (10)

3. A book by an author you've seen cited or heard about a lot but never read (10)

4. a book about housing, homelessness, and/or the use of urban space (20)

5. a book written in the 1960s (10)

6. A book that you've owned for a long time but have never read (10)

7. A book about a rural location or rural life in general (in any country) (20)

8. A book by a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature (10)

9. A book that won an academic prize (20)

10. A book about conspiracy theories or "conspiracism" (10)

11. A book about mental health/illness (20)

12. A book of fiction in which a non-human animal is a major character, or in which non-human animals feature significantly in the plot (10)

13. A book published before 1900 (10)

14. A book about a specific election or elections in general (10)

15. A book about a place you've visited for no longer than a month (20)

Extra Credit:

16. Extra-Credit: A book about the effect of a disease outbreak or epidemic on religion (20)

17. Extra Extra-Credit: A book by a recently-ish deceased author (10)

18. Super-Duper Extra Credit: A special issue of an academic journal (20)

10^th anniversary bonus categories! TBA at the 6-month mark

19.

20. 

 The Rules 

The challenge starts on January 1, 2024 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2024. 

There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge, and five “extra credit” categories for over-achievers. Two of these categories are currently TBD and will be decided by challenge-participants in June.   

 The academic books must be at least 175 pages long . 

Novels must be at least 200 pages long 

Books of poetry or special issues of journals must be at least 100 pp. long 

One book can be a children's or YA book. 

To decide whether a book is academic, look for something published by a university press, or check the acknowledgments for references to scholarly mentors and anonymous readers. 

 Any book on the list, except where specified otherwise, can be a novel, book of poetry, or a complete journal issue as long as it fits the general category 

Books can only count for one category, but you can switch them from one category to the other before you’re done if you like. (In other words, you cannot count a book by your friend who wrote a book about the 2016 election for both the "book about an election" and the "by a friend" categories.) 

Only one book can be something you’ve read before 

Audiobooks are fine as long as they are unabridged and the print edition is at least 175 pages long. Books must be started no earlier than midnight 1/1/24 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2024

The Points: This isn't a competition, but some find this motivating, so if you're counting… 

Total possible points for 1-15 without any extra points: 200 

Total possible points for all extra-credit: 270 (after adding the last two categories in the summer)