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) 

2023 Reading Challenge Wrap-Up

 

Here's what I read for the 2023 academic reading challenge. 

I'm only posting links for the academic or lesser known books I read

 1. Book by a friend, colleague, former teacher or former student 10: Alisha Gaines, Black for a Day: White Fantasies of Race and Empathy

 2. A literary classic 10  Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

 3. An adaptation of a literary classic  (double points if you read an adaptation of the same book you read for  category 2) 10,20: Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead 

 4. A book about the natural environment that draws on academic research 20 : Lyndsie Bourgon, Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods

 5. A book about care-giving for humans or non-human animals 10 Gabriel Winant, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America

 6.A book that, when written, was set in the future, which is now a date in the past 10 P.D. James, Children of Men

 7.  A book by someone who was a refugee, exile, or asylum seeker 10: Alfred Wetzler, Escape from Hell: the True Story of the Auschwitz Protocol

 8. An academic book originally written in a language other than English  20: Michael Wildt,  Hitler's Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion

 9. A book about fashion 20 Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit

 10.  A book about anti-fascism or other opposition to the far-right 20 Thomas Doherty, Hollywood and Hitler

 11.  A book about grief  10: Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk

 12. A book about something considered “low brow” or “kitsch” 10 Kathleen Hale, Slenderman

 13. A book about anti-Semitism 10: Edward Berenson,  The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town

 14. A book about sound, hearing and/or about hearing loss (could be sound studies, musicology, scientific analysis of hearing/deafness, about the deaf community)  20  - Leah Hager Cohen, Train Go Sorry

 15. A book about colonialism and/or empire 10 ; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents

 EXTRA CREDIT: 

16:  Extra-Credit: A book you saw someone reading in public 20 (didn't do it!, but saw someone reading Blood Meridian. I bought a copy, but then just didn't have time to read it) 

17.  Extra-Extra-Credit  :A play 10 - Bertolt Brecht, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui

18.  Super-Duper Extra Credit:  A book about, or set in, Scandinavia 10 (didn't even decide on something to read)

(details after the video) 

    It turned out that most of my favorite reads of the year were from doing this challenge. I had a pretty "blah" year of reading, but in a final rush to finish the challenge starting during Thanksgiving break, I wound up reading some fantastic books: Train Go Sorry by Leah Hager Cohen was a real revelation. It was first published in 1997, but I can see from internet commentary that it is still a staple of syllabuses in ASL classes and is widely used as an introduction to deaf culture for hearing students. In addition to describing the "deaf world," the book is truly "intersectional" in its analysis and is beautifully written. I recommend it to everyone.

   I also loved H is for Hawk, which I'd heard great things about but only now found time to read on the last two days of the year. I knew nothing about falconry, but I had read T.H. White obsessively as a "tween" and loved getting more background information on him, and seeing the influence of falconry on his fiction. Macdonald's story of her own emotional life is beautifully told.

  Ashley Mears' Very Important People and Lyndsie Bourgon's Tree Thieves were both surprisingly good - academically rigorous, truly disturbing,  and also "gripping" reads that were hard to put down. Very Important People could be considered a kind of "workplace ethnography" - even though it's about party culture. She also uses Thorstien Veblen to great effect. Bourgon's Tree Thieves is marketed almost like true crime, but has something like an abolitionist perpsective. I learned a lot about trees, forest ecology, and the economy of the timber industry, as well as the history of timber poaching, which I didn't realize was a "thing."  Also in the low-key abolitionist register, Kathleen Hale's Slenderman, which is really about the legal system's complete failure to address mental illness, was both fascinating - and enraging - to read. 

  I've been writing a book on anti-fascism, and there were a few books for that research that I managed to include in my challenge categories this year. Thomas Doherty's Hollywood and Hitler is an essential read for anyone interested in how Hollywood moguls, writers and actors responded to the rise of Nazi Germany. Alfred Wetzler's book Escape from Hell, originally published in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, and only recently translated into English, tells the story of a little-known escape from Auschwitz and the report to the alllies that Wetzler and his comrade, Rudolph Vrba risked their lives to deliver. Bertolt Brecht's satire of Hitler through the machinations of the Chicago "cauliflower trust" was, as expected, darkly funny, though I always have a hard time getting a sense of a play from simply reading it without ever seeing it performed. Finally, Michael Wildt's book on the Nazis' effort to create a "people's community" was an important intervention into historical debates about the extent to which "average Germans" participated in Nazi anti-Semitism. 

  I had wanted to read Lisa Lowe's Intimacies of Four Continents for a long time, and finally got to it early in the year- and wound up using it in my grad seminar on "literature of the Americas." My friend Alisha Gaines' brilliant book on weird projects by white people trying to learn to be empathic across the color line by doing experiments (the most famous being John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me) was truly fascinating - another book I could imagine teaching.  Gabriel Winant's book on the economic transformation of the rust-belt was one of the best academic books I read all year - another book that managed to skillfully interweave race, class and gender. 

  I hadn't read an entire Dickens novel in many years, and I absolutely loved David Copperfield, and felt dipping into it every morning was a luxurious experience for the prose alone. While I liked Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, which I'd heard great things about from a few friends, I found it hard not to compare it to Dickens. I might have liked it better if I hadn't read the original and enjoyed it so much. 

Bout of Books 39 to start off a New Year of Reading

 

Yes, I'm again joining Bout Of Books. What's Bout of Books?

The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 1st and runs through Sunday, January 7th in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, daily Discord questions, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 39 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

My goals for this bout of books are to read my first book-club book of the year: Amanda Peters, The Berry Pickers and to read the two new books I've added to my syllabus for my prison studies class. These are Maurice Hobson, The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta and Anne Gray Fischer's The Streets Belong To Us. It looks like a big week for UNC press in my reading queue. I'll also try to finish the book I've been slowly reading at night: The Last Party by Claire Mackintosh, which I've been enjoying, but not prioritizing. I'm also starting my academic reading challenge this week, and will post about that soon.

BOB updates:

Monday Jan 1: 

  I started the Berry Pickers for book club. I also started re-reading Maurice Hobson's The Legend of the Black Mecca. At night, I read a few pages of the Last Party before falling asleep. In total, I probably read about 85 pages. 

Tuesday Jan 2: I read about 100 pages in The Berry Pickers, which I'm not loving. I read another small bit of The Legend of the Black Mecca, which I do like very much and which I think is going to work very well in the class I'm teaching. Again read a few pages of The Last Party - woke up when my ereader fell out of my hand. 

Wednesday Jan 3: I finished The Berry Pickers - and went to book-club to discuss it. I was so-so on this one. I found the characters and the writing itself to be a little flat, though I liked the concept of the book.

Thursday Jan 4: My prep for next week's classes took up the majority of my time, but I did manage to read the first 40 pages of Naomi Klein's Doppelganger. I picked up this book as a spanking new hardcover when I was on a quick trip to Asheville last fall. it's one of the books of 2023 that I most wanted to read. Once again, I fell asleep after a few pages of The Last Party. 

Friday Jan 5: before I got down to course prep, I read another 50 pages of Doppelganger. 

Saturday Jan 6: I read another 50 pages of Doppleganger and another 50 pages Hobson, The Legend of the Black Mecca.