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.