24 in 48 Reading Challenge - the Day After

I'm in the midst of writing a piece about how academics can use reading challenges to broaden their professional reading and enhance their quality of life, and, just as I finished the first draft of my piece, I saw that the 24in48 reading challenge was starting the next day. Of course, I had to join it, ready or not.

 What I found most challenging about this challenge was using technology to prove/record my reading, and also the social media aspect. Since I kept the timer on only when I was actually reading and pressed "stop" if I was doing something else (refilling my coffee, talking to my husband), I don't know how people also did this challenge while posting their updates on social media. What I probably enjoyed most about the challenge was finding another way to get away from distraction that isn't the Pomodoro technique, because of the practice of keeping a stop-watch going without requiring yourself to go 25 minutes without a break. This allows you to monitor how much of your reading time is really spent reading, if you are good about stopping the clock as soon as your eyes leave the page.  However, the downside of the stopwatch method is that I accidentally turned it off while I was reading for 15 minutes on the first day, and more disastrously accidentally reset the stop-watch after 6 hours and 15 minutes (+the unclocked 15).

 Anyway, I mostly used it to finish books I was half-way through, so I didn't read a single book from start-to-finish, which was a little unsatisfying. Since I was doing primarily academic reading, I also took longhand notes as I was going, which made my pace pretty slow. Despite that, I read a total of 664 pages and listened to 6 hours and 12 minutes of Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes. In hard copies, I finished Marjorie Spruill's Divided We Stand; the Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values that Polarized American Politics , James Forman's Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America; and Omar El Akkad's American War. I started, but didn't quite finish George Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses and at the very end of the challenge, when I decided I was too tired to effectively read Mosse, I got 65 pages into Billy Wayne Sinclair and Jodi Sinclair, A Life in the Balance: The Billy Wayne Sinclair Story, which I've had on my shelf for a long time because it was cited in some other book I read. It turns out to be not at all what I had expected. 

A week's worth of reading and reader-chat

I haven't posted here in a long time. I've been reading a ton lately, and also participating a new kind of online reading challenge: the readathon. Towards the end of July I participated in the 24 in 48 readathon and barely made it to the end on time.

Next week, I'll be joining the Bout of Books, a week-long reading challenge with origins in a blog run by fans of paranormal fiction, but which I think you can participate in while reading anything you like.  Here's how the organizers describe the project :

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, August 21st and runs through Sunday, August 27th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 20 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

It's not clear to me what the goals are for this challenge, but I'll participate by posting updates about what I'm reading next week, along with my usual music match-ups. I'll also post my responses to their social media challenges here as the week goes along.  Right now, I've just started a new semester, and I always revise my courses, so a fair portion of my "bout" is going to be reading around the edges of my own syllabuses.  

Who are the white women who voted for DJT?

I met one in the airport last night. Let’s call her Nancy. She is a white upper-class woman, who told me, during the course of our conversation at the airport bar that she makes over 100k per year. When we first met, she seemed nice enough and said she was eager to hear what I had to say about the state of the country. Before I answered her question, I asked her what side she was on and she said she had voted for Donald Trump.

I asked her why, and most of what she said was not substantive. She wanted a “change”, said that “He is imploding the whole thing” which she didn’t seem to think was bad, though she admitted to being worried about his personal instability. Her main issue was not immigration, but as far as she’s concerned, she earned her money, and she shouldn’t have to pay taxes for other people’s health care. It’s morally wrong, according to her, that people are not denied service at Emergency Rooms even if they can’t pay. “They are never turned away!” She said, “it’s not right!” She rejected any reflection on what this said about her moral priorities when I asked directly, “so your money is more important than someone’s life?” She just repeated: “Health care is not a right,” insisting that the high costs of medical care for her are based on paying for other people’s care (rather than for profits of private health care providers.) “I don’t want to pay $50 for a box of tissues because other people don’t pay for their healthcare.”

I tried to explain to her that our health care is more expensive than what it costs in other countries with public health care or insurance, and how the lack of insurance drives up ER use (though it turns out, this is a myth). She was having none of it, flatly denying that other countries have figured out how to pay less for health care. I talked a bit about Single Payer and she denied it reduced costs, but then the conversation took a conspiratorial turn. She went on that the secret of Obamacare was that it was intentionally set up to “not work” so that we would be forced to go to Single Payer. I told her this was ridiculous, suggesting that private insurance companies and the protection of their profits by BOTH parties was the reason that Obamcare didn’t work. When I asked her where she got her information about the secret plan to make Obamcaare not work she said, “don’t you know, the architect of Obamacare, he said it himself….you know, the Jewish guy.”

Maybe it was the look in her eye, or the tone of her voice, or the fact that I’d been reading Rebecca West this week, but I was done with politely listening to the other side. She protested that she had many “Dear Jewish friends.”

In Rebecca West’s post-war essays collected in A Train of Powder, there is a comment from someone she describes as an able Jew who had returned to Berlin after the war. I think he explained a voter like this one pretty clearly:

You see, under the Nazis, strangers did not come by night and take you away unless you were a Jew or an important Social Democrat, or an important liberal or a party member who had got in with the wrong higher ups. If you were not a Jew or a conspicuous politician or party member, and were an unimaginative person as well, you did not realize what this meant, and perhaps persuaded yourself that it didn’t really happen. And if you were a sufficiently unimportant German, who only knew the people next door, and had no Jewish friends, and never joined the party, then you might very well never get any intimation that it really did happen . (Rebecca West, “Greenhouse with Cyclamens II, 1949)

And today it is only ICE that is knocking on the doors of the homes, schools and churches of immigrants, and only “random individuals” who burn down Mosques or shoot Black people in church, or call bomb threats to the Jewish community centers, and the President and his cronies only advocate the silencing of protesters and newspapers who oppose them, or who dare to criticize the police. But voters like Nancy can live in their bubbles, spending their money happily on their comforts, while others suffer, invisible, outside the boundaries of their limited imaginations.

2016's Reading Tally and Reflections

It's time to quantify and analyze the year's reading

As of  5 pm or so on New Year's eve, I've read 92 books for the year. Here's what I read in the various overlapping categories.

In 2016, I read 29 books for research (not teaching), and 30 academic books in total, counting books read for teaching, research, book reviews, and reading challenges. I read 44 books for either teaching, reviews or research this year. My 29456 pages of reading (according to goodreads) meant reading about 80 pages per day, though with footnotes, I think this really means about 60 pages per day, which is what I strive for in daily reading on week days, going to 90 per day on Friday and Saturday. This does not count books I re-read for teaching. I did two reading challenges, my own academic reading challenge and Book Riot's Read Harder, for a total of 40 books. 

   I wound up doing less reading for work than I did in 2015, when I read 36 research-related books. Of course, I only count books I read completely, so many of the other reading-for-work that I did meant books I didn't read in their entirety, such as the big chunks of Ernst Bloch I read, which were probably the books that had the most impact on my thinking about my project.  I've been working on an essay that's given me trouble because it's new disciplinary territory for me, and it's been slowing me down. Also, with all the drama of the election year, I spent more time reading the news than I had done in 2015, and felt more urgency about reading about contemporary politics than I did about the reading challenge, especially this fall.

In 2016,  listened to 15 audio books, mostly while driving to and from work.  Regardless of format, I read 9 mysteries and 10 works of literary fiction, as well as much more non-mystery genre fiction than I've read in the past, including horror and science-fiction. I also read 6 graphic novels or comics, 6 books by friends and acquaintances, 8 general non-fiction books and 5 memoirs. I reviewed 4 books this year for academic and /or political journals. As in 2012 and 2015 most of the books I read were by white people (80 out of 92).  These don't count, but I also read 7 dissertations - some of which will make excellent books.  The split between men (54) and women (38) was the same as in 2015.  I read 12 academic books that I would likely have not read when I did because I read them for one of the two challenges. Most of these were books that I will wind up using for teaching, or possibly in future research, if in an unexpected way. For example, Bethany Moreton's book on Walmart wound up helping me with the article I'm still working on because of what it says about populism, AND, I'm using it in my research methods class this coming Spring.


Other than the revelation of Ernst Bloch, I'd say that my baker's dozen favorite books of the year, in no particular order were: 

The aforementioned,  To Serve God and Walmart by Bethany Moreton. (Book Riot's Read Harder challenge - book about religion) I had seen Moreton give a talk on this project when she was a graduate student, and was already blown away. I also recommended this book to a student in my undergrad class who was writing her term paper about her job at Walmart, where she is a third-generation employee from the same store. She loved it!

Sarah Haley's No Mercy Here (book bought in the last 6 months - bought at a the OAH conference in April 16)  - which I plan to teach in the fall in my seminar on prison studies.  This book about Black women prisoners on chain gangs in GA is simply amazing for unearthing an untold story, as well as for the force of its analysis.

Viet Than Nguyen's The Sympathizer  (for Read Harder - book by author from Southeast Asia) -  I taught this in my undergrad class last fall as an illustration of transnationalism. It brought a couple of the undergraduates to wake up a bit, but I think I loved it much more than they did. 

Dan Berger's Captive Nation  (book by a friend) - which I'll teach part of next fall. This is another book that brings forward an untold story from a place where such stories seem hard to access. 

Eric Tang's Unsettled, (as a teaching possibility). I didn't wind up using it myself, but recommended to a friend who did use it. This short little book about Cambodian refugees in the Bronx is both great as a narrative and for analytical contributions that are already having an impact on many scholars.

David McNally's Global Slump ,(book bought over a year ago - at the Left Forum in 2012)  I've imagined an entire class around it for Spring 2018. A succinct and careful analysis of both the causes of the 2008 financial collapse and the resistance it is still inspiring. Essential reading in the years to come.

Lucia Trimbur's Come Out Swinging  (sports ethnography)  I used a chapter from in my undergrad class this fall. I really enjoyed reading books about sports this year. This one brings together analysis of class, race ,and gender in the context of gentrification, incarceration, and unemployment and also includes great commentary on social theory and ethnographic practice more generally. 

Chandan Reddy's Freedom with Violence (book of theory) -  I used a chapter in my grad class this fall, It was way over my students'  heads. Next year, I will likely use the Youtube of his talk on Gay marriage at ASA.  This book also brings together a number of important threads - intersections between Gay Rights, immigrant political strategy, foreign policy, and legal history. It's made a massive impact on the field of American Studies.

Audra Simpson's Mohawk Interruptus  (indigenous studies)  which I used a chapter from in my undergrad class this fall.  This book contains one of the best discussions of the biases of anthropology that I have read yet, along with amazing discussions of the place of Native people between the US and Canadian border, as they travel from place to place.

Laurent Binet's HHhH, (novel about your research subject). This is an unusual novel about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich that doubles back to comment on the nature of representation of reality as soon as images are created in the reader's mind. I I'd love to teach in a historical methods course.

David Roediger's short summation of most of his academic work: How Race Survived U.S. History I used it as a core text in my undergrad class, and it worked very well to inspire discussion.  It brings together a lot of this great scholar's recent thinking about the intertwined relationships of race and class. 

Calavita and Jenness, Appealing to Justice.  I'll probably use a chapter from in my class in fall 2017. This book about the internal prison appeals system is another one that shows how much can be done to include voices of prisoners in scholarship on prison, and it includes some excellent comments about why this is not done more, including references to articles about how the IRB is used to make it difficult to do research on prisons. It also includes fascinating analysis of guards' views of prisoners. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in looking at how bureaucracies work.

Janice Radway's Reading the Romance  (classic in your field that you haven't read) which I read only part of in graduate school in a seminar when it was assigned, but which I devoured this summer. This book is, as many reviewers note, pretty dated, but it combines a sharp textual analysis of romances with the analysis of a small community of readers. It is much less populist than I had originally thought when I first read it.



and with that, friends. I'll stop. It's time to start reading for 2017. Happy New Year's Reading to You!  

 If you did the challenge and want to talk about it - please make a comment! 

  

Reb's academic reading challenge for 2017

Another year is almost done, which means it's time to release the chart for next year's academic reading challenge.  See below for rules, rationale, and a handy chart to keep track of your reading.  If you want a word doc with the chart on it, send me a message with your email address. As I get to the end of my own reading year, I'll do some summing up posts and invite report backs from anyone who finished the 2016 challenge.

 Rationale:

This is a challenge I created 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. Maybe you're a geek and you like to read scholarly literature. 

The challenge starts on January 1,  2017 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2017 at 11:59!

. There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge with three “extra credit” categories for over-achievers.  There are also double-points available in a few categories.

Rules and guidelines:

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.

Any book on the list, except where specified by category, can be a novel 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 can't count a book by your friend who wrote about food for both the food and "by a friend" category)

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 200 pages long.

Books must be started no earlier than midnight 1/1/17 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2017.

Points: This isn't a competition, but if you're counting…

Total possible points for 1-15 without "double-point bonuses" : 200. 

If you do all the double-point bonuses and do extra-credit, you can get the maximum of 260 points.

Category	Author	Title	pages	Date finished	points
1. A book by a friend or colleague					10
2.  A book you first saw in a Social media post or heard about on a podcast, or radio show					10
3. A classic in your field or book you see cited often but have never read					10
4. An academic book about a (non-human) animal or animals					20
5. A book that you've started in the past but never finished					10
6.  A work of literary fiction published in the last five years (bonus points if it's published outside the U.S or the U.K )					10 (20)
7.  A book about a subject or field that you study, but in a country that you don't usually study (bonus points for books published outside the US/UK)					20 (30)
8.  A book about popular culture outside the United States or England					20
9. A book about an immigrant or migrant community					10
10.  A book by a prisoner or formerly incarcerated person					10
11,  A book in your field or current research project published since 2013					10
12.  A book in your field or current research project published before 1980					20
13. A book about religion					20
14. An academic book about sex, sexuality, sex work; OR about food, agriculture or food-service work (Double points if you manage to read one of each, or to combine them - a book about sexy food)					10 (20)
15. A book about teaching, pedagogy, or an ethnographic study of students and/or teachers					10
16.  Extra Credit:  A book that you loved as a child or teenager, but that you haven't read since then					10
17. Extra, EXTRA credit : Read a web comic every week for a year					10
18. Super Duper Extra Credit: A book that you bought on a whim   double points  if you experienced this whim a year ago or more but still haven't read the book					5 (10)

Reading Suggestions for the Electoral College

The electoral college chooses the president of the United States on December 19th. A number of arguments are being made about whether it would make sense to abolish the electoral college in the future, for the electoral college to act as "Hamilton electors" (and choose someone that nobody voted for) or for the electoral college to follow the popular vote and elect Hillary Clinton president. Now Drumpf has claimed, following conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones, that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote because "illegal" people voted for. her  This latest tweet storm suggests that for the Drumpf followers, many of us aren't "real" Americans at all.

With that said, here are my suggested readings for the electoral college.

Frances Fox-Piven is a bugbear for the far-right, but that is only because she presents such compelling arguments that they cannot get her on evidence, thus they resort to conspiracy theories and ad-hominem attacks. Since her famous book with Richard Cloward, Why Americans Don't Vote, she has produced two updated works, first Why Americans Still Don't Vote, and most recently, Keeping Down the Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters. Since false claims of voter-fraud have played a significant role in this election, this may be the first stop for the electoral college in deciding how democratic this process of election has really been, and where exactly the Constitutional crisis began.

Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night concerns the dynamics of collaboration with an evil regime, regardless of intention, with the moral that "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." I haven't read the book, but came across it in a discussion of the German physicists who continued to work for the Nazis throughout the war, and how it was they believed that what they did wasn't as important, as what they meant. But no, I agree with the author, what people actually do is much more important than how they feel about it, or what they mean deep inside.  Along with this, they might also read Hannah Arendt's famous essay, Eichmann in Jerusalem.

This is a long one, but seems important in light of the recent laser-focus on the electoral college and the possibility that voting otherwise than in recent past-practice would provoke a Constitutional crisis that could imperil democracy (more so than the threats presented by the president elect). Michael Klarman's Framer's Coup explains how the Constitution was meant not to increase, but to deter democracy. It builds on arguments first put forward by Charles and Mary Beard, popularized for this generation by Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and then more recently explained in detail by Woody Holton who is also the author of one my favorite books on the American Revolution,, Forced Founders.  According to the review linked above, Klarman presents more documentary evidence than the prior accounts.

And finally, for the specific threat posed by Drumpf himself, perhaps they might want to read this book, Trump Unveiled which is currently on sale for just $1 from OR books.

And for the listening portion of this edition of reading & listening, here is the German band Die Artze, whose anti-fascist song of the 1990s, "Schrei Nach Liebe" gained new popularity in Germany following fascist attacks on Syrian refugees last year.

What I'm reading now. - back to school reading blog

  I ran into one of this blog's regular readers at the bookstore the other day, and he wanted to know what I am reading now. It's rare that someone who's not your student actually asks for a copy of a syllabus, so this reminded me that I've been negligent about posting here. I don't have much of an excuse. I'm 6 books behind in my Goodreads challenge.  One of my bad habits is reading too many books at once, which often means that I don't finish all of them, but I do try to keep reading in a few categories at all times.

For teaching, I just finished reading a book that's really valuable for anyone teaching the hard to define introduction to American Studies class, Paul Lauter's book From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park. Lauter is an American Studies veteran. He's an emeritus professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, has been the president of the American Studies Association, and also general editor of the original and now legendary, Heath Anthology of American Literature. This is a collection of essays published in 2001, based on essays and talks given at various spaces during Lauter's long academic career.. For anyone teaching American Studies, or American Literature, it's very helpful not necessarily as a source of essays to put on your syllabus, but because of how it prods reflection about what your overall objectives in a course might be. That is, how do you want to help students approach texts? What kinds of questions do you want them to ask? What are the politics of teaching and reading literature - what are the politics, conscious or unconscious, of your own course?  The essays cover a variety of topics, including critical readings of texts, discussions of real-world academic labor unions, and the contemporary state of the field in American Studies, including a somewhat unorthodox take on academic priorities of transnationalism and exceptionalism. If I were teaching an American Studies pedagogy class at the graduate level, this would be on my syllabus. This would also be a book I would choose for a faculty group who wanted to learn more about the field.

For research: I just cracked open Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class? I'm kind of embarrassed that I never read this when it came out, and though I thought it was old hat, it seems as if reception studies may be making a comeback. I was recently instructed by an anonymous reader of an article I'm working on that I need to read more reader-response criticism to frame my findings in my own reader-reception study project, so I decided I should make my way through it. I often find Stanley Fish's writing about academia and politics to be pompous and odious, but I'm already finding much of use in this book regarding the process of reading, and I hate to say it, but I think that given my argument in my own work-in-progress, that I will probably also read his newest book Winning Arguments and find it useful. Earlier in the summer, I read Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, which I had partially read in graduate school in the 1990s, and found it refreshing and still relevant. Radway has also written a more recent essay that appears in a good and wide-ranging edited collection New Directions in American Reception Study. What I especially like about this field of interdisciplinary scholarship on literature is how useful it is for thinking about students' encounters with texts.

   For my book project, I've just started, and am impressed by, but have little to say yet about Laurent Binet's historical novel, HHhH, about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

For the Academic Reading Challenge:

  For the category of a book about places that are being discussed in the presidential election foreign policy debates , I'm reading Patrick Cockburn's collection of reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the production of ISIS: Chaos and Caliphate.  Cockburn writes for the British newspaper The Independent.  At 90 pages in,  this selection of his writing from the 1990s to the present, makes it clear that Americans have too easily forgotten and ignored the horrors of the pre-2003 sanctions regime in Iraq, as well as the subsequent and ongoing wars. This book is valuable because it both offers vivid reporting of how the ongoing wars have affected individuals as well as the larger international relationships, leadership decisions, and political conflicts that are driving the situation.