This isn't an experience of synchronicity, but I couldn't help thinking of King Gizz's excellent "There is no Planet B" while finishing up the chapter "Dumpster Fire Space Utopia" in Adam Becker's also excellent More Everything Forever
In this chapter, he quotes Martin Rees who argues "it's a dangerous delusion to to think that space offers an escape from Earth's problems. We've got to solve these problems here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it's a doddle compared to terraforming Mars."
I'm a little late posting this year, but we are still doing the Academic Reading Challenge and the 2025 categories are here. If you want to be in on the choosing or discuss what you read for those categories, 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 about resistance to dictatorships, authoritarian rule, etc (any discipline) (10)
3.A book about borders (and why they're bad) (20)
4. A memoir or novel by a refugee, child of refugees, immigrant or child of immigrants (in any country) (10)
5. A book about medical care, medicine or healthcare policy(20)
6. A book with a provocative title and/or cover, double points if you read it in public (10/20)
7. A book about Reconstruction (in the US after the Civil War) and its overthrow (20)
8.A biography of someone who isn’t famous (20)
9. A book about a specific region within any country (10)
10.A book by, or about a personal hero or heroes (double points if they fall outside of politics) (10/20)
11.A biography of an artist (broadly defined: visual artists; novelists; dancers; musicians) (10)
12. A book about where you live now, or the place you consider your hometown. (10)
13. A novel that deals centrally with the natural world(10)
14.A book by an author who was fired or suspended from their job, denied an award, or disinvited from an awards event, or otherwise de-platformed or dishonored due to their support for Palestine. (20)
15.A book about computers, AI or new media (YouTube, social media, etc) (10)
Extra Credit:
16. Extra-Credit: A book about a country that's no longer there (20)
17. Extra Extra-Credit: A book about crime (10)
18. Super-Duper Extra Credit: An academic book about games and/or gaming (either video or table-top) (20)
The Rules
The challenge starts on January 1, 2025 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2025.
There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge, and three “extra credit” categories for over-achievers.
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 for both 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 1/1/25 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2025
The Points: This isn't a competition, but some find this motivating, so if you're counting…
In case you're wondering what makes some books worth 20 and some books worth 10 points, it's all about how difficult it might be to find books in that category.
Total possible points for 1-15 without any extra points: 200
Total possible points w/3 extra-credit: 250
Total possible points w/ extra credit and extra points for 1-15: 270
I had an OK year of reading this year, though I was pretty slow with some books - like Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus, which took me forever! I wound up reducing my original reading goal on Goodreads from 103 to 100 and only got to 100 by reading a number of big comic books (sometimes called graphic novels, though two of these were non-fiction so wouldn't fit that description).
I'll go ahead and link to my Goodreads Year in Books.
It shows the results of my preliminary research on my "geek wars" book project - reading some classics in the field of fan studies, like Matt Hill's game-changing Fan Cultures which is one that I see cited in a lot of contemporary books, such as Benjamin Woo's Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture, which was a great place to start on a review of the recent scholarly literature.I also read Quinn Slobodian's excellent and very readable Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy as research on the right-wing of geekdom. Partly because I was prioritizing that project this year, I also decided to read as many of the Hugo finalists as possible before attending the Glasgow World Con in August. Hardly any of my choices did well this year. I had voted for the Saint of Bright Doors which I didn't actually finish, but which was so much better than the other novels simply based on character depth, writing at the sentence level and general concept that it was a very easy choice. For me, the rest of the challenge was deciding which of the several nominees were the worst, since I thought several of the nominated novels were actually bad. I did like Arkady Martine's novella Rose/House much better than her Hugo-winning novel, A Memory Called Empire, which for me, was a slog.
Another influence on last year's reads was my participation in two book clubs through a local indie bookstore - one science fiction and one literary fiction. If I had managed to read them all, this would have been 24 of the books I read last year, though I wasn't able to particpate every month. I read 11 of the literary fiction club books, having missed the August book (The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden) because I was traveling at the time. For the SF book club, I missed more, reading 8 of the 12. Of the book club books I read this year, my favorite in science fiction were Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, most of which I read while hanging out at my mother-in-law's last summer, Samuel Delany's Nova, and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. I had expected to really like Octavia Butler's Wild Seed because I usually like her books, but this one just wasn't my favorite. It felt repetitive in places and sometimes the main character's motivations were hard to understand. For that group, I started but did not finish Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers which I just didn't like and A. Lee Martinez's The Automatic Detective which I really did enjoy, but just didn't have time for, and 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, which was probably just too long given the time I had to read it. I didn't even start Fire Upon the Deep because I was out of town for a conference. In the lit fiction book club, the standouts were Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton; Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland; Louise Kennedy's Trespasses; and Bunny by Mona Awad - except for the ending, which I found really disappointing.
I just barely managed to finish the academic reading challenge, partly by counting books I had read along the way without realizing they had fulfilled the categories. Of those books that I read intentionally for the challenge, the best were Regina Kunzel's In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (book about mental health/illness); Red Hot City: Housing Race and Exclusion in 21st Century Atlanta by Dan Immergluck (book about housing, homelessness, etc), which I think every person who lives in this city should read; Rebecca Godfrey's Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk, a frightening page-turner, which I read for the category of a place I've visited for under a month, since I spent a couple of days visiting a friend in Victoria many years ago, and Rashid Khalidi's The Hundred Years War on Palestine (book by a Palestinian author). Others I read for the reading challenge were also really good, including the The Man Who Caught the Storm about storm-chaser Tim Samaras, who died tragically while tracking a massive tornado in Oklahoma (book about weather and/or weather prediction). Of course, I love Jane Austen I read Northanger Abbey for the category "book written before 1900," and now because of reading her for the academic reading challenge year after year, I have read all but one of her completed novels.
I read some other random books while doing things like flying on airplanes and riding trains. Of these, I really enjoyed Brendan Slocumb's The Violin Conspiracy, which had some predictable turns and clunky moments, but was still entertaining and interesting because of its representation of racial dynamics in the world of classical music. I finally read Percival Everett's sharp and hilarious Erasure prior to seeing American Fiction. I admit to being charmed by Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, which was read sort of for fun and sort of for work. My major guilty pleasure-read this year was Riley Sager's Home Before Dark, which I read on the plane coming back from England. I liked pretty much all the graphic novels I read, but for a new series, I especially enjoyed Amy Chu's new take on Sheridan Le Fanu's classic, Carmilla.
A book that continues to influence the conversation on fascism is Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem which began in the New Yorker magazine in 1963.
Some of Erving Goffman's most important works were published in the 1960s.
Another landmark 1960s activist book is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, first published in 1961.
Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me , published in 1966, is a 60s classic and one of my favorite novels from my teen years, though I haven't read it in quite a while.
This entry's official song is "Sympathy for the Devil," a 60s song inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita which was actually written in Russian between 1928 and 1941, though the English translation could qualify as "written in the 60s."
Science fiction also went through a radical transformation in the 1960s. The landmark collection Dangerous Visions (edited by Harlan Ellison) came out in 1967. Several of Samuel R. Delany's more accessible books came out in the 1960s. Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness was first published in 1969.
There are many lists that you can peruse for important fiction and popular non-fiction of the 1960s. Lit Hub is always a great place to look. Here is their list of The 10 Books that Defined the 1960s which is followed by a lengthy list of additional books published in that decade.
When we chose the category book about mental health or illness, I don't think I really understood the potentially huge number of books that could count. This could include works of fiction, studies of individuals, academic books about mental health or illness from a variety of perspectives.
In other words, this list should not be considered exhaustive in any way. Pretty much any honest or reflective book about human experience could be considered a book about mental health or mental illness, though some will be more explicit through framing the subject in those terms. The books listed are the ones that I first thought of, as well as books suggested by other challenge members.
There are some obvious academic classics you could consider,
Freud may get a bad rap as a sexist, and wrong about everything, but his writing is actuallyinteresting and mostly accessible. Reading anything's he's written can provide you with an understanding of the history of psychiatry. His influence on our culture, regardless of how much psychiatry and psychology have changed, remains massive.
Another couple of classic works of theory aim to topple the empire of Freud. These are Foucault's History of Sexuality part one, which takes on Freud's "repression hypothesis" and the entire method of psychoanalysis, as well as Madness and Civilization, which identifies this binary as central to modernity.
Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipusis a major critique of the Freudian model of psychoanalysis that has also been influential in academia.
Alicia Elliot's memoir, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground which connects mental health and illness to Mohawk experience and settler colonialism.
Susan Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, a literary memoir about the experience of being locked in a mental institution in the late 1960s.
Alan Reeve's Notes from a Waiting Room, published in 1983, is a memoir chronicling the author's 17 years in the UK's Broadmoor mental institution, his eventual escape, and his engagement with radical politics.
Other memoirs that readers in the challenge have read include comedian, Fern Brady's Strong Female Character and novelist, Viet Thanh Nguyen's A Man with Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. Both of these look fascinating to me. I really loved Nguyen's novel the Sympathizer, and had seen it was out, but didn't realize that the Man With Two Faces is a memoir. A couple of years ago, for a book club, I read Claire Vaye Watkins' I Love You, But I've Chosen Darkness which is about post-partum depression, among other things. I didn't love the book, but it did leave a lasting impression.
Kaysen's book got higher marks than Sylvia Plath's classic novel, The Bell Jar which one of our challengers read, but left non-plussed. I remember being very moved by it as a teenager in the 1980s, but I haven't read it since then, and today if you bop around the web, you will see people assailing it for its casual racism.
I haven't posted here in a while because I've been trying to get some research done and have been having a pretty busy summer. I will get back to posting cateogry recommendations soon. However, the big news is that the challenge FB group has voted on the the 2 10th anniversary bonus extra-credit categories. These are
19: A book about class and 20. A book about natural disaster and/or natural disaster response.
The complete list is here:
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) 10th anniversary bonus categories! 19. A book about class 20. A book about natural disaster and/or natural disaster response
I didn't read as much as I had hoped to during the bout of books week, considering that this time of year is generally a good one for me to be reading. I think the main problem was that I started with Isaac-Dovere's Battle for the Soul, which I made some headway in, though I'm beginning to find it to be a a slog.
However, I did finish Michael Gould Wartofksy's The Occupiers, which I was reading to prepare for my fall seminar, and found it quite a quick and informative study. I'm looking forward to teaching it. I also finished the audiobook of Ian Rankin's Strip Jack, which I had almost finished, but then forgot about for a while - not the best Rankin mystery. I also started reading John Scalzi's Starter Villain, which is quite entertaining. Not only is it nominated for the best novel Hugo (though I doubt I'll be voting for it), but the artist who did the cover, Tristan Ellwell is also nominated for best professional artist.
