2018 Academic Reading Challenge

With 2018 just a month away, it's time to start planning for next year's academic reading challenge 

 This year, I've created more social media spaces for the reading challenge. 

You can 
follow the challenge on twitter @ReadingAcademic 
use hashtag #AcademicReadingChallenge2018 
or like us on facebook at: : https://www.facebook.com/AcademicReadingChallenge/
  There's also a group you can join if you are participating in the challenge, and there's a link to it on the public FB page for the group.

What it is and who it is for: 

This is a year long reading challenge with an emphasis on reading across disciplines. It serves a few different purposes depending on where you are in relation to formal university life. 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. This is the fourth year I've organized this challenge. The categories are crowd-sourced by a small group of friends each year on Facebook. 

  New this year:  Under the extra-credit section, you can now "rig the category" and read someone else's "rigged" category.  For task 16, you can retroactively create a category based on a book you just want to read anyway; and for 17, the task is to find another book in the rigged category for someone else's 16.  So, while in general, as a prof. I don't advise doing extra credit first, this time, it might be good to post your rigged category sooner rather than later - either here or 

Rules and Rationale:

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 starts on January 1^, 2018 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2018. 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 otherwise, 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 fascism for both the fascism and "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 200 pages long.

Books must be started no earlier than midnight 1/1/18 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2018.

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 categories, you can get a maximum of 260 points.

Categories for 2018

1. A book by a friend or colleague 10 points

2.  book on any colonizing society by a person from the place colonized by that society 10

3. A book about fascism or other political subject that you don’t like, but should read about for your own good 10 points

4. A book of economic history or theory 20 points

5.  A book with a number in the title (not a volume number) 10 points

6. A work of formally innovative literary fiction, such as experimental or avant-garde fiction 20 points (double points if published outside the US or UK)

7.   A literary biography or work of literary criticism 20 points

8. A book by the author whose biography you read, or a work of literature discussed in the book of literary criticism 20 points

9.  Academic or journalistic book on the same subject as a documentary film 10 points

10.  a book on whichever of these categories you don't usually read about in the US: race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, disability/ability 10 points

11. An academic book about any location in Asia or Africa (if you are in African or Asian Studies, read about a place or time that you don't normally read about, or read about the other continent) 10 points (Double points if about a topic about which you teach or do research)

12. Academic book published the year you were born 20 points

13.  A book about the place where you are at the moment you are reading it. Can be fiction, poetry or any academic discipline, including sciences.  (size of place should be city, town, region or state) 10 points

14.  A book about a climate change, or about environmentalist politics 10 points

15.  A 2017 winner of an academic book award, or any non-fiction book on a "best-of" list 10 points

EXTRA CREDIT:

16.  Extra Credit: Rig the Category: Read a book you'd read anyway, then make up (and share) the category to justify it  10 points

17. Extra, Extra Credit:  Read a book in the category of someone else's "rig the category" post 10 points

18. Super Duper Extra Credit: genre fiction or graphic novel related to your current academic project 10

10 Years in 10 Books for Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon 2012-2017

It's the last hour of Dewey's 24 hour readathon and time to finish my recommendations for books published in each year between 2007 and 2017.

2012: Although it was founded soon into Obama's presidency, the Tea Party became more central in the public eye in connection with the preparation for the 2012 presidential election. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's detailed study The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism is one of the best books on the subject.

2013: Another analysis of right-wing organizing that anticipated the rise of Gamergate and the growth of anti-feminist radicalism is Michael Kimmel's Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the end of an Era.


2014: Without a doubt the funniest comic I've read in the last several years, Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's Sex Criminals came out in its first trade collection in 2014. Here is an antidote to the generally paranoid and anxious right-wing cultural turn of the last six years, one that also shows us the positive and playful side of a left wing cultural movement that has been labeled as censorious and humorless by a growing backlash of right-wing activists.

2015: Sherrie Randolph's wonderful biography, Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical  is also something of an antidote to the books documenting the rise of the right.  Bringing back the story of this second-wave era Black feminist is an important corrective to a homogeneous narrative of the history of women's liberation as being about only led by "white middle class women."

2016: Christina Heatherton's and Jordan Camp's edited collection about police abolitionist movements and the global crisis in policing, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter is another important book for understanding the current moment. This includes both interviews with current activists and more academic studies of policing, inspired by the activist scholarship of Stuart Hall.

* 2017:  In a year when new fascist formations have been the subject of general alarm and countless quick research articles, Alexander Reid Ross's Against the Fascist Creep is the most detailed and historically informed of the books published on this subject. Run out and read it right now!

10 years in 10 books for Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon Part One: Books from 2007-2011

It's about 25 minutes before the official readathon start, and I'm doing this challenge from Dewey's 24 hour readathon. Since this blog is mostly for academic books, I will include a fair number of these, but they'll be things that I think might interest the readathon crew.

1. 2007: Ruthie Wilison Gilmore, The Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. This book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in mass incarceration. Gilmore has been involved in prison abolition activism for decades, and this book is the culmination of years of scholarship and activism. If you're not already convinced, here's a video:

2. 2008: Janice Peck, The Age of Oprah: Icon for theNeoliberal Era This is a book I've taught in the past, and it is always very, very popular with students. One of my former students even went to study with Peck for her PhD as a result of reading it. While this book is definitely about Oprah Winfrey, it is also a very clear explanation of neoliberalism that connects Oprah's particular version of self-help ideology to a history of pop psychology going back to the 19th century.

3. 2009: Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. I believe that this book won both the American History and American Studies first book prizes when it came out. It's another book about economics that is highly readable. It's an informative analysis of how this superstore developed through an ideological fusion of Christian evangelical religion and free market ideology.

4. 2010: Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. I'm teaching this book in a few weeks and it's one that is usually popular with my students. Kunzel's book is both historically informative and theoretically sophisticated, while also being readable. If you're interested in the history of sexuality, prisons, and social movements, this is a really valuable book.

5. 2011: What is a better way to remember 2011 than with N+1 collection, Occupy: Scenes from Occupied America ?  This book is a collection of short pieces produced during the Wall Street occupation and gives you the feeling of being there.

Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon Countdown

It's 29 days to the 10th annual.Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon. This will be my first time participating in it, and my third social-media based readathon of the year.

Here, I'll post my updates in the comments section instead of doing separate blog posts.

For now, I'll post what I think I'll be reading on October 21st, Philosopher, Kelly Oliver's Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human and possibly, a series of comics, or a graphic novel. Perhaps, to keep with the Animal Lessons theme, it will be Michael Tisserand's book on Krazy Kat, cartoonist, George Harrison: Krazy: George Herriman A Life in Black and White, or if I am going to engage in some research for my book, it will be anti-fascist history, because that is always appropriate. I guess I'll decide in a month. There's a lot out there.

Bout of Books - 7 Day Wrap Up

On Sunday, the last day of Bout of Books, I finally managed to do my usual daily reading minimum - 40 pages of a book that I am not teaching this semester. I read more about police violence in Sao Paolo, along with people's justifications for it in Teresa Caldeira's excellent City of Walls.  The problem of citizen-endorsement of police violence is global.

As far as the week's wrap-up goes, I was defeated by the hectic nature of the first weeks of a new school year.  In the summer, I was easily reading close to 100 pages a day. Last week, our second week of classes, despite my best efforts, I read less than 40 pages most days - with the exception of things I had assigned and was teaching. The immediate need to prepare for a class full of students will always drive every other goal to the margins, or, for me, to 5:00 am - and sometimes, I will have to get up that early just to be ready for a 6:30 pm seminar.  I'm hoping that I'll get used to the weekly routine and will be back to my serene morning reading soon.

Bout of Books Day 6, or Yesterday's News

Yesterday was a writing day for me, so I didn't read very much, unless you count re-reading. I'm working on an academic essay that includes a discussion of Weapons of Democracy by Jonathan Auerbach. Weapons is an intellectual history of how early 20th century US reformers and politicians understood the field of "public opinion", the mass media, and how they interacted with the newly created field of public relations. While many of us have heard of Edward Bernays and George Creel, this slim book could serve both as a new introductory text for people unfamiliar with this field, as well as being an original contribution to an ongoing discussion about the history of American media and the Progressive movement.  Auerbach is also the editor of a recent Handbook of Propaganda Studies, and his work seems especially relevant now, given the attention we are currently giving to the problem of "fake news" and the president's attacks on the press. I was surprised to read, for example, that Theodore Roosevelt had attacked investigative journalists of his time, inventing the term "muck-raker" to describe them in a speech to the Gridiron Club, where he" worked himself into a fever pitch over 'hysterical sensationalism' and against those 'wild preachers of unrest and discontent, the wild agitators against the entire existing order.' "

Saturday Morning Reading and Listening - Distracto-Machine

Just caught myself dancing at the standing desk while doing some long postponed reading for peer review.  This might make me a more generous reader. Let's see.

Bout of Books 5 - Friday Update

  As much as I wanted to continue reading today, my main reading that wasn't for teaching happened between 4:30 and 5:30 am, when I was reading the Russian Debutante's Handbook, before I could finally fall asleep again, and between 11 and midnight when I got back to it before bed. In this section of the book, our hero, Vladimir is organizing a literary magazine/Ponzi scheme in the ex-pat community of "Prava"  - the hipster scene in Prague of the 1990s.

   I can't believe it took me so long to read Shteyngart. For years, I bypassed paperback copies of this book on the shelves of my favorite Brooklyn used bookstores, never believing I had time to read it.  It was then, as a brand-new college professor that I most ascetically only read things that were related to work, whether for my own book-in-progress, or in order to teach classes in unfamiliar subjects that I was scheduled to teach with only weeks to go before the opening of a semester.  Now that I'm reading it, I would say it's both exactly the kind of book I like, and that it is in many ways close to my own personal history. Shteyngart's only a little bit younger than I am, so many of the cultural references of the 1990s are familiar. I knew some people who went to Prague and traveled to Eastern Europe during this era - the band I sang for in college played a song written by one of these folks, with the title "the Bucharest Blues." (chorus: "I got the Bucharest Blues/ I gotta get outta this place") During my assistant professor years, I briefly dated a scientist from Azerbaijan who'd moved to LA with his family shortly after the fall of the USSR  When he talked about his childhood, he told me he'd once aspired to be a "Soviet Man," passionately memorizing and reciting passages from Mayakovsky. The way he described it made it sound like an adolescent rite of passage, in the way that many in the US describe feverish teen-aged reading of another all-too-American Russian emigré, Ayn Rand. And, of course, as a CUNY professor, I had so many students from the former USSR. In my first two years living in Brooklyn, I taught developmental English classes in Brighton Beach, often called "Little Odessa"   Finally, it was after seeing them open for Manu Chao on Central Park's Summerstage in 2001, that I became a devotee of the "gypsy punk" Ukrainian band, Gogol Bordello, although despite years of hearing about it, I never made it to see Hutz DJ at the Bulgarian Bar.

 I finally gave myself the pleasure of reading the Russian Debutante's Handbook by making it part of work. That is, incorporated a section on US- Eastern European connections into my syllabus for American Studies this year, as part of my syllabus is meant to introduce students to theories of transnational American Studies through fiction. It seemed worthwhile to spend some time on the former USSR, given the current keen interest in our President's relationship with Russia. We'll be reading a short story by Molly Antopol, a chapter set in Shteyngart's Prava, and watching the movie made by a CUNY grad, Darko Lungulov called Here and There, which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival years ago. I imagine that this urban cosmopolitanism will be as foreign to my current students in the suburban US South as Garrison Keillor once was to my immigrant students in New York City, one of whom once asked if "born-again" Christians believed in reincarnation.




I did get some other scattered reading done.  While cooking dinner, I listened to Crosbie Wells' letters to Alistair Lauderback in The Luminaries.  My official (non-teaching) reading of the day was Caldeira's City of Walls. I woke up late and got about ten pages in before I realized I had to do a ton of things on the computer because I was working from home. Among the things I had to do were read a couple of journal articles that I've assigned my students for next week, both about broader effects on communities created by policing and incarceration. I wish I had found a place on the syllabus this semester for City of Walls - there are so many connections with this week's assignments in particular. One of these days, I'll teach this class again, I hope, and then I can find a place for Caldeira in a section on policing/incarceration in the Americas beyond the U.S. That way, I could also include some of the great work being done in surveillance studies in Canada. It may be slow progress, however, as it seems the semester is going like this:

Bout of Books 4 - Thursday

    For Thursday, I again had too much going on to read as much as I have been during the summer. After spending some time doing administrative tasks and reading about 20 pages of Caldeira's City of Walls, I took my husband to have a surgery that he had to schedule for this week. I thought I would be reading in the waiting room, but it turns out that his surgery was a very fast one!  That was good news for both of us, but it meant that I didn't get my reading done.
    At the end of the day, we decided to re-watch some of Deadwood.  I have been thinking about the show since I've been listening to Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries as an audiobook. Despite her setting in Hokitika,New Zealand and Deadwood's 1876 South Dakota, there are many similarities. The time periods are close, the stories center around the brutal capitalist competition over gold mines, expressed as complicated intrigue unfolding in a small prospecting town, filled with smart schemers, city-slicker marks, and a whole range of assistants and opportunists involved in every detail of organizing daily life. In both stories, a seemingly tragic white woman is an opium addict, and in both cases, this woman is generally underestimated by most of the men in the story.  The Luminaries develops more non-white characters. Catton's story includes a Maori character named Tea Rau Tawhare, who has some kind of relationship with Crosbie Wells, whose dead body is discovered at the outset of the novel. There are also two Chinese characters, Sook Yoonsheng and Qui Long, who are fully described and involved in the center of the plot. This is a contrast with the one Chinese character in Deadwood.
   I'd say that fiction about gold mining towns is a good place to look at similarities in the dynamics, both historical and mythic, of settler-colonial societies across the globe. As I was just discussing with my students the other day, we can call music from Australia and New Zealand country music, even if it's not produced in Nashville.

Bout of Books 3 - Wednesday

Tuesday night was rough, which meant Wednesday was rough too. I got done teaching my evening class at 9:30, then drove for about 10 minutes of my hour-long trip home while thinking I heard some kind of bug rustling around. I pulled into a gas station, and lo and behold, found a cockroach on the floor of my car behind the driver's seat!
I completely freaked out and spent an hour rooting around my car with a car vac until I got to the point where I just had to go home. Then, when I got home at nearly midnight, there was a TV news meltdown happening over the idiot president's most recent speech.

So, on Wednesday, instead of meeting my usual 80 page goal, I read only about 30 pages. I started in the morning with Teresa Caldeira's City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in Sao Paolo. This is really a wonderfully thoughtful and well-researched enthography about the impact of neoliberal transformation in Brazil on the lives of individuals, with an emphasis on walled-in housing and people's constant "talk of crime." It's a very empathic and yet critical study of every-day dynamics that contribute to segregation and criminalization.  I'm reading this both as general support for my teaching this semester, and for my 2017 academic reading challenge, in the category, "read about a subject you study, but in a different country from the one that you usually study." Later in the day, I read another 20 pages or so of The Russian Debutante's Handbook. 

Bout of Books Update 2

Tuesday was a frantic day, reminding me of why summer break, even when you're on the clock is different from the school year, especially the first weeks of a new school year. I had several meetings in the morning and early afternoon, taught a class, and then was swamped with "emergency" emails and phone-calls.

I managed only to read things I had to read for the classes I was teaching. From books, this meant another two chapters of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's Golden Gulag, along with three different interviews with activists against broken windows policing from Jordan Camp and Christina Heatherton's timely and wonderful collection of essays by scholars and activists,  Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter.  I did drive for an hour and listened to the 20th chapter of The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.  After I got home from my long drive, I was too obsessed with watching CNN to read very much before bed. I'm hoping that tomorrow will be different, but then of course, there's preparing for next week's classes. 

Bout of Books 20 Update One

On Monday,  I spent most of the day in Tennessee waiting on or watching the eclipse. Since we got there early to make sure we could park and had a good spot, I had plenty of time to read before anything got started. I was reading, for the third time, Ruth Wilson Gilmore's amazing book, The Golden Gulag. I'm teaching this book tonight in a seminar on the spatial arrangement of prisons and policing in the U.S.  Tonight, we'll be discussing the notion of how surpluses of investment capital, labor, land and state capacity contributed to what Gilmore calls "the Prison fix" in California.

 Later in the day, I read about 20 pages of Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook. I'm planning to use a chapter of this book in a course I'm teaching to undergrads this semester, but I haven't decided on which chapter yet - but I'm thinking of the one about his return to the former USSR.  

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!