Bout of Books Day 7 Update

I've managed to read more during this Bout of Books so far than in the previous year, mostly by just trying to read for a bit more than I usually would in any given day. It certainly helped that the school year is over. I found it hard to concentrate on reading books when there were such horrible events this week, including the Israeli massacre of protesters in Gaza and the dreadful school shooting in Texas. It seems strange to be preoccupied with counting pages during such a week,and I spent a lot of time reading news articles and talking to people. Over the course of the week, I read about 700 pages, but I wasn't counting carefully.

  For my stretch goal, I'd like to read 100 more pages before the day is done, but that seems unrealistic, I'll probably just wind up listening to an audiobook while I get ready to go back to work on Monday.
  5/21 UPDATE: I met my stretch goal by reading another 100 pages in Brothers of the Gun

  This week's reading:
Books Finished:
Karen Russell, Swamplandia!
Win McCormack, Chronicles of Rajneesh. 
3 issues of the new radical comic, Calexit  - which my friendly comic-seller had recommended to me when it first started up. What a blast!  and with informative interviews with activists in the back of each issue.
  Iris Tillman,   All This Happened Long Ago -It Happens Now. - my mother's beautiful and long-awaited poetry chapbook about our family history which just came out last week.

Books Started: 
 David Neiwert's Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, (110 pp and still going)
 Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple's Brothers of the Gun.  (185 pages)

And the Rest: 
I did not read close to as many pages of Adam Tooze's book, Wages of Destruction as I had planned to. Nor did I read any bit of the Graham Greene bio I had started reading in late April.
I also listened to a  4 hours of James Comey's memoir during carpool to and from work this week, and also listened to a few hours of Nick Stone's The Verdict.


Favorite of the week is definitely Brothers of the Gun.

In its honor, here's some music by the singer Fairouz, who is mentioned in the book's first chapters:

Bout of Books 22 Day 6 Update

Yesterday, I spent some time thinking about books, went to both the bookstore and the comics store. Earlier in the day, I read a little bit of Adam Tooze, this chapter being about steel rationing and the conflict between rearmament goals and general problems with balance of payments, and then began a section about the beginning of aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia.

I also picked up Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple's Brothers of the Gun, which just came out. Here's a video of Crabapple discussing the book, a joint project with Hisham, who was based in Raqqa when they first were talking.



Today I read a bit of Brothers of the Gun in the morning, then shifted to David Neiwert's Alt-America which has been on my TBR for quite a while now. If you're thinking about how to prioritize reading about the far right, Neiwert's book goes back to the militia movement of the 1990s in order to understand the roots of Trumpism in a long-building conspiracist culture based on various alternative media.
 At the end of the day, I decided to finally read the comic Calexit, a complex narrative about what might happen if California had seceded and then devolved into a civil war. The comic also includes interviews with activists and radical writers in the back pages. It's definitely not a predicable story line so far, and I'm looking forward to reading the next issues.  Like this guy, interviewed about the recent Free Comic Book Day, I'm really enjoying the radical trends in comic writing during the last several years.

For today's challenge, I don't have a lot to say. I enjoy the Bout of Books readathon. I don't know if I have favorite moments so much, but I generally enjoy the opportunity to read about what other people are doing by checking their blogs or seeing their tweets and bookish photos on instagram.


Since I'm reading comics right now, today's reading and listening is Art Brut's "DC Comics and Chocolate Milkshakes" (because some things will always be great).

Bout of Books 22 - Day Five

 I crept slowly through 20 pages in Adam Tooze, but finished Win McCormack's Rajneesh Chronicles this morning. Today, after reading for an hour or two, and doing the usual email and admin work, I managed to spend some time in the garden and made a trip to the bookstore and the comic store. Tonight, I'm planning to dive into Brothers of the Gun by Marawn Hisham and Molly Crabapple.

Today's challenge from the BoB peeps is all about space, which explains the Kid Koala clip. I was very lucky to attend his Satellite turntable orchestra show at Big Ears back in March.


Onto the challenge - A space scavenger hunt from Liz at https://travelinretrospect.com/, who made up this challenge for the Bout of Books crew. This was a scavenger hunt through my recent and distant memories...

Mercury: favorite short story/novella: Edith Wharton, False Dawn from the Old New York collection
 I read this brilliant collection of short stories by Edith Wharton soon after I finished graduate school and moved to New York City. I always was looking for a way to teach the short story "False Dawn" which represents an American's travels in Europe and his interest in "unfashionable" art that disappoints his parents.

Venus: Favorite book with female protagonist: Toni Morrison, Beloved
   Still one of the best novels of all time - capturing the ghostly presence of slavery, the dark heart of American history. I read this in the summer after I graduated from college, sweating on a bedroll in a shared apartment in the Hamptons.

Earth - favorite book with nature/nature word in the title: Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air
  It's not a great work of literature, I suppose, but it tells an important story about tourism, exploitation, money, and human stupidity in the face of nature. It is absolutely gripping. I read the entire thing on a train trip from Minneapolis to Philadelphia.

Mars: Favorite book with a red cover: Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
   This book won the Pulitzer prize in 2016 and was one of the few books that so deserved prizes. A Vietnamese view of America and Imperial power as told from multiple locations. I've read it twice since it came out, and am impressed at how well it stands multiple readings. It's lyrical, smart, political, and works both as a literary work and a "thriller."

Jupiter: Favorite tome over 500 pages: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
   I dreamily read large chunks of the first volume of the Pleiade edition when I was in highschool, which is a great time to read this book, though I think I might not finish all the volumes until I manage to go on sabbatical or retire.

Saturn: Favorite book with circle or ring on the cover/in the title: Mary McCarthy, The Group
My mother had recommended this book about female friendships to me when I was in middle school, and I did find it a completely memorable experience, though I was a bit mystified by the sexual relationships.

Uranus: Favorite book set in winter: Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat and Other Stories
   I read this book for a class on "Russian literature in the Gogolian tradition" when I was in college. The entire course was like a walk on the Nevksy Prospekt in the wet snow  - the atmosphere becoming my central memory of the multiple dark, fantastical books I read in one spring semester in Connecticut.

Neptune: Favorite book set at sea, on a boat or under water: Herman Melville, Moby Dick

   I read this book when I lived in Sag Harbor, the old whaling town where I lived for six months immediately after graduating from college. It's an obvious and wonderful choice.

Pluto: Favorite book featuring a dog or with a dog on the cover: Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones  I read this one quite recently - a wrenching tale where the dog is a character on equal footing with humans, in a way that resonates with some recent scholarly work on human-animal relationships.

Moon: Favorite book set anywhere other than Earth: Ursula LeGuin, Wizard of Earthsea - read over 30 years ago, and only now a dim and pleasurable memory, but  I'm planning to read it again soon.  Another wonderful not-earth book by LeGuin is The Dispossessed which mixes social commentary and narrative power in a way that is rarely achieved.

Sun: Favorite book set in summer: L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between This whole book is about what summer is for children - endless, sweaty, golden, mysterious, sexual. 

Space: Favorite book set in space: Octavia Butler, Dawn  Not your average book about waking up on an alien spacecraft. A serious book about what it means to be human and life on earth.

Bout of Books Day Four

Yesterday was a pretty productive reading day for me. I finished Swamplandia! and discussed it with my book-club crew, and read more of the Rajneesh Chronicles as well.  Today, having finished an administrative task that took up more time than it should have, I'm now back to serious research reading, which means Adam Tooze again. I'd left off around p. 235.


For my read alike, since yesterday's "precious"  was Marx's Capital, I chose Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital:the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.  This amazing book about Taylorism and the deskilling of work continues to be relevant, and now applies to even the "knowledge professions" because of the growth of information technology.

For fiction, I don't know why...maybe it's that summer feeling, but I chose to match fans of Emma Straub's Brooklyn novel, Modern Lovers, which centers around old college band mates with Jane Smiley's earlier NYC novel, Duplicate Keys a quasi-literary mystery that also features a rock band in Manhattan.  I read it almost twenty years ago and really loved it. I might need to read it again if I have time. I am a sucker for books about tight-knit groups of friends in cities, so if anyone's reading this and has suggestions, please leave em in the comments.

Bout of Books Day 3 update

I started off on Tuesday morning with a big section of Win McCormack's The Rajneesh Chronicles but soon got too busy at the office to do much reading until later in the day, when I dived back into Swamplandia! which we'll be discussing tonight in the A Capella Under Cover Book Club. Last week, I had almost decided not to finish this one, which seems to fall too much into the stereotypical "eccentric Southern family" narrative for me, especially with all the ghost stuff, but the second half of the book has been a bit more compelling.

To show off my Precious for today's challenge, I'll go with a classic choice.

via GIPHY

Bout of Books Day 2 update

Well, well, well. It really is much better to do Bout of Books when I'm not teaching. Today's theme is finding a book from the year when you were born. As this blog's purpose is to bring music and reading together, here's my favorite birth year-related song.

Yesterday, despite not being preoccupied with work, I was consumed by terrible events in Israel/Palestine.  For a relevant reading recommendation, it's hard to do better than Edward Said.

Let's get to the update:
Yesterday, I read chunks of Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. The chapters I read yesterday concerned the NSDAP's focus on the peasantry, and the quest for Autarky through changes in agriculural policy. What is autarky you ask? It's the idea of a national economy that is completely self-sufficient, rather than being reliant on global trade. It seems ever more relevant then to read about Germany's goals of economic nationalism  in the current nationalist populist upsurge. As Tooze argues, the Nazi effort to stop relying so much on imported food was central to the ideology of lebensraum,  the ideology driving Nazi imperialism in Eastern Europe.  In short, if you are into reading long serious works of non-fiction, this book is an excellent corrective to popular representations of Nazi economic beliefs, which are too often described by people on the right as "socialist."

I also read quite a bit of Win McCormack's  Rajneesh Chronicles, a book collecting pieces originally published in Oregon Magazine during the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram. I'm reading this book as part of this year's academic reading challenge, for task 9, "academic or journalistic book on the same subject as a documentary film." Since everyone has been talking about Wild, Wild Country, I just had to watch it, and am now learning even more by reading about the Rajneeshees. Without a doubt, this book has much more detail about the abuses of members of the cult than the film does. I can understand why ex-members of the Rajneesh movement have found fault with the documentary.


For today, it's back to Adam Tooze, starting the book's next section.

And for the daily challenge for bout of books, "Year of You" challenge, I choose Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I read this book in high school, during a time when I was on a Vonnegut-reading binge. I haven't read it since then, and only remember it now as a dread-filled and mind-blowing experience.

In the spirit of those dread-filled years, here's today's reading/listening song.

Bout of Books May 2018

  Another week of reading and reading challenges is coming up with the next bout-of-books starting on May 14th. Every other time I've participated in this one, it's been the first week of classes for me, so it's not been very much of a reading week.  So this time, as I join the Bout of Books readathon, I'm looking forward to it - especially since I wanted to make May a big reading month for a long-term book project that I've had trouble making time for this year.

What is bout of books? Here's a description:

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, May 14th and runs through Sunday, May 20th 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 22 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team


I've got quite a serious TBR going right now, but I'm also in a book club, so I have some lighter things on the list as well.
  For my Academic Reading Challenge, I'm reading a biography of Graham Greene and Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction, which is also for my book project. For book-club reading, I need to read Swamplandia, which I've owned for a long time without reading.  But in more serious reading, I have a large pile of recent books about neo-Nazis, right-wing populism, and the alt-right, and how to stop them, including David Neiwert's Alt America; Matthew Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, and Shane Burley, Fascism Today: What it is and How to End It, Since the school year just ended and all my grades are turned in, I'm hoping to get a lot of reading done in the next two weeks.