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).