The 6th Annual Academic Reading Challenge starts on Jan 1, 2020

Hello again, reading friends and reading strangers, and welcome to the academic reading challenge for 2020. I hope you'll join us for this fun experiment in resisting the push to over-specialization and give yourself permission to read academic books that aren't immediately obviously instrumental for your next project.  Those books you bought at a book exhibit two years ago? time to open them up and start reading! That book your colleague wrote that you bought but didn't get around to yet? It's category #1. 

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.


We have a Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/160467571369051/

There is also an academic article about this challenge here: https://www.academia.edu/38104347/Read_Another_Book_Repeat_When_Necessary

Rules

The challenge starts on January 1, 2020 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2020. There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge with 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 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 an ocean voyage for both the ocean voyage 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 1/1/20 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2020

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

Total possible points for 1-15 without "double-point bonuses" 200. Points for all extra-credit and double-point bonuses: 250 

And Now .... The Categories!

1. Book by a friend or colleague 10 points 

2. Book about a coup, counter-revolutionary movement and/ or revolution  10 points, double points if within 21st century 
3. Book about social movements not focused on presidential elections  20 points
4. Book about something considered “low culture”  10 points
5. Book about magic or the supernatural   10 points - double points for an academic study
6. Book about politics outside the U.S.      20 points
7. Book about the ocean or an ocean voyage (academic, popular science, journalism or fiction)  10 points
8. Modern adaptation of Shakespeare or other classic literature from any country  20 points
9. Book about legal history or courts  10 points
10. Book about a religion that you have never before studied or practiced (can be key texts / scriptures of that religion or a book about that religion).  10 points
11. Book about responding to climate change    20 points
12. Book about science for general readers       10 points
13. Academic book someone recommended to you, but you still haven't read  20 points
14. Academic book published in 2019 or 2020     10 points
15. Book about youth or youth culture, with a protagonist under 30, or written by someone under 30 - 10 points 

Extra Credit
16. 2nd book by an author who you have read 1 book by. Can be academic, literary, or genre fiction 10 points
17. Extra-Extra Credit: Historical Fiction set after WWII 10 points
18. Super-Duper Extra-Credit: Book you stumbled across in the library stacks or browsing in a book store 10 points

And if you're new, please comment below and say what brought you to this blog post. I don't use this space that often, but It's fun to see who's reading. 

24in48 Hour Twelve: Audiobook Story

It's hour 12 of the 48 hours of reading time this weekend, and I'm 6 hours into my (hopefully) 24 hours of reading. Now I'm alternating between two books, one print, one audio, to rest my eyes and keep my body moving. I didn't plan it this way, but Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give and Stephen Markley's Ohio are a good match. Both are fiction crafted in an immediate response to violence and poverty in America. One is focused on police violence against Black people and features a young girl becoming an activist. The other about the Iraq war and the opioid epidemic, and at least partly concerns a young man becoming an activist. Both also describe drug use and drug dealing as a product of poverty and despair, and both address how larger conflicts interrupt and clarify friendships among young people.  And because of where I am in each book, I wound up reading and listening to two different descriptions of high school proms in the same two hour period this afternoon. I'm only a little ways into Ohio, but it seems to take racism seriously as part of its story line from the perspective of a white man who is increasingly critical of the casual racism and patriotic illusions in his small town in Ohio, while The Hate U Give comes from the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Here's Tupac's Thug Life, which I think works for both books, even though it's most obviously connected to the Hate U Give, which takes its title from Tupac's explanation of the T.H.U.G L.I.F.E (The Hate You Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody).

24in48: It's a Book-Fiend Holiday!

It's the 24in48 readathon, the weekend that comes twice a year, when I and thousands of others read for 24 hours between Saturday and Monday at midnight and take breaks to chat and share our bookish glee.

I've only been reading for a little over an hour. I conked out almost immediately after starting my first book last night at hour zero.

And now we're between hours 6 and 9, and i'm posting for the Hour Six challenge: Show off your SFF. This was the perfect one for me, since my husband and I created a science fiction bathroom after realizing how much shelf space we had in there. Before you ask, no, there's no tub or shower in this small bathroom, so we're not worried about the books getting ruined. We've been collecting posters and other decor for the last couple of years. Now that my husband runs a Science Fiction book-club through our local indie bookshop, we're also building a great collection of contemporary international SF.

Some history recommendations for July 4th

Since the first thing I saw this morning was a scandalous New York Times editorial that dramatically misrepresented the history of the American Revolution and its relationship to the French revolution, I thought it would be a good idea to post some recommendations of books that show a different side of the American Revolution and the "Age of Revolutions" more generally.
  Let's get the party started:

Some of the best books on the American Revolution start with an analysis of the social conflict and popular demonstrations among the era's workers, both enslaved and free and how they pushed the colonies toward independence. Probably the most influential of these works is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic which describes revolts by sailors and dock-workers across the Atlantic  from the 1600s through the French Revolution.

The most classic work on the subject of 18th century radicalism and its relevance for modern politics is C.LR. James' brilliant Black Jacobins. This book is more focused on the Haitian and French Revolutions, but it places the American war of independence in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and provides the underlying perspective that explains much of the more grounded work on the 18th century Atlantic world today.

Edward Countryman, whose work was the subject of a round-table of historians in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1996, is another historian whose work emphasizes class differences and contrasting agendas of the groups who participated in the American war for independence and the transformation to the early Republic. His most frequently assigned work is The American Revolution which is now out in a new edition. 

An equally important classic is Benjamin Quarles' study, The Negro in the American Revolution, recently reissued by the UNC press. I learned a great deal from this book when I was preparing to teach African American history before 1865 for the first time after I had just finished by PhD.

For a very recent work by an anthropologist about the legacy of the revolution for Black Americans, see Mitch Kachun's new book on the memory of Crispus Attucks, First Martyr of Liberty I haven't read this one yet, but it looks full of fascinating material. Here he is being interviewed on the New Books Network

Other historians who have moved beyond staid representations of founders made of marble include Annette Gordon-Reid, Woody Holton, Jean H. Baker, Gary Nash, Jeff Pasley, and Dana Frank, whose book on boycotts and economic nationalism in the revolutionary era may have new relevance in the age of Trump.

Friday Book and Music Pairing

Today's morning reading was Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Signal to Noise. Set in Mexico City, and alternating between the late 1980s and the end of the 00s, it's the story of three friends who do magic with vinyl records. Music pairing for one pivotal scene

Bout of Books Day 7 - Update and Stretch Goals

This week, I did a fair amount of reading, though I didn't do much posting. I finished Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, started and finished Megan Abbott, The End of Everything, and the Manga by Naoki Urasawa, Monster for the Book Riot Read Harder challenge. I read some of Kathleen Belew's Bring the War Home, but not enough. Today, I'm going to try to read more of that book, and then maybe some other book I had started and set aside a while back. I have quite a few options on that score. I've been in a lazy mode, so it will probably be fiction or another graphic novel/ trade issue of a comic book. Reading so much about the far right for research is finally getting to me.

Bout of Books Day 2 - Update

Yesterday, I was in NYC on vacation, so most of my reading was done on the subway. I had a lot of places to go, and I got quite a bit of reading done, mostly in Quinones' Dreamland, which is just excellent. I also read a good chunk of it on the plane today.  Last night, because the b&b where we were staying only had a lamp on one side of the bed, and I neglected to bring a book light, I stayed up pretty late reading John Dean's Watergate memoir, Blind Ambition, So far, it shows him barely hesitating to help Nixon do a bunch of crazy shit to attack his political enemies.

Today's Challenge: bookish favorites. This year, I'm planning to re-read two different old favorites: A.S. Byatt's Possession which really swept me off my feet when I read it in the 1990s, and the newish translation of the Master and Margarita, which I first read for a college class in the 1980s.

Bout of Books 25 - Sign-Up Post

I really need to post some other things on this blog, but for now, here's my official sign-up post for the next "Bout of Books" read-a-thon, which started yesterday. The last time I did the read-a-thon, it was at the beginning of the semester, and I didn't have much time to read. In fact, the spring semester has been so busy that I got pretty far behind in my reading goals for the year, so I'm hoping doing some read-a-thons this summer will get me on track.

This week, I'm planning to finish reading Sam Quinones' Dreamland, a book about the American opiate/opioid epidemics, tracing the marketing and proliferation of oxycontin and black tar heroin in parallel tracks. I met Quinones when he was in the early stages of the research for the book, and I've been looking forward to reading it ever since. Other reading goals for the week include finishing up Kathleen Belew's Bring the War Home, and also starting a new work of fiction. I'll probably also try to finish reading the Mueller Report in PDF, but I suppose that doesn't count as a book yet.
  If you're not familiar with it, here's a description of the Bout of Books:

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 13th and runs through Sunday, May 19th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, Twitter chats, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 25 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

Bout of Books 24 Update - Day 7

This weekend my friends threw a birthday party for me at their house, and I spent much of the weekend shopping and making food for the party.

Along the way, I listened to Attica Locke's Bluebird, Bulebird. This book is pretty entertaining, and i can see her Texas ranger character become the center of a good series with a lot of emphasis of Southern Black life and racial conflict. I'm always interested in mysteries that have a bit of leftist political commentary, and this one combines that with good story-telling. It kept me company on a long drive from work as well.

I kept reading Meera Nanda, while also trying to keep track of what is happening the news. At this rate, I feel like the next book to pull from the TBR pile should be Russian Roulette by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

Today's challenge: Stretch Goal. I had originally hoped to finish Nanda by today, so I will try, though I'm not confident. 

Bout of Books 24 days 2,3, and 4

It's been a busy week at work, so I didn't have time to post, though I did have some time to read.

I finished Zoo City on Monday. I liked, but didn't love it.
I continue to read Meera Nanda's Prophets Facing Backward, though I'm making slow progress in it because of the need to prioritize work. Since she includes the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in her discussion of neo-Hinduism, I'm linking to the Beatles again for the listening portion of this read. According to John Lennon, this song is about the Maharishi.

and this is a recently unearthed song he worked on before Sexy Sadie, with Yoko joining in.

I also started David Golumbia's Politics of Bitcoin which I had started in December, but didn't finish before the end of the year. It's short, so I imagine I'll be done with it relatively soon. I like it so far, it's a useful overview of cyber-libertarianism, which is a somewhat under-studied aspect of far-right politics today.

For work, I read, because, I use it to teach, the first 130 pages of Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book. This year's students liked it much better than previous students did. It's always interesting to see how different classes react to the same text, and how they adapt to each other's reactions in the classroom. For me, How to Read a Book is a useful guide for reading that can still be helpful to students or those outside academia who want to read difficult books on their own - which is its stated purpose. It is also a kind of classic text of cold war liberalism, as it links its particular style of reading and analysis with the maintenance of democracy. In many ways the book is quite hierarchical and promotes the kind of view of literature and knowledge in general that you'd expect from confident New Critics. 

Day 5 challenge: if this, then that.

If you liked The New Jim Crow, try Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here, or for a more modern book, Understanding Mass Incarceration
   

Bout of Books 24 Day One Update

As I predicted, since it was the first day of classes at my university, I didn't do a whole lot of reading on Monday. I started in the morning with a very small amount of pages in Meera Nanda's Prophets Facing Backward, a book that I've known about for a while,since she was one of Alan Sokal's allies when he hoaxed the journal Social Text.  A lot of the people who were around Sokal seem to have gone further right politically, but Nanda does not seem to be one of them, as her other books are solidly left critiques of Hindu nationalism.  As interested as I am in how she develops her argument, which is relevant for research I'm doing on how people understand or define fascism, I had to leave to go to the office, at which point, more reading in that book was out of the question. Beyond reading stuff that I'll be teaching on Wednesday, I didn't get back to reading until the evening, when I read about 50 pages of Lauren Beukes' Zoo City before falling asleep. I really enjoyed the first part of the book, but either I got out of the swing of it for the second half, or the plot doesn't really cohere from the beginning to the end. I keep feeling like it's going along one line, then it seems to switch to a new direction, making it read like a series of unconnected scenes.  I'm close to being done, and it seems like I still barely have an idea of what's going on. That might be that the author's more interested in the world building than the story, so it seems like a travelogue in a cool fantasy land....or it might be that I'm always reading it when I'm not entirely awake.

Today's Bout of Books challenge:
 5 favorite fictional characters at a dinner party - who do I invite and what do I serve?  Hmm, I'll invite the main character of An Unnecessary Woman, Aaliya Sohbi. If I start with her, the group would need to be small, because she makes a point that she's quite anti-social. Milly from the novel Christadora, the artist who always feels in her husband's or her mother's shadow, would probably have something to talk with her about, despite their living in different places under radically different circumstances. To discuss the human condition with them, why not also invite Lilith Iyapo, the mother of hybrid human-oankali from Octavia Butler's xenogenesis trilogy? With myself and these three, I think we'd have plenty to discuss. We'd start with some olives and cheese and bread, and then eat something simple and delicious, roast chicken and vegetables maybe, with wine of course. 

Bout of Books 24 ...First readathon of 2019

Once again,  a Bout of Books readathon is happening during the first week of classes where I teach, from Monday Jan 7 through Sunday Jan 13.

It will be interesting to see how much, if anything I'm able to do. I'm striving to include BoB posts to my new practice of daily instagram "morning reading posts."

One thing I've got ready is a TBR pile that tippeth over, so I won't be struggling to find something to read.

Here's the official Bout of Books Blurb:

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, January 7th and runs through Sunday, January 13th 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 24 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team