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