Bout of Books Day 6 post

It seems like I'm sort of meeting goals for the week. I've read a little bit every day, despite working from home and also being super distracted by the ongoing Corona virus disaster. I did finish Pale Rider, finished one book I was reading for a review essay and have started the second one. I am 1/3 of the way through A Memory Called Empire and hope to finish it by the end of the weekend, and have 40 minutes to go in American Wolf, which I'm about to go listen to while out in the garden.  I did not get back into Adam Tooze's book on the economics of the 3rd Reich, because of the focus on getting the book review reading done, but there's still a little time. Once I'm done with this book review, I'll have cleared my mind a little more to get back to researching and writing pieces of my own book - it's a been too long since I had real undivided time.  

Bout of Books Update Day 4

Yesterday I finished Pale Rider and made some headway in an edited collection I'm reviewing for an academic journal. In my anxious insomnia, I also read another couple of chapters in Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire in my hopes to read all the Hugo-nominated novels for the year before it's time to vote. I'm enjoying this one a lot so far. This morning, I got back to the 1/2 finished book I'd been reading on writing local history by Joseph Amato,Rethinking Home.  I had initially bought it for the purpose of figuing out how to teach students how to write local history, and it's going to be helpful for that, but it's also just turned out to be an unusually well-written and fascinating book.

Now it's time for me to go back to work. Today's challenge is to ask for recommendations and respond to other people's recommendations, which I guess I'll do on instagram or Twitter before the day is up.

Today's musical accompaniment, on the theme of local history, since Amato's work is mostly done in Minnesota comes from one of Minnesota's famous musicians, so much of whose music is about specific places in and aroud Minneapolis.

Bout of Books 28 - Day 2: Pale Rider

Yesterday, I wound up being busy with work for a lot of the day, and only got my usual morning reading done: about 40 pages of Spinney's Pale Rider about the 1918 influenza. Today, I read another 40 pages in the morning, and am now about 40 pages from the end. I wanted to keep reading, but had to work, so I didn't get to the chapter on the influence of Spanish flu on Europeans adopting national healthcare. For a brief moment, it seemed as if covid-19 would lead to real change in health care policy in the U.S., but now it seems like we are just going to pretend it's not happening as thousands of people die. It's a grim start to the readathon, sorry. Last fall, not knowing what it was about, I read Katherine Anne Porter's novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, from which Spinney's book takes its name. That book captures the experience of delirium that has been common to the 1918 and 2020 pandemics, as this bit quoted in a recent piece on it in Texas Monthly shows

Silenced she sank easily through deeps under deeps of darkness until she lay like a stone at the farthest bottom of life, knowing herself to be blind, deaf, speechless, no longer aware of the members of her own body, entirely withdrawn from all human concerns, yet alive with a peculiar lucidity and coherence; all notions of the mind, the reasonable inquiries of doubt, all ties of blood and the desires of the heart, dissolved and fell away from her, and there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being that knew itself alone, that relied upon nothing beyond itself for its strength; not susceptible to any appeal or inducement, being itself composed entirely of one single motive, the stubborn will to live. This fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction, to survive and to be in its own madness of being, motiveless and planless beyond that one essential end. Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay.

 
To make an abrupt transition to today's challenge, if you like Katherine Anne Porter, then maybe you would also like Virginia Woolf. 

Bout Of Books 28: Social Distancing Style

I was so busy for most of this academic year, and so dismayed by the ongoing horror of American politics, that I didn't have the energy to keep up even a little reading blog, but since I turned my grades in and I'm working from home, it seems like I should join Bout of Books 28.  For the next week, I'll be posting updates on what I've read, and maybe doing some of their mini-challenges, and hopefully, pairing some books and music.  I'm currently reading multiple books at once, as usual. I'm in the middle of Laura Spinney's book about the 1918 global influenza pandemic, Pale Rider, am almost done with the audiobook of American Wolf, as well as two books I decided to start reading in my goal of actually reading all the nominees for the Hugo Awards before the voting deadline. This week, that's Seanan McGuire's Middlegame and Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire. I'm also reading a couple of different things for work, including two edited collections on prisons and policing. For my own research, my goal for this week is to re-start and finally finish Adam Tooze's book on the economics of the Third Reich, The Wages of Destruction which I had started at least two years ago and got side-tracked from. I've got some other stuff to do for work this week too, so I doubt I'll finish all of these, but it's good to have an ambitious goal to start with, right?

What is Bout of Books?  From the organizers:

The Bout of Books readathon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It’s a weeklong readathon that begins 12:01am Monday, May 11th and runs through Sunday, May 17th in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are daily challenges, Twitter chats, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For Bout of Books 28 information and updates, visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team