Academic Reading Challenge Categories for 2021

 The dreadful year 2020 is almost over, which means it's time to start planning our academic reading challenge for 2021.

I hope you'll join us for this fun experiment in resisting the push to academic over-work, over-specialization, and time-rationing 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. 

 The Covid-19 pandemic has created burdens and opportunities for readers, so this year instead of matching a song about books and reading with the challenge, I'm pairing Randy Newman's Corona-virus song from April "Stay Away From Me" with the official Reading & Listening post for the 2021 challenge. The vaccines may be here, but we're not done with this yet, so please follow Randy's advice. If you watch the video and listen to the words of the song, you may also find you agree with me that Newman is prescient about the things that would come to define the social-distancing experience for many of us. Finally, he's got a bookcase behind him and books piled by the piano (is that Borges or Berg in the title face up on the bench?)  making this video a great way to start thinking about your next year of reading. Glad to see he - or the Venus in Sweatpants mentioned in the song - is a fan of Elena Ferrante, or at least Europa Editions.

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/
  In this group we talk about the challenge categories for the year and occasionally discuss what we've read and plan to read 

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, 2021 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2021. There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge, and FOUR “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 a memoir of a coup for both the memoir about a coup and the "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 1/1/21 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2021

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

Total possible points for 1-15: 200

Total possible points for all extra-credit: 250

1. A book by a friend, colleague, former teacher or former student 10

2. Classic in your field that you’ve never read or book you see cited often but have never read 10

3. Book about the place you grew up 10

4. Book about place you want to travel to when this mess is over 10

5. History of medicine or illness 20

6. Book about isolation, quarantine or lockdown 20

7. Book about LGBTQ+ politics or culture outside the U.S.A. 20

8. A book recently translated into English 20  

9. A book about visual arts or the biography of an artist 10

10. A book about a place, time, concept, or topic adjacent to what you study 20

11. Book Published before 1900 10

12. A memoir about politics, revolution, counter-revolution, or coup 10

13. Book about pre-modern trade routes 20

14. Graphic novel, graphic non-fiction, or collection of comics 10

15. Nonfiction book about animals and/or animal psychology 20

 EXTRA CREDIT:

Extra Credit: Award nominee that didn’t win the award 10

Extra-Extra-Credit: Award winner or nominee that won an award that you’d never heard of 20

Extra-Extra-Extra Credit: Book about a commodity 10

For those of us who are just extra: a satire 10