Seems I only post here when there's a readathon going. Here's my response to the Dewey 24 Hour readathon opening meme
1) Where: I'm reading in Atlanta. 2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to? Hardest question. I really want to read Liz Fekete's book Europe's Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right but I also just finished most of a school year and might instead like to take a break from serious reading about politics for 24 hours. In that case, I'll probably divide my time between Six Wakes and the first volume of Norman Sherry's bio of Graham Greene, which is what I'm starting with. 3) Which snack are you most looking forward to? hot Buffalo flavored pop-chips 4) About me: I'm a college professor and I run an annual academic reading challenge . Also, this blog is supposed to be about both music and reading, but I haven't done enough with it this year. 5) Do differently? This is my second time doing the readathon, and this year, I'm hoping to do more challenges than I did the first time, and hopefully go comment on other people's blogs.
I've been reading away, but without time to blog regularly for BoutofBooks This is the official start of the spring semester in the U. System of Georgia, so blogging and challenges had to wait.
Day 2:
On Monday 1/9, we had an official day off from the state because of the big football game possible ice storm and an "abundance of caution." I spent the day reading the classic work on analytical reading by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book. As my students noted, this book is very dated. It was first published in 1940, and its authors are notoriously Eurocentric. Nonetheless, the book still serves enough of a purpose that teachers still assign it, even to graduate students. I started assigning it because one of my students told me that she had read it after I commented on the noticeable improvement of her discussions of assigned reading in one of my classes. One of the things I like about this book is the way the authors describe the act of reading "There is the book, and here is your mind" - with a real affection for the cognitive acts involved in reading words on a page, for the relationship between book and reader as between student and teacher. It's hierarchical in some ways, as my students observed, but in the insistence that the reader learn to use only the tools of the mind on the book, rather than reaching for interpretive authorities to do it for him/her, it has a fundamentally democratic underlying principle.
Day 3:
On Wednesday, Jan 10th, to start the day I finished Dick Lehr and Michael Zuckoff's chilling and detailed Judgment Ridge. I'd had it on my shelf for a while, and used it to fill the Book Riot Read Harder challenge category for True Crime. I have a weird relationship with True Crime as a genre. I know it's lurid, voyeuristic and appeals to the worst morbid curiosity, and, as happened at the time that I picked up this book, I've often found it too compelling to resist reading. When I was in graduate school, I read several books by Anne Rule until I really couldn't stand her. Judgment Ridge, is a different sort of book from Rule's - more sociological than psychological, though the central premise in the end is that one of the killers is a sociopath. To make sense of what seemed like a very senseless crime - two high school boys from a small town in Vermont randomly chose to go into the home of two Dartmouth professors and then brutally kill them - they describe the warmth and generosity of the victims, Half and Susanna Zantopp, who of course would welcome two high school boys into their home to help them conduct a survey on environmental issues. Most of all, they describe the culture of small-town Vermont where the boys came from, in somewhat excruciating detail, as Goodreads reviewers have noted. Through these descriptions, we are supposed to understand the strange behavior of the boys (lazy, unaccountable, probably over-praised) and the community's failure to recognize the warning signs that two young murderers were on their way to a heinous act. The authors argue that Robert Tulloch was a sociopath who killed for pleasure and Jim Parker, who confessed in court, was the weak and insecure friend. The short version of the story is available in the New York Daily News, here. Cases like this one try my convictions as a prison abolitionist. From even a reform perspective, since they were very young when they committed the crime, they are people whose sentences should be much shorter than they are. At the same time, they had every advantage in life and, seemed to commit this crime out of sheer arrogance and lack of empathy. In a world without prisons and organized around different priorities, the hope is that instead of drawing praise and privilege, people like Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker would be subjects of much earlier intervention to stop them from victimizing others. The other thing that is notable in a case like this is that people are so mystified and shocked that young, white, middle-class boys would commit violent crime, since they are so "normal" and fit so many social ideals. The book does a good job revealing all the ways that our own "normal" ideals might have nurtured a sociopathic killer.
On Thursday, Jan 11th, I finished reading George Hawley's Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism. This book is a discussion of the ideological content of the US far right, written in a dispassionate style by someone who identifies as a conservative. It is interesting that those on the far right who are described in the book can be found across the internet describing it as a "liberal'or "left" book, when the author portrays the conservative movement as having been an effective check against the far right in the US, and can also be found blogging and contributing frequently to mainstream conservative publications. I found the book useful, even though the conclusion surprisingly underestimates the likelihood of increased popularity of white nationalism in the US, and dismisses the "manosphere" as a major force in politics. I do agree with the author's assessment that libertarianism is the most likely large-scale conservative movement. Considering that the book was written in 2015, it makes sense that the author may have to revisit both positions in the wake of the 45th presidency and growth of the "alt-right." I look forward to reading his more recent book, Making Sense of the Alt-Right
With all the booknerds, I'll be trying the bout of books for the second time. This challenge runs for this week.
Here's the explanation from the official gang at Bout of Books
The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly @ Reading the Paranormal. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 8th and runs through Sunday, January 14th 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 21 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog.
What I like about these web-based reading challenges is that they get you into a kind of bookish frenzy with other readers to talk about the books you like, to answer some questions about your reading habits, and of course, to write about what you're reading on social media.
So...
It's been day one and as usual I was reading.
Today, my reading included:
Reading for research: George Hawley, Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism, which is an academic analysis of various trends on the far-right by a scholar who is a mainstream conservative. This makes it interesting as he takes divisions on the right much more seriously than most left writers do.
Reading for teaching: it's an old classic, Adler and Van Doren, How to Read a Book. I started assigning this to my introductory grad school theory class after a student told me it was helpful to her as she worked on interpreting theoretical works on her own for the first time.
and for the Book Riot Read Harder challenge of 2018, my chosen "book of true crime" - Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders. I had picked this book up a couple of years ago in a used bookstore. I don't know why, but I remembered those murders even though I didn't follow what happened later. I never knew anything about why they happened or who it was that actually did them, certainly not the trial. Reading the book is like entering the bad, dark reality that would be on the other side of the image of Stars Hollow on the Gilmore Girls. So far, it is not what the book represents, but it is a perfect study of how the presumption of innocence is a privilege specific to white middle-class people. Surely, these "normal boys" from "good families" in a small town could not be cold-blooded killers! Note: by saying this, I do not mean that the presumption of innocence is a bad thing, but that whiteness itself is so associated with innocence in our culture that it remains very difficult for people to associate white people with criminal activity, and the suggestion seems to be that there must be an extraordinary explanation for such crimes, in contrast to crimes committed by non-white people.
With 2018 just a month away, it's time to start planning for next year's academic reading challenge This year, I've created more social media spaces for the reading challenge. You can follow the challenge on twitter @ReadingAcademic use hashtag #AcademicReadingChallenge2018 or like us on facebook at: : https://www.facebook.com/AcademicReadingChallenge/ There's also a group you can join if you are participating in the challenge, and there's a link to it on the public FB page for the group.
What it is and who it is for:
This is a year long reading challenge with an emphasis on reading across disciplines. It serves a few different purposes depending on where you are in relation to formal university life. 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. This is the fourth year I've organized this challenge. The categories are crowd-sourced by a small group of friends each year on Facebook.
New this year: Under the extra-credit section, you can now "rig the category" and read someone else's "rigged" category. For task 16, you can retroactively create a category based on a book you just want to read anyway; and for 17, the task is to find another book in the rigged category for someone else's 16. So, while in general, as a prof. I don't advise doing extra credit first, this time, it might be good to post your rigged category sooner rather than later - either here or
Rules and Rationale:
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 starts
on January 1, 2018 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2018. There
are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge with three “extra credit”
categories for over-achievers. There are
also double-points available in a few categories.
Rules and guidelines:
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.
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 fascism for both
the fascism 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 1/1/18 and finished no later midnight
12/31/2018.
Points: This isn't a competition, but if
you're counting…
Total possible
points for 1-15 without "double-point bonuses" - 200.
If you do all the double-point
bonuses and do extra-credit categories, you can get a maximum of 260 points.
Categories for 2018
1. A book by a friend or colleague 10 points
2. book on any
colonizing society by a person from the place colonized by that society 10
3. A book about fascism or other political subject that you
don’t like, but should read about for your own good 10 points
4. A book of economic history or theory 20 points
5. A book with a
number in the title (not a volume number) 10 points
6. A work of formally innovative literary fiction, such as experimental or avant-garde fiction 20 points (double
points if published outside the US or UK)
7. A literary biography
or work of literary criticism 20 points
8.
A book by the author whose biography you read, or a work of literature discussed
in the book of literary criticism 20 points
9.
Academic or journalistic book on the same
subject as a documentary film 10 points
10. a book on
whichever of these categories you don't usually
read about in the US: race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, disability/ability
10
points
11. An academic book about any location in Asia or Africa (if you are in African or Asian Studies, read about a place or time that you don't normally read about, or read about the other continent) 10 points
(Double points if about a topic about which you teach or do research)
12. Academic book published the year you were born 20 points
13. A book about the
place where you are at the moment you are reading it. Can be fiction, poetry or
any academic discipline, including sciences. (size of place should be city, town, region or state) 10 points
14. A book about a
climate change, or about environmentalist politics 10 points
15. A 2017 winner of
an academic book award, or any non-fiction book on a "best-of" list 10
points
EXTRA
CREDIT:
16. Extra Credit: Rig
the Category: Read a book you'd read anyway, then make up (and share) the
category to justify it 10 points
17. Extra, Extra Credit: Read a book in the category of someone else's
"rig the category" post 10 points
18. Super Duper Extra Credit: genre fiction or graphic novel
related to your current academic project 10
It's the last hour of Dewey's 24 hour readathon and time to finish my recommendations for books published in each year between 2007 and 2017. 2012: Although it was founded soon into Obama's presidency, the Tea Party became more central in the public eye in connection with the preparation for the 2012 presidential election. Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's detailed study The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism is one of the best books on the subject.
2014: Without a doubt the funniest comic I've read in the last several years, Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky's Sex Criminals came out in its first trade collection in 2014. Here is an antidote to the generally paranoid and anxious right-wing cultural turn of the last six years, one that also shows us the positive and playful side of a left wing cultural movement that has been labeled as censorious and humorless by a growing backlash of right-wing activists.
2015: Sherrie Randolph's wonderful biography, Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical is also something of an antidote to the books documenting the rise of the right. Bringing back the story of this second-wave era Black feminist is an important corrective to a homogeneous narrative of the history of women's liberation as being about only led by "white middle class women."
2016: Christina Heatherton's and Jordan Camp's edited collection about police abolitionist movements and the global crisis in policing, Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter is another important book for understanding the current moment. This includes both interviews with current activists and more academic studies of policing, inspired by the activist scholarship of Stuart Hall.
* 2017: In a year when new fascist formations have been the subject of general alarm and countless quick research articles, Alexander Reid Ross's Against the Fascist Creep is the most detailed and historically informed of the books published on this subject. Run out and read it right now!
It's about 25 minutes before the official readathon start, and I'm doing this challenge from Dewey's 24 hour readathon. Since this blog is mostly for academic books, I will include a fair number of these, but they'll be things that I think might interest the readathon crew.
1. 2007: Ruthie Wilison Gilmore, The Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. This book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in mass incarceration. Gilmore has been involved in prison abolition activism for decades, and this book is the culmination of years of scholarship and activism. If you're not already convinced, here's a video:
2. 2008: Janice Peck, The Age of Oprah: Icon for theNeoliberal Era This is a book I've taught in the past, and it is always very, very popular with students. One of my former students even went to study with Peck for her PhD as a result of reading it. While this book is definitely about Oprah Winfrey, it is also a very clear explanation of neoliberalism that connects Oprah's particular version of self-help ideology to a history of pop psychology going back to the 19th century.
3. 2009: Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. I believe that this book won both the American History and American Studies first book prizes when it came out. It's another book about economics that is highly readable. It's an informative analysis of how this superstore developed through an ideological fusion of Christian evangelical religion and free market ideology.
4. 2010: Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality. I'm teaching this book in a few weeks and it's one that is usually popular with my students. Kunzel's book is both historically informative and theoretically sophisticated, while also being readable. If you're interested in the history of sexuality, prisons, and social movements, this is a really valuable book.
5. 2011: What is a better way to remember 2011 than with N+1 collection, Occupy: Scenes from Occupied America ? This book is a collection of short pieces produced during the Wall Street occupation and gives you the feeling of being there.
It's 29 days to the 10th annual.Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon. This will be my first time participating in it, and my third social-media based readathon of the year.
Here, I'll post my updates in the comments section instead of doing separate blog posts.
For now, I'll post what I think I'll be reading on October 21st, Philosopher, Kelly Oliver's Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human and possibly, a series of comics, or a graphic novel. Perhaps, to keep with the Animal Lessons theme, it will be Michael Tisserand's book on Krazy Kat, cartoonist, George Harrison: Krazy: George Herriman A Life in Black and White, or if I am going to engage in some research for my book, it will be anti-fascist history, because that is always appropriate. I guess I'll decide in a month. There's a lot out there.
