Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon Final Post

That was quick. This year for Dewey's 24 hour readathon, I read for 6 and a half hours and listened to an audiobook for 5 and a half hours - spending a total of 12 of the last 24 hours reading or listening to an audiobook.
Total pages in regular books: 230: Liz Fekete, Europe's Fault Lines 50; Mur Lafferty, Six Wakes 40; Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene v. 1, 140. Audiobook finished: Drew Magary, the Hike.   This fits my usual slow reading speed of 30 -40 pages per hour.  The most daunting hour was  between 1:00 and 2:00 am. I slowed down a lot - falling asleep while reading Six Wakes despite late-night coca-cola and coffee ice-cream.

 While listening to the Hike, I lifted weights, walked for about 2 and 1/2 hours, went grocery shopping, washed dishes, and cooked dinner. During the 12 hours I wasn't reading or listening to an audiobook, I was attending a friend's afternoon party, talking to my husband, doing readathon related social media stuff, and finally, watching comedian Michelle Wolff's hilarious stand-up at the White House Correspondents' dinner.  I did more of the readathon "mini-challenges"  this time - but tried not to spend so much time on social media that I failed to use the time to read.

To answer the last couple of survey questions for the final hour, I am likely to do the readathon again. I don't know what really rad thing the readathon could do to make me smile - maybe do something to create a single place with a list of what everyone read, including some stats on the most popular books read during the readathon. I imagine this could be done through Goodreads, or a spreadsheet similar to what you create for the readathon when people sign up.

I'm very much enjoying Sherry's Greene biography, and am glad I chose it for this readathon. Greene's childhood reading habits were perfect readathon fodder, and this morning in my usual morning hour of reading, I finally got to the part of the book about Greene's friendship with Claud Cockburn and his early interest in spying in the 1920s.

Dewey's Readathon Mixtape Mini-Challenge

It's almost as if Leah and 26 Letters was planning a theme for my blog today. This blog initially started as a place to store posts I'd made on Facebook about strange synchronicities between music and books, as I often listen to music while reading. 
 Anyway, this mini-challenge for Dewey's Readathon is to shuffle a music player, take the first song and match a book to it.  The first song that played on my usb drive in my car this afternoon was Thee Oh Sees, "The Axis"   It's a dark song with a pretty sound that ends in a chaotic and threatening sounding guitar solo. Looking over what I'd read recently, I decided the best book pairing for this song was Karolina Waclawiak's How to Get Into Twin Palms, a about a young Polish woman attracted to the trashy glamour of a Russian nightclub in her neighborhood in Los Angeles: Twin Palms.  The central character, like the guitar in the song's conclusion, makes a surprising decision, veering into chaos.

Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon Hour 12 - Mid Readathon post -

It's been kind of a strange one for me this time.  I spent a lot of time walking today, so listened to many hours of an audiobook, the Hike by Drew Magary, and am almost done. I read a little over 56 pages of the first volume of Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene, which is great for a readathon - Greene spent a lot of his childhood reading. Instead of going to school, he sometimes went to the bookshop, snuck home and then

would go cautiously to the croquet lawn where the summerhouse was that could be turned round so it faced away from house and school and there, sitting in a deck-chair, he would read all day, breaking only for lunch.

And then about 30 pages of Liz Fekete's new book on the European far right, Europe's Fault Lines. So to answer the questions, I have had a lot of interruptions, but they were my own. A friend was having a party, and I wanted to go, but she lives near a place where there is a large neighborhood festival so I didn't want to drive. Thus, I decided to walk there and back, using the opportunity to listen to the Hike, which I started a while back, but hadn't had time to finish.  For the second half, I'd like to finish Fekete. Her book is really sharp, and it is also quite short, but I probably will read more of the Greene bio because it's a bit more leisurely, and jump back into Mur Lafferty's Six Wakes, which I started reading late last night.

In honor of the reading & listening theme, I'm including this song from Helmet "Street Crab"  since The Hike includes a crab as a major character.  Trying not to be a spoiler.

Dewey's 24 Hour Readathon Opening Meme Post

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. 

Bout of Books Days 2, 3 and 4

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

Bout of Books 21 - Snow Days and School Days January 2018

 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. 

2018 Academic Reading Challenge

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