Bout of Books Day Four

Yesterday was a pretty productive reading day for me. I finished Swamplandia! and discussed it with my book-club crew, and read more of the Rajneesh Chronicles as well.  Today, having finished an administrative task that took up more time than it should have, I'm now back to serious research reading, which means Adam Tooze again. I'd left off around p. 235.


For my read alike, since yesterday's "precious"  was Marx's Capital, I chose Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital:the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century.  This amazing book about Taylorism and the deskilling of work continues to be relevant, and now applies to even the "knowledge professions" because of the growth of information technology.

For fiction, I don't know why...maybe it's that summer feeling, but I chose to match fans of Emma Straub's Brooklyn novel, Modern Lovers, which centers around old college band mates with Jane Smiley's earlier NYC novel, Duplicate Keys a quasi-literary mystery that also features a rock band in Manhattan.  I read it almost twenty years ago and really loved it. I might need to read it again if I have time. I am a sucker for books about tight-knit groups of friends in cities, so if anyone's reading this and has suggestions, please leave em in the comments.

Bout of Books Day 3 update

I started off on Tuesday morning with a big section of Win McCormack's The Rajneesh Chronicles but soon got too busy at the office to do much reading until later in the day, when I dived back into Swamplandia! which we'll be discussing tonight in the A Capella Under Cover Book Club. Last week, I had almost decided not to finish this one, which seems to fall too much into the stereotypical "eccentric Southern family" narrative for me, especially with all the ghost stuff, but the second half of the book has been a bit more compelling.

To show off my Precious for today's challenge, I'll go with a classic choice.

via GIPHY

Bout of Books Day 2 update

Well, well, well. It really is much better to do Bout of Books when I'm not teaching. Today's theme is finding a book from the year when you were born. As this blog's purpose is to bring music and reading together, here's my favorite birth year-related song.

Yesterday, despite not being preoccupied with work, I was consumed by terrible events in Israel/Palestine.  For a relevant reading recommendation, it's hard to do better than Edward Said.

Let's get to the update:
Yesterday, I read chunks of Adam Tooze, Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. The chapters I read yesterday concerned the NSDAP's focus on the peasantry, and the quest for Autarky through changes in agriculural policy. What is autarky you ask? It's the idea of a national economy that is completely self-sufficient, rather than being reliant on global trade. It seems ever more relevant then to read about Germany's goals of economic nationalism  in the current nationalist populist upsurge. As Tooze argues, the Nazi effort to stop relying so much on imported food was central to the ideology of lebensraum,  the ideology driving Nazi imperialism in Eastern Europe.  In short, if you are into reading long serious works of non-fiction, this book is an excellent corrective to popular representations of Nazi economic beliefs, which are too often described by people on the right as "socialist."

I also read quite a bit of Win McCormack's  Rajneesh Chronicles, a book collecting pieces originally published in Oregon Magazine during the rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram. I'm reading this book as part of this year's academic reading challenge, for task 9, "academic or journalistic book on the same subject as a documentary film." Since everyone has been talking about Wild, Wild Country, I just had to watch it, and am now learning even more by reading about the Rajneeshees. Without a doubt, this book has much more detail about the abuses of members of the cult than the film does. I can understand why ex-members of the Rajneesh movement have found fault with the documentary.


For today, it's back to Adam Tooze, starting the book's next section.

And for the daily challenge for bout of books, "Year of You" challenge, I choose Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. I read this book in high school, during a time when I was on a Vonnegut-reading binge. I haven't read it since then, and only remember it now as a dread-filled and mind-blowing experience.

In the spirit of those dread-filled years, here's today's reading/listening song.

Bout of Books May 2018

  Another week of reading and reading challenges is coming up with the next bout-of-books starting on May 14th. Every other time I've participated in this one, it's been the first week of classes for me, so it's not been very much of a reading week.  So this time, as I join the Bout of Books readathon, I'm looking forward to it - especially since I wanted to make May a big reading month for a long-term book project that I've had trouble making time for this year.

What is bout of books? Here's a description:

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, May 14th and runs through Sunday, May 20th 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 22 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team


I've got quite a serious TBR going right now, but I'm also in a book club, so I have some lighter things on the list as well.
  For my Academic Reading Challenge, I'm reading a biography of Graham Greene and Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction, which is also for my book project. For book-club reading, I need to read Swamplandia, which I've owned for a long time without reading.  But in more serious reading, I have a large pile of recent books about neo-Nazis, right-wing populism, and the alt-right, and how to stop them, including David Neiwert's Alt America; Matthew Lyons, Insurgent Supremacists, and Shane Burley, Fascism Today: What it is and How to End It, Since the school year just ended and all my grades are turned in, I'm hoping to get a lot of reading done in the next two weeks.

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.