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

Audible.Com Includes Nazi Propaganda in Holiday Relief Sale. - Updated: Book Removed

It looks as if both Audible and Amazon have pulled the book from their site. They did not issue any public statement about how the book came to be recommended in a featured sale selection over the holidays. I'm not sure what the process is, or how they plan to avoid promoting similar books in the future. Are they going to have human beings check algorithmic recommendations? That seems like the best bet, but who knows?

Since Audible.com was bought by Amazon twelve years ago, it's probably been futile to expect that they would refuse to carry Nazi content. After all, their parent company still sells the Turner Diaries despite organized efforts to get them to stop.  I've been a member of Audible since 2002,  and I really enjoy audiobooks, which I listen to when travelling and doing chores. I usually listen to about 12 each year, which is why I have one of those memberships that includes an audiobook each month.

I was curious to read that the Audible CEO, Don Katz, was a student of Ralph Ellison's at NYU, and attributes much of his thinking to Ellison's mentorship. In 2018, he proudly posted a link to Philip Roth's visit to the Audible studio in Newark. One wonders what Ellison and Roth would think today, if they saw the book Day of the Rope a fan-fiction fantasy based on the vision of the Turner Diaries, not just being sold on Audible, but being featured as part of a year-end "Holiday Relief" 2-for-1 sale. The sale is over now, but you can see the screen-shot from the promotion below.  I included the first review "pure trash" in the picture because that reader is correct about this book, which should not be featured in a sale.

My best guess is that this promotion happened because of an algorithm. After all, Youtube's algorithm has become a notorious ingredient in online radicalization. What it looks like is that this book got a large number of positive reviews from Nazis who organized to build it up through the algorithms. Some of these reviews refer to it as a "guide" for the boogaloo - the current white supremacist plan for a 2nd Civil War inside the United States. which makes the inclusion of the book in the sale even more concerning.  One would expect that a company based on the values of literacy and human understanding would seek to find out what happened and would have already taken action to remedy it quickly. It should not take a large social media or letter writing campaign to get them to do so. There are a lot of other worse things happening in the world right now than this one small thing, but it's troubling to me that Audible.com's reaction hasn't been to swiftly, clearly - and publicly repudiate this piece of pure racist trash. Instead, the first response to my complaint has been to say that "we try to be neutral." But promoting a book like this one isn't neutral, it's incendiary. On the good side, the email I got from customer service said that a "team" was handling this with utmost priority. I hope to find out soon what that means, as Audible has remained entirely silent about this on their social media accounts, despite the fact that several people have liked or retweeted and tagged them in posts related to this promotion, with a number of people saying that they are cancelling subscriptions as a result.
   Lesson number one in new media literacy ought to be not to let algorithms do all your thinking. Lessons from Ellison and Roth would likely be that sometimes even business people ought to maintain some principles. If you can't see the problem with a promotion of a white supremacist terrorist manual, what problem can you see with anything? 

The 6th Annual Academic Reading Challenge starts on Jan 1, 2020

Hello again, reading friends and reading strangers, and welcome to the academic reading challenge for 2020. I hope you'll join us for this fun experiment in resisting the push to over-specialization 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. 

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/

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, 2020 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2020. There are a total of 15 regular categories in the challenge with three “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 about an ocean voyage for both the ocean voyage 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 1/1/20 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2020

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

Total possible points for 1-15 without "double-point bonuses" 200. Points for all extra-credit and double-point bonuses: 250 

And Now .... The Categories!

1. Book by a friend or colleague 10 points 

2. Book about a coup, counter-revolutionary movement and/ or revolution  10 points, double points if within 21st century 
3. Book about social movements not focused on presidential elections  20 points
4. Book about something considered “low culture”  10 points
5. Book about magic or the supernatural   10 points - double points for an academic study
6. Book about politics outside the U.S.      20 points
7. Book about the ocean or an ocean voyage (academic, popular science, journalism or fiction)  10 points
8. Modern adaptation of Shakespeare or other classic literature from any country  20 points
9. Book about legal history or courts  10 points
10. Book about a religion that you have never before studied or practiced (can be key texts / scriptures of that religion or a book about that religion).  10 points
11. Book about responding to climate change    20 points
12. Book about science for general readers       10 points
13. Academic book someone recommended to you, but you still haven't read  20 points
14. Academic book published in 2019 or 2020     10 points
15. Book about youth or youth culture, with a protagonist under 30, or written by someone under 30 - 10 points 

Extra Credit
16. 2nd book by an author who you have read 1 book by. Can be academic, literary, or genre fiction 10 points
17. Extra-Extra Credit: Historical Fiction set after WWII 10 points
18. Super-Duper Extra-Credit: Book you stumbled across in the library stacks or browsing in a book store 10 points

And if you're new, please comment below and say what brought you to this blog post. I don't use this space that often, but It's fun to see who's reading. 

24in48 Hour Twelve: Audiobook Story

It's hour 12 of the 48 hours of reading time this weekend, and I'm 6 hours into my (hopefully) 24 hours of reading. Now I'm alternating between two books, one print, one audio, to rest my eyes and keep my body moving. I didn't plan it this way, but Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give and Stephen Markley's Ohio are a good match. Both are fiction crafted in an immediate response to violence and poverty in America. One is focused on police violence against Black people and features a young girl becoming an activist. The other about the Iraq war and the opioid epidemic, and at least partly concerns a young man becoming an activist. Both also describe drug use and drug dealing as a product of poverty and despair, and both address how larger conflicts interrupt and clarify friendships among young people.  And because of where I am in each book, I wound up reading and listening to two different descriptions of high school proms in the same two hour period this afternoon. I'm only a little ways into Ohio, but it seems to take racism seriously as part of its story line from the perspective of a white man who is increasingly critical of the casual racism and patriotic illusions in his small town in Ohio, while The Hate U Give comes from the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Here's Tupac's Thug Life, which I think works for both books, even though it's most obviously connected to the Hate U Give, which takes its title from Tupac's explanation of the T.H.U.G L.I.F.E (The Hate You Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody).

24in48: It's a Book-Fiend Holiday!

It's the 24in48 readathon, the weekend that comes twice a year, when I and thousands of others read for 24 hours between Saturday and Monday at midnight and take breaks to chat and share our bookish glee.

I've only been reading for a little over an hour. I conked out almost immediately after starting my first book last night at hour zero.

And now we're between hours 6 and 9, and i'm posting for the Hour Six challenge: Show off your SFF. This was the perfect one for me, since my husband and I created a science fiction bathroom after realizing how much shelf space we had in there. Before you ask, no, there's no tub or shower in this small bathroom, so we're not worried about the books getting ruined. We've been collecting posters and other decor for the last couple of years. Now that my husband runs a Science Fiction book-club through our local indie bookshop, we're also building a great collection of contemporary international SF.

Some history recommendations for July 4th

Since the first thing I saw this morning was a scandalous New York Times editorial that dramatically misrepresented the history of the American Revolution and its relationship to the French revolution, I thought it would be a good idea to post some recommendations of books that show a different side of the American Revolution and the "Age of Revolutions" more generally.
  Let's get the party started:

Some of the best books on the American Revolution start with an analysis of the social conflict and popular demonstrations among the era's workers, both enslaved and free and how they pushed the colonies toward independence. Probably the most influential of these works is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic which describes revolts by sailors and dock-workers across the Atlantic  from the 1600s through the French Revolution.

The most classic work on the subject of 18th century radicalism and its relevance for modern politics is C.LR. James' brilliant Black Jacobins. This book is more focused on the Haitian and French Revolutions, but it places the American war of independence in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and provides the underlying perspective that explains much of the more grounded work on the 18th century Atlantic world today.

Edward Countryman, whose work was the subject of a round-table of historians in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1996, is another historian whose work emphasizes class differences and contrasting agendas of the groups who participated in the American war for independence and the transformation to the early Republic. His most frequently assigned work is The American Revolution which is now out in a new edition. 

An equally important classic is Benjamin Quarles' study, The Negro in the American Revolution, recently reissued by the UNC press. I learned a great deal from this book when I was preparing to teach African American history before 1865 for the first time after I had just finished by PhD.

For a very recent work by an anthropologist about the legacy of the revolution for Black Americans, see Mitch Kachun's new book on the memory of Crispus Attucks, First Martyr of Liberty I haven't read this one yet, but it looks full of fascinating material. Here he is being interviewed on the New Books Network

Other historians who have moved beyond staid representations of founders made of marble include Annette Gordon-Reid, Woody Holton, Jean H. Baker, Gary Nash, Jeff Pasley, and Dana Frank, whose book on boycotts and economic nationalism in the revolutionary era may have new relevance in the age of Trump.

Friday Book and Music Pairing

Today's morning reading was Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Signal to Noise. Set in Mexico City, and alternating between the late 1980s and the end of the 00s, it's the story of three friends who do magic with vinyl records. Music pairing for one pivotal scene