Final Extra Credit Categories in this year's reading challenge!

Hello there, reading friends

 I haven't posted here in a while because I've been trying to get some research done and have been having a pretty busy summer. I will get back to posting cateogry recommendations soon. However, the big news is that the challenge FB group has voted on the the 2 10th anniversary bonus extra-credit categories. These are

19: A book about class and
20. A book about natural disaster and/or natural disaster response. 
 

 The complete list is here: 

1. A book by a friend, colleague, former teacher or former student (10)
 2. a book by a Palestinian author (10)
3. A book by an author you've seen cited or heard about a lot but never read (10)
4. a book about housing, homelessness, and/or the use of urban space (20)
5. a book written in the 1960s (10)
6. A book that you've owned for a long time but have never read (10)
7. A book about a rural location or rural life in general (in any country) (20)
8. A book by a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature (10)
9. A book that won an academic prize (20)
10. A book about conspiracy theories or "conspiracism" (10)
11. A book about mental health/illness (20)
12. A book of fiction in which a non-human animal is a major character, or in which non-human animals feature significantly in the plot (10)
13. A book published before 1900 (10)
14. A book about a specific election or elections in general (10)
15. A book about a place you've visited for no longer than a month (20)
Extra Credit:
16. Extra-Credit: A book about the effect of a disease outbreak or epidemic on religion (20)
17. Extra Extra-Credit: A book by a recently-ish deceased author (10)
18. Super-Duper Extra Credit: A special issue of an academic journal (20)
10^th anniversary bonus categories!
19. A book about class
20. A book about natural disaster and/or natural disaster response

Bout of Books 40 Wrap-Up

 I didn't read as much as I had hoped to during the bout of books week, considering that this time of year is generally a good one for me to be reading. I think the main problem was that I started with Isaac-Dovere's Battle for the Soul, which I made some headway in, though I'm beginning to find it to be a  a slog. 

However, I did finish Michael Gould Wartofksy's The Occupiers, which I was reading to prepare for my fall seminar, and found it quite a quick and informative study. I'm looking forward to teaching it. I also finished the audiobook of Ian Rankin's Strip Jack, which I had almost finished, but then forgot about for a while - not the best Rankin mystery. I also started reading John Scalzi's Starter Villain, which is quite entertaining. Not only is it nominated for the best novel Hugo (though I doubt I'll be voting for it), but the artist who did the cover, Tristan Ellwell is also nominated for best professional artist.

Bout of Books 40 Update - Monday-Wednesday

 I read a little bit in the morning, but spent most of Monday at a work mini-conference and then had a post-work plan with a friend, so I didn't get much reading done on the first day of this readathon. 

On Tuesday, I read about 40 pages of Edward-Isaac Dovere's Battle for the Soul and 75 pages of Michael Gould-Wartofksy's The Occupiers, which is my 'read-for-work' book of the moment. This was my best day so far. 

On Wednesday, I had hopes to match Tuesday, but I was distracted and didn't read that much, though I did pick up three books at the public library (two holds that came in: Volker Ulrich,Germany 1923, Calla Henkel, Other People's Clothes and impulse shelf pick of John Safran, God'll Cut You Down) as well as several comics at the comics shop in the evening, including the first two issues of Matt Kindt's new series If You Find This I'm Already Dead which had been accumulating in the "large issues" box along with Jeff Lemire's new run of Swamp Thing. 

Today's music, in honor of reading about Occupy Wall Street is Lupe Fiasco's anthem, with video brought to you by "Shit Scott Walker is Doing to My State" (what that SSWIDTMS stamped on the video means).

I forgot to do the last couple of photo challenges, so I'll have to start doing those again. I guess I still have 4 potential good reading days before this week is over. Onward! 

Academic Reading Challenge Recommendation: Book About an Election or Elections in General

 I was kind of surprised that category 14, Book about an election or elections in general got chosen by the group since this kind of focus in politics can become tedious. However, it is an election year, and we're surrounded by election talk. It seems reasonable to read something about an election, including things that could help put current politics in context. 

This entry's theme song is Black Sheep's "The Choice is Yours" with the chorus that Billboard tells me sums up every election "you can get with this or you can get with that." 

The one that I've chosen to read myself, and which I'm currently about 1/4 of the way through is Edward-Isaac Dovere's book Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump. This is the sort of book that probably turns a lot of people off from reading books about elections. It's a very standard political journalist's take, not an academic analysis, and certainly not a book with a point of view from the left. However, if you want to read an account that includes a lot of detailed "political insider" stuff about the internal politics of various campaigns building up to 2020, this isn't a bad read. I don't agree with a lot of Dovere's judgments of particular policies or politicians, but it's useful to know what those judgments are as I believe they are shared by a lot of people with political power. This is very much an example of American political "common sense," which can make it unintentionally infuriating. Other books about the 2020 election that are worth reading include Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague's The Steal which describes Trump's efforts to undo the results. I read this back when it first came out, and it was very similar to what you might have learned if you watched the January 6th hearings. Another choice might be the Congress's January 6th Report - though consider which edition to get. I got the one with Ari Melber's introduction on the recommendation of my local bookseller. 

A search for books about the 2016 election led me immediately to the role of Russian propaganda in that election. Probably the most authoritative academic study of that attempt is political scientist, Kathleen Hall-Jamieson's book Cyberwar which came out in the fall of 2018. After finding that, I went searching for books about "election meddling" that would cover the US's interference in other countries' elections, and came across this 2021 study Meddling in the Ballot Box by International Relations professor, Dov Levin, which compares Russian and US electoral interference efforts from 1946 to 2000. Another interesting book that addresses recent elections outside the United States is Leslie C. Gates's Capitalist Outsiders about the influence of oil on the politics of Mexico and Venezuela. Another book that begins with a recent election in Latin America is Sebastian Edwards' The Chile Project which includes substantial discussion of the role of the US in undermining democracy in Chile, but also tells the story of the election of Gabriel Boric in 2021. Rather than being a story of the rise of neoliberalism, it's about neoliberalism's fall. Another book about elections and electoral activity outside the U.S., but involving U.S. influence is Amy Wilentz's  The Rainy Season: Haiti Then and Now which updates the author's classic account of the immediate aftermath of the fall of "Baby Doc" Duvalier in Haiti and goes into the 2000s. 

For books about the mixing of elections and criminal conspiracies, why not read about Richard Nixon's rise and fall in the U.S? There are many books to choose from. There's Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in '72 based on his reports for Rolling Stone. I read this book years ago in the summer between my senior year in high school and first year in college, and remember finding it both prescient and hilarious. Or, you could read the classic Joe McGinnis book, The Selling of the President 1968 which features Roger Ailes, who sadly continued to influence American politics for years to come. A relatively recent book on the 1968 election is Aram Goudsouzian's The Men and the Moment, which is also about Nixon's opponents. And of course, you could go for any book on Watergate. There are so many to choose from, starting with the original All the President's Men that made so many people want to be investigative reporters, to the more recent book by Garrett Graff, Watergate: A New History. 

 While electoral play-by-plays can be interesting, elections can also be sites of analysis to understand broader political context. One example of such a book is political scientist, Joe Lowndes' book From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism which builds from 1948's Dixiecrats to the George Wallace campaigns as a key to understanding the contemporary right.  Speaking of 1948, you could pick one of THREE recent books on Henry Wallace and the 1948 US presidential campaign. There's Ben Steil's The World That Wasn't, published this year, John Nichols' Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party and Thomas Devine's Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of American Postwar Liberalism. 

  If you're more interested in the slightly more recent past, you might want to check out Robert Fleegler's Brutal Campaign about the Bush vs. Dukakis contest in 1988.  This was the same period when David Duke ran for the Louisiana state legislature, sparking an early anti-fascist campaign to stop him. Tyler Bridges' book The Rise and Fall of David Duke could be a great choice for this category. Or, if you're interested in a more academic account, you might take a look at the edited collection from U. of Vanderbilt Press, David Duke and the Politics of Race in the South. 

If you're interested in going even further back in US electoral history to get at the roots of this situation, a friend and mentor of mine recommends Morgan Kousser's The Shaping of Southern Politics, originally published in 1974 as "the best of the older histories" about the establishment of the Democratic Party's one-party white-supremacist rule of the US South in the late nineteenth century. 

If you want to read about elections in Europe, you could go with a real classic, Karl Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte which is about a coup, but also includes a lot of discussion of elections that preceded it. This is really an indispensible book for anyone interested in political analysis in my view.   Another book that concerns a set of specific elections that ends with the end of elections is Benjamin Carter Hett's book about the immediate rise of Hitler, The Death of Democracy which gets into the details of the German parliament during the Weimar period, and also was written in such a way as to highlight parallels with the Trump era. I am not sure how much this book on Silvio Berlusconi focuses on the ins and outs of specific elections, but it looks like it has at least some discussion of the media and "the democratic process" and might be worth a look. For another account of contemporary far-right authoritarianism, Paul Lendvai's book on Viktor Orban, Orban: Hungary's Strongman includes a significant amount of discussion of his path to electoral victory. 

Another book about the election of a major far-right leader outside the US, is the popular book on Modi's election in 2014 by journalist, Rajdeep Sardesai, 2014: The Election that Changed India. I haven't read this book, but the Goodreads reviews from BJP supporters are very negative, which suggests it's a critical analysis of Hindu nationalism. 

A friend who's participating in the reading challenge reminded me that there are also novels about elections. 

One of those is Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah, a classic work about a mayoral race in Boston that was adapted into a movie starring Spencer Tracey. It's now out in a new edition from the University of Chicago Press.  

But if a mayoral race is too serious for you, you could try Tom Perotta's popular novel about a high school class-president race, Election, which was also adapted into a (very funny) movie. 

Philip Roth's The Plot Against America got a second lease on life because of Trump, and also a TV series adaptation. It's one of his better novels, in my view, though I found the ending a bit strange.

Bout of Books 40 - Sign-Up Post

 

The May Bout of Books is the one that gives me the best chance to actually do some substantial reading. My grades are turned in, the big indie-rock festival I go to every spring is over. The only thing stopping me this week is one all-day mini-conference thing at work on Monday. After that, I should be unscheduled and ready to read.

What is Bout of Books? According to the hosts,

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 13th and runs through Sunday, May 19th in YOUR time zone. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are reading sprints, daily Discord questions, and exclusive Instagram challenges, but they’re all completely optional. For all Bout of Books 40 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

I noticed that they've moved the scheduled chats from the sewer that is Twitter/X to Discord which is nice, though I rarely remember to participate in the chats.

 I've been trying to figure out what I really want to focus on reading this month for my research. I've been working on two different books over the last few years, and summer is the only time I really have to do research. One of these books is about "geek culture" and political conflict in science-fiction and fantasy, which I've been calling "Geek Wars" as a working title. The other one is about anti-fascist politics in the U.S. But I have a couple of other pressing work-related things to do that involve reading. I'm teaching a brand new graduate course in the fall, and need to prepare for that. I've also got a book review to write this summer - and both the book review and the new graduate course are related to the project on anti-fascism. I always try to do at least some "non-work" reading as well, and those books continue to be tempting. 

So far, I'm thinking I'll continue reading Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump, which was my choice for the academic reading challenge category 14: "book about an election or elections in general." It's not the best book about an election, but it's a detailed account of the backroom politics of a lot of capmaigns and Democratic strategizing over the last 8 years or so, so is worth reading. 

 I'm also going to continue reading Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky's The Occupiers: the Making of the 99 Percent Movement, which I'll be teaching in that grad seminar in the fall. 

 If I have time, I'm going to go back to Jo Walton's Informal History of the Hugos, which has the benefit of being both fun and related to the "geek wars" project. A less fun book that I started reading for "Geek Wars" before I was forced to focus all my energy on teaching last spring is the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction by Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint (the edition I have doesn't include Adam Roberts).

 I have already given up on this week's book-club selection, 2312 which I'm having trouble getting into, and which is just too long to finish in a couple of days, even if I was really loving it. 

 I guess we'll see what happens. Hopefully I'll be able to settle down and focus on reading something, as I've been very distracted for the last week.

Academic Reading Challenge Recommendations: Books by Recently-ish Deceased Authors (Extra-Credit Category)

I've been super busy with work this spring, so I haven't had an opportunity to post for a while, but I'm finally getting around to this one. I just finished reading my own choice for this category, which was Russel Banks' novel The Darling about a white woman from the Weather Underground who winds up in Liberia, married to a government minister, and then involved in the civil war between Charles Taylor, Prince Johnson and Samuel Doe. The reason for this category's entry into into the challenge was that one of my friends really wanted to read another book by Banks, and thus "rigged" the cateogory. Thankfully, others were interested in reading books by the recently departed.  This category may seem a little maudlin or macabre, but it's true that writers who we may not have paid attention to in life get more attention when they die because of the obituaries that come out. 

Sadly there are many eligible people for this category. Since this category is "recently-ish" I've decided that means within the last five years. I decided to only include authors whose work I've read myself and remember well enough to really talk about, though of course there have been some recent major literary deaths that I haven't included below. 

Since several of the authors I chose were fierce critics of the US government, but also knew, "it's not just American where shit's fucked up." today's musical accompaniment comes from the late Jaimie Branch, a fantastic jazz musician who died in 2022, playing "Prayer for AmeriKKKa pt 1 and 2" 

Here are my suggestions: 

1. Russell Banks Since I've already mentioned him, here's why you should read a book by him. Banks is a meticulous writer who creates wonderfully believable characters. For example, in the Darling, his point-of-view character is Hannah Musgrave, a white woman activist from the 60s, told in flashback from the early 1990s. It never felt "off" to me at all. He also takes on serious political issues without being didactic. I say he's meticulous because so many of his novels are also about distinct historical periods - such as his book Cloudsplitter, about John Brown, which is probably the best work of fiction about John Brown and abolition in general. 

2. Toni Morrison This is my second recommendation for her for one of the reading challenge categories. She counts for this category because she died in 2019, within the last five years. 

3.I've also previously recommended Mike Davis for this reading challenge. He was a prolific writer, and while my first recommendation was in the books about cities category, he also wrote books about other subjects that are very much worth reading, such as his classic book on the American working class, Prisoners of the American Dream

4. The great British novelist, A.S. Byatt  died last year. Her book Possession is one of my all-time favorite books. I re-read a few years ago for one of these reading challenges, and it was still just as fun as the first time. She's also the author of many other books that are probably also excellent. 

5. Another great British novelist, and the winner of two Booker prizes, Hilary Mantel, who suffered from illness for most of her life, died in 2022. As the linked obituary reads, she is most well-known for her amazing historical novels about Thomas Cromwell, starting with Wolf Hall. I also loved her novel Beyond Black sort of like magical realism in British suburbia.

6. If you're looking for an excellent academic book to read by a recently deceased scholar of American empire, Amy Kaplan would be a wonderful author to read at this particular moment because of the way she brought together literary and cultural criticism and analysis of US foreign policy. Her 2018 book Our American Israel, would be an especially good choice this year. 

7. Another great anti-imperialist writer was Sven Lindquist, who died in 2019. His short book Exterminate All the Brutes is one that most of my friends read when it first came out in translation. In it, he writes “We want genocide to have begun and ended with nazism....That is what is most comforting.” 

8. If you'd rather read something lighter, try something by Barbara Neely, the author of the wonderful mystery series featuring Blanche White. This article from Lit Hub's "Crime Reads" newsletter explains her activist history and influence on a younger generation of Black women mystery writers.  

9. If you want a mix of foreign policy commentary with genre fiction, you cannot do better than John Le Carre, who, like Neely, died in 2020. He certainly wrote plenty of books to choose from. 

10. The last author whose work I've read and who I highly recommend in this category is the most recently deceased, Maryse Conde who died just last month. Her book I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, is one that I taught when I was still teaching literature classes. You can read Lit Hub's profile of her at the link above.

11. Speaking of Lit Hub, I suggest reviewing their annual summaries of notable literary deaths I found out more about recently-deceased Syrian author, Khaled Khalifa by reviewing those lists this morning. 

Academic Reading Challenge Recommendations: Fiction about Non-Human Animals

 I've been too busy to do a recommendation post for a while, but here I am again wtih recommendations for category 12:  A book of fiction in which a non-human animal is a major character, or in which non-human animals feature significantly in the plot. 

At first I didn't think there would be that many books that would fit this category, but then I realized that there's so much to choose from in this category. There are many books written from an animal's point of view, books about alien animal species, books in which animals figure significantly without being central characters, and science-fiction books about "uplifted animals" who have been genetically modified to have human-like intelligence. 

I got some excellent suggestions for this category from members of the reading challenge Facebook group, as well as a new "bookish" social group that a friend of mine has created for his friends that like to read and talk about books without being members of a regular book club. It also just so happens that the science fiction book club that I'm in chose to read a book about uplifted animals for our March meeting, so I got some ideas from that list of options as well. 

This post's theme-song is Foals' "Providence" 

 

1. One of my favorite books,and one of the first to be recommended by a member of the challenge facebook group was the science-fiction book, Borne by Jeff VanderMeer. This book began a series and all of it includes significant animal characters, so any of them could count. VanderMeer's interest in animals and ecology would also make some of his other writings work for this challenge, including the excellent Southern Reach trilogy.  

2. Another alien-animal series begins with Nicky Drayden's book Escaping Exodus which includes an organic space-ship. It comes recommended by another challenge participant. The same member of the group also recommends The Last Animal, which she described as addressing a number of fascinating issues such as cloning, research ethics, grief, and sexism. 

3, Because I was reading their review of Borne, Publisher's Weekly's algorithm just suggested this forthcoming book by Julia Phillips, author of The Disappearing Earth. If you can wait until June to read this category, why not try out Bear, which sounds like it's influenced both by ecology and fairy tales. 

4. Also from the facebook group, comes a recommendation for Bernard Malamud's God's Grace which, like some of the others listed here is also a dystopian novel, and according to the challenge participant "gets weird." 

5. I thought of this entire category because I recently stumbled across the book Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth. It's not written from an animal point of view, at least as far as I know, but the whole thing is about a heist by two egg auditors to "steal a million chickens in the middle of the night." I bought it because the cover caught my eye and then the description made it sound like a lot of fun. 

6. There are many classics written from the point of view of animals, and any of them would be great for this category. Consider, for example Watership Down, Animal Farm, Call of the Wild and White Fang; Charlotte's Web, the Metamorphosis paired with lesser-works by Kafka, such as "Josephine the Mouse Singer." There are many children's books in this category, including the Black Stallion books, or, more recently, the huge "warrior cats" series. Just remember that challenge books should be about 200 pages long, so you might need to read a couple to fill the category. 

7. The most classic work in the "uplifted animal" sub-genre is Planet of the Apes, which began as a book in French in 1963. Other works to consider in this category, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, which features a terraformed planet populated by accidentally uplifted spiders and ants, Despite being pretty horrifying as a concept, this book, which I'm currently reading for the SF book club I mentioned, is really good. Some other good uplifted animal books you might consider are Clifford Simak's City, in which dogs narrate the end of human civilization,  Lawrence Schoen's Barsk; The Elephant's Graveyard, and Robert Repino's Mort(e): War With No Name, featuring a house-cat turned assassin.   

8. Many of the members of the bookish club recently read the short novel, Open Throat written from the point of view of a mountain lion in the Hollywood Hills, which is part of this year's Tournament of Books. They really, really liked it, finding the animal's point of view narrative very interestingly non-human.

9. I've already mentioned this book in my recommendations of Nobel Prize winners, but Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is another great book in which animals feature significantly in the plot without being point-of-view characters. 

10. Sigrid Nunez's The Friend is another non-science fiction work in which an animal figures significantly in the plot. This book is as much about relationships among humans as it is about animals, but it explores the importance of animal companions to humans.

I think I'll stop there, but if you find something else that looks good, feel free to mention it in the comments.