Bout of Books 24 Update - Day 7

This weekend my friends threw a birthday party for me at their house, and I spent much of the weekend shopping and making food for the party.

Along the way, I listened to Attica Locke's Bluebird, Bulebird. This book is pretty entertaining, and i can see her Texas ranger character become the center of a good series with a lot of emphasis of Southern Black life and racial conflict. I'm always interested in mysteries that have a bit of leftist political commentary, and this one combines that with good story-telling. It kept me company on a long drive from work as well.

I kept reading Meera Nanda, while also trying to keep track of what is happening the news. At this rate, I feel like the next book to pull from the TBR pile should be Russian Roulette by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

Today's challenge: Stretch Goal. I had originally hoped to finish Nanda by today, so I will try, though I'm not confident. 

Bout of Books 24 days 2,3, and 4

It's been a busy week at work, so I didn't have time to post, though I did have some time to read.

I finished Zoo City on Monday. I liked, but didn't love it.
I continue to read Meera Nanda's Prophets Facing Backward, though I'm making slow progress in it because of the need to prioritize work. Since she includes the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in her discussion of neo-Hinduism, I'm linking to the Beatles again for the listening portion of this read. According to John Lennon, this song is about the Maharishi.

and this is a recently unearthed song he worked on before Sexy Sadie, with Yoko joining in.

I also started David Golumbia's Politics of Bitcoin which I had started in December, but didn't finish before the end of the year. It's short, so I imagine I'll be done with it relatively soon. I like it so far, it's a useful overview of cyber-libertarianism, which is a somewhat under-studied aspect of far-right politics today.

For work, I read, because, I use it to teach, the first 130 pages of Adler and Van Doren's How to Read a Book. This year's students liked it much better than previous students did. It's always interesting to see how different classes react to the same text, and how they adapt to each other's reactions in the classroom. For me, How to Read a Book is a useful guide for reading that can still be helpful to students or those outside academia who want to read difficult books on their own - which is its stated purpose. It is also a kind of classic text of cold war liberalism, as it links its particular style of reading and analysis with the maintenance of democracy. In many ways the book is quite hierarchical and promotes the kind of view of literature and knowledge in general that you'd expect from confident New Critics. 

Day 5 challenge: if this, then that.

If you liked The New Jim Crow, try Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here, or for a more modern book, Understanding Mass Incarceration
   

Bout of Books 24 Day One Update

As I predicted, since it was the first day of classes at my university, I didn't do a whole lot of reading on Monday. I started in the morning with a very small amount of pages in Meera Nanda's Prophets Facing Backward, a book that I've known about for a while,since she was one of Alan Sokal's allies when he hoaxed the journal Social Text.  A lot of the people who were around Sokal seem to have gone further right politically, but Nanda does not seem to be one of them, as her other books are solidly left critiques of Hindu nationalism.  As interested as I am in how she develops her argument, which is relevant for research I'm doing on how people understand or define fascism, I had to leave to go to the office, at which point, more reading in that book was out of the question. Beyond reading stuff that I'll be teaching on Wednesday, I didn't get back to reading until the evening, when I read about 50 pages of Lauren Beukes' Zoo City before falling asleep. I really enjoyed the first part of the book, but either I got out of the swing of it for the second half, or the plot doesn't really cohere from the beginning to the end. I keep feeling like it's going along one line, then it seems to switch to a new direction, making it read like a series of unconnected scenes.  I'm close to being done, and it seems like I still barely have an idea of what's going on. That might be that the author's more interested in the world building than the story, so it seems like a travelogue in a cool fantasy land....or it might be that I'm always reading it when I'm not entirely awake.

Today's Bout of Books challenge:
 5 favorite fictional characters at a dinner party - who do I invite and what do I serve?  Hmm, I'll invite the main character of An Unnecessary Woman, Aaliya Sohbi. If I start with her, the group would need to be small, because she makes a point that she's quite anti-social. Milly from the novel Christadora, the artist who always feels in her husband's or her mother's shadow, would probably have something to talk with her about, despite their living in different places under radically different circumstances. To discuss the human condition with them, why not also invite Lilith Iyapo, the mother of hybrid human-oankali from Octavia Butler's xenogenesis trilogy? With myself and these three, I think we'd have plenty to discuss. We'd start with some olives and cheese and bread, and then eat something simple and delicious, roast chicken and vegetables maybe, with wine of course. 

Bout of Books 24 ...First readathon of 2019

Once again,  a Bout of Books readathon is happening during the first week of classes where I teach, from Monday Jan 7 through Sunday Jan 13.

It will be interesting to see how much, if anything I'm able to do. I'm striving to include BoB posts to my new practice of daily instagram "morning reading posts."

One thing I've got ready is a TBR pile that tippeth over, so I won't be struggling to find something to read.

Here's the official Bout of Books Blurb:

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, January 7th and runs through Sunday, January 13th 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 24 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog. - From the Bout of Books team

Reading and Listening Again - Portishead and Crip Times for Liz Crow's Figures project

I haven't been keeping at it, but the original reason for this blog was to find a permanent place for posts I used to make on Facebook about strange juxtapositions between books and music that came to me while I was simultaneously reading and listening to music. Since then, it's become mostly a place to blog about reading challenges and readathons, though I try to give my posts some musical accompaniment.

Today, I'm reading Robert McRuer's intellectually stimulating and politically motivating book, Crip Times: Disability, Globalization and Resistance for one of the categories in the 2018 academic reading challenge. On p. 208, he makes the connection between the band Portishead and their namesake, Portishead in North Somerset where Liz Crow completed sculpture/performance project, Figures in 2015. For the project, Crow spent 11 days at the river, using the mud to make small clay figures. She then toured with the figures for five days, along with stories of 650 disabled people affected by austerity policies. On the project's final day, she burned the figures in a cairn, and then crushed them into dust, while reading the stories of individuals aloud, a process that lasted six hours. Finally, she scattered the ashes off the coast of Portishead.

McRuer argues that the first lines of Portishead's song "Cowboys" could be a comment on the Blaire/Cameron (Blameron) govt. policies of austerity against which Crow's art was a protest:

Did you feel us tales of deceit
Conceal the tongues who need to speak
Subtle lies and a soiled coin
The truth is told, the deal is done. 

I could add, after reading just a few of the the devastating stories that make up Crow's Figures series, that they also resonate strongly with Portishead's song "Roads" which was playing on my computer when I began reading these narratives of lives "at the sharp end of austerity"

How can it feel this wrong?

This is just one of the stories behind the figures:

48-year old Paul was part of a wave of young Scottish authors who rose to international prominence in the 1990s. After he killed himself, his publisher wrote to Chancellor George Osborne, “I thought I would let you know that Paul took his own life. He didn’t leave a note but he laid out two letters on his table. One was notifying him that his Housing Benefit had been stopped. The other was notifying him that his Incapacity Benefit had been stopped. The reason I’m writing is just so you know the human cost of attacking those on benefits.

the Fifth Annual Academic Reading Challenge Starts Jan 1, 2019

Welcome reading friends!

Read below to find out the categories for next year's challenge. 

What it is and who it 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. 

    This is the fifth year I've organized this challenge, and you can read about it in an essay I wrote “Read Another Book, Repeat When Necessary” that’s included in the new essay collection, Reversing the Cult of Speed in Higher Education  edited by Jonathan Lee Chambers and Stephanie Gearhart. The challenge categories are crowd-sourced by the challenge participants in November of the year before the challenge starts.  

 

You can 

Like us on facebook

  There's also a facebook group you can join by permission.

follow the challenge on twitter

use hashtag #AcademicReadingChallenge to share your own updates on the challenge

Rules

The challenge starts on January 1, 2019 at midnight and goes till Dec. 31, 2019. 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.

 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 1/1/19 and finished no later midnight 12/31/2019

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 240 points.

And NOW….the Categories

1) Book by a friend or colleague 10 points
2) Book about music 10 points
3) Book about fascism  10  points
4) Book written before 1900 20  points
5) Book about a commodity 10 points
6) Book by a living poet 20 points
7) Historical novel 10 points
8)  Book of critical university studies 20 points
9)  Book about a country you don't normally read about 10 points
10) Book originally written in a non-European language 20 points
11) Book you first heard about on a podcast, radio, or social media 10 points
12) Book about a profession you'll never have, but always wish you did  20 points

13) Book that won an award in your field (any time period) 10 points

14) Book you'd forgotten you own (double points if you bought it twice) 10 points

15) A book about aging or with a protagonist over 60 10 points

Extra Credit:
16)  Extra Credit: The Struggle Continues! (you define the struggle) 10 points
17) Extra Extra credit: Book related to your teaching or research but a different discipline from yours 10 points
18) Super Duper Extra Credit: A book you discovered in the footnotes of another book 10 points

Bout of Books 23 - Day 7

Today's Bout of Books challenge - reassess the week's goals and decide whether I can stretch them.

So far, I've read 410 pages this week, and didn't finish a single book, but instead read bits of several.

So my stretch goal is to stay up another hour or so and finish at least one.  I'm almost done with two: Butler's Dawn and Ron Beiner, Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Return of the Far Right an essay reconsidering the influence of Nietzsche and Heidegger in contemporary philosophy in light of the rise of the alt-right.

At the moment though, I'm listening to the last chapter of the audiobook of Sharp Objects, which I had listened to when the book first came out, but which explains a lot more than the ending of the TV show.  Although I did enjoy what the show did to create a creepy Southern Gothic atmosphere,  the book was better.


and here's your music