The Book Thread Book • Page 118

I'm assuming it's heavily what I spoiler tagged?

 

Purchasing a Kindle and setting up a nearly weekly virtual book club helped me read the most in years, if not by number of works, then definitely by volume.

• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
• Where the Forests Meet the Stars - Glendy Vanderah
• The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company - William Dalrymple
  
• The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
• On Ideology - Louis Althusser
• When We Believed in Mermaids: A Novel - Barbara O'Neal
• The End of Policing - Alex Vitale
  
• Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States - Truthout Collection
• The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
• Critique of Everyday Life - Henri Lefebrve
• The Cider House Rules - John Irving
• All-American Nativism: How the Bipartisan War on Immigrants Explains Politics as We Know It - Daniel Denvir
• Foundation - Isaac Asimov
• If Beale Street Could Talk - James Baldwin
• The Black Jacobins - C.L.R. James
• How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them - Jason Stanley
• The Human Condition - Hannah Arendt
• The King is Always Above the People - Daniel Alarcón
• The Balfour Declaration: Empire, the Mandate, and Resistance in Palestine - Bernard Regan (Currently Reading)
• Tranny - Laura Jane Grace (Currently reading)

Edit: I think i finished the majority of Brothers Karamazov in February or March but i struggle to remember anything pre-pandemic or pre-Kindle.

 

that’s definitely a big part of it but I feel it focused much more on her alcoholism and struggling with remembering that night and her past with her dad and brother.

 

Well, if everyone's doing it, here's my book list. As many have said, due to the pandemic, my 61 books were the most I've read in a few years (I usually set and just barely meet my goal of a book a week/52 a year). A word of warning: as an anthropology grad student, a solid chunk of these books are random ethnographies that I can't imagine many people would have interest in. Also, I definitely need to find a way to fit more fiction in here. Anyway, in chronological order and without ratings because I'm not very critical and just gave most of these 5 stars:
1. The Water Dancer - Te-Nehisi Coates
2. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems - Randell Monroe
3. The Wars of Afghanistan - Peter Tomsen
4. 108 Stitches - Ron Darling
5. Of Hospitality - Jacques Derrida
6. Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco - Teresa Gowan
7. Closing Time - Joseph Heller
8. Righteous Dopefiend - Phillipe Bourgois
9. Alex & Me - Irene Pepperberg
10. Churchill's Secret War - Madhusree Mukenjee
11. We Must Be Brave - Frances Liardet
12. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya - Caroline Elkins
13. Ice: A Memoir of Gangster Life and Redemption - Ice-T
14. The Education of Kevin Powell - Kevin Powell
15. The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X
16. The Nickel Boys - Colston Whitehead
17. Assata: An Autobiography - Assata Shakur
18. The Epigenetics Revolution - Nessa Carey
19. Almost Human: The Story of Julius, the Chimpanzee Caught between Two Worlds - Alfred Fidjestol
20. Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They tell us About Ourselves - Frans de Waal
21. The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World - Ian McGilchrist
22. Born a Crime - Trevor Noah
23. The Sixth Extinction - Elizabeth Kolbert
24. American War - Omar El Akkad
25. The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein
26. The Last Jedi - Jason Fry
27. The Rise of Skywalker - Rae Carson
28. The Fire This Time - Jesmyn Ward
29. Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa - Patrick Bond
30. Wild Life - Keena Roberts
31. Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey - Ayse Parla
32. What Truth Sounds Like - Michael Eric Dyson
33. Debt: The First 5000 Years - David Graeber (RIP)
34. Individutopia: A Novel Set in a Neoliberal Dystopia - Joss Sheldon
35. Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment - Joao Biehl
36. Invisible:The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America's Most Powerful Mobster- Carter
37. Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community - Steven Gregory
38. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
39. The Dialogic Imagination - M.M. Bakhtin
40. Gorilla and the Bird - Zack McDermott
41. Facing Up to the American Dream: Class, Race, and the Soul of the Nation - Jennifer Hochschild
42. Gang Leader for a Day - Sudhir Venkatesh
43. Last Project Standing: Civics and Sympathy in Post-Welfare Chicago - Catherine Fennel
44. Precolonial Black Africa - Cheikh Anta Diop
45. Mudpacks and Prozac: Experiencing Ayurvedic, Biomedical, and Religious Healing - Murphy Halliburton
46. Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths Among Nepal's Yolmo Buddhists - Robert Desjarlais
47. Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development - Daromir Rudnyckyj
48. Bending Towards Justice - Doug Jones
49. The Craft of Research - Wayne Booth
50. Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime - Sean Carroll
51. The Production of Space - Henri Lefebvre
52. Nervous Conditions - Tsitsi Dangarmbga
53. Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago - Christine Walley
54. We Need New Names - NoViolet Bulawayo
55. Decolonizing the Mind - Ngugi wa Thiong'o
56: The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon
57. What Are You Going Through - Sigrid Nunez
58. Wisdom From a Rainforest: The Spiritual Journey of an Anthropologist - Stuart Schlegal
59. God and the Multiverse - Victor Stenger
60. Critical Discourse Analysis - Norman Fairclough
61. Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China - Judith Farquhar

 

I’ve been re-reading Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and I’m approaching the end, and goddamn, if this prose isn’t some of the most gorgeous flowing musical shit I’ll ever read. I know Joyce gets flack for his later stuff (which I haven’t dug into—yet) but damn what a linguistic master. There are some writers that make me want to shrink down and live in the comfort of their sentences, and he’s definitely one of them.

 

yeah, dude was brilliant

 

was trying to finish my last book before I posted my list. Here's what I read this year! favorites in bold:

 

Joyce was one kinky mofo

 

I ended up reading books from years past that I never got around to - many of which I ended up loving. Anyway, I just wanted to focus on books released this year so here are my best books of 2020:

Top Non-Fiction of 2020:

01) History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

02) Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream by Mychal Denzel Smith

03) Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction by Arundhati Roy

04) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

05) Paying the Land by Joe Sacco

06) An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida by Peter Salmon

07) Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

08) The People, NO!: A Brief History of Anti-Populism by Thomas Frank

09) Apple: Skin to the Core by Eric Garnsworth

10) Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild

11) Reverse Cowgirl by McKenzie Wark

12) Bukowski: A Life by Neeli Cherkovski

Top Fiction/Poetry of 2020:

01) How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang

02) Apeirogon by Colum McCann

03) The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones

04) Memorial by Bryan Washington

05) Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

06) Good Citizens Need Not Fear by Maria Reva

07) Finna: Poems by Nate Marshall

08) Post-Colonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Honorable Mentions:

Dragon Hoops by Gene Luen Yang

A Map to the Sun by Sloane Yang

Slaughterhouse-Five: The Graphic Novel by Ryan North/Kurt Vonnegut

Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance by Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone

Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal by Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin

 

My final 2020 list. Loved a lot of these, but my two favorites were Interpreter of Maladies and Interior Chinatown.

1. Lethal White - Robert Galbraith
2. The Outsider - Stephen King
3. The Shining Girls - Lauren Beukes
4. Universal Harvester - John Darnielle
5. Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 - Annie Proulx
6. Dune - Frank Herbert
7. High School - Sara Quin and Tegan Quin
8. The Dark Forest - Liu Cixin
9. To Fly Among the Stars - Rebecca Siegel
10. Death’s End - Liu Cixin
11. Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri
12. The Terminal Man - Michael Crichton
13. The Thief Lord - Cornelia Funke
14. The Iliad - Homer
15. Room - Emma Donoghue
16. Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut
17. Big Beautiful Book of Bass - Geddy Lee
18. The Testaments - Margaret Atwood
19. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
20. The Happiness Trap - Russ Harris
21. We Were the Mulvaneys - Joyce Carol Oates
22. Divergent - Veronica Roth
23. The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
24. A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
25. Insurgent - Veronica Roth
26. Cujo - Stephen King
27. Allegiant - Veronica Roth
28. The Odyssey - Homer
29. Wise Blood - Flannery O’Connor
30. Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
31. Solutions and Other Problems - Allie Brosh
32. The Answer Is... - Alex Trebek
33. The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
34. A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
35. Where the Crawdads Sing - Delia Owens
36. Foundation - Isaac Asimov
37. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
38. The Underground Railroad - Colson Whitehead
39. Night - Elie Wiesel
40. A Time To Kill - John Grisham
41. Interior Chinatown - Charles Yu

 

2021 in books: what to look forward to this year | Fiction | The Guardian

A fair bit here that I'll want to check out. New ones from Murakami and Abdurraqib, as well as a children's picture book by Zadie Smith (def getting that for my daughters).

Will also 100% be avoiding the new Jordan Peterson and Bill Gates book about climate change (insert hot dog "we're all trying to find out who did this" meme).

 

Just finished Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. Jaw dropping prose, strange and gripping story, disturbing themes involving murderous children, super quick read.

Up next, Toni Morrison’s Jazz.

 

Just started reading The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. I'm only a few chapters in but holy shit - what a phenomenal debut novel this is shaping up to be. This is truly something that would make Baldwin and Morrison proud.

That Hanif Abdurraqib book is great. I'm taking my time on the advanced copy, savoring it. Every new book he releases blows away his previous one.

 

Ocean Vuong plugged this today. Def on my list.

 

Jazz unfortunately wasn’t grabbing me so I started Tatiana Salem Levy’s The House in Smyrna.

 

Just downloaded Ducks, Newburyport after skimming through folks' end-of-year lists and having the first 20 books i searched at my library come up on hold lol. Every 6 months or so i seem to pick a book that is an outright project.

 

I bought that right after it came out and still haven't started it. Definitely seems like a project, but I'm looking forward to it.

 

I looooved it

 

it's on my list

 

just looked it up and can say with 100% certainty I’m not smart enough to read that novel

 

I just downloaded it and am going to give it a shot. You are definitely smarter than me with books and such. I'll let you know how my journey goes

 

I feel like there's no way that's true but then again, I haven't read it either. the only thing I really know about it is it's ostensibly one giant run-on sentence

 

your brain very quickly adapts to read "the fact that" as punctuation and for me it became more soothing than anything! was a lot more accessible than I expected

 

I got a library card today and felt like a boss

 

I'm on it at the moment and loving it! Definitely going to be a long haul but I don't think its going to be a chore.

Honestly it looks intimidating but its a very gentle read. Its basically just reading the narrators train of thought for a 1000 pages, so it jumps all over the place and there's no real plot as such, but there's no deep underlying messages to interpret or anything like that. If anything its the opposite, it kinda washes over you, almost becomes white noise. Kinda meditative.