A list of books I have read in 2007:
Irish on the Inside, Tom Hayden
On Truth, Harry Frankfurt
The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory, Amanda Anderson (yet to finish)
The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin (for the third or fourth time)
The End of Utopia, Russell Jacoby
The Last Intellectual, Russel Jacoby (yet to finish)
Kiss My Tiara, Susan Jane Gilman
Iran Awakening, Shirin Ebadi
Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti.
How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev.
Books I have acquired and not touched:
Rhetorical Grammar, Martha Kolln
Environment and Society, Charles L. Harper
I think there have been a few more, but these are the ones I remember at the moment.
Also, writing them down makes me realize how many there are. I often feel like I don't read that much, but seeing this list makes me feel a lot better about what I do read. I know, I know - it doesn't compare to many people, but who cares?
I had also considered doing reviews on the blog for some of the books on this list, but I realize now that reading with a review in mind and reading for pleasure and comprehension are two different (perhaps three different) things for me. Sorry!
Finally, see the two books I've yet to open? By far and away the most academic of the books I've obtained (I found them on campus in a discarded pile). I don't think that's a coincidence. The Jacoby books and the Anderson book are also pretty dense, but so were Irish on the Inside and How the Irish Became White, so I don't think that I'm avoiding dense books, just academic ones. That college still has such an effect on my reading says something about college, I think, or at least my experience with it. I was a pretty voracious reader of books before college; now, I tend towards blog posts and news articles. I've also found that the reading schedule in college totally wrecked my reading comprehension. I need far more time to properly absorb material I've read.
Please feel free to leave a list of books you've read in 2007, or even just over the summer, in the comments. I would be really interested in seeing that. Thanks.
UPDATE: I also read Remembering Tomorrow: From the SDS to Life After Capitalism, by Michael Albert.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
On the Reading
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4 comments:
Please tell me that there are others - you must read something non-substantive, right? I like reading too much for it to always be a chore. I know, I know, you LIKE reading these kinds of books all the time, right? Blah! You hooked me, thought, and I pulled out my reader's notebook and compiled a semi-complete list and posted it. http://africaatlast.blogspot.com/2007/08/what-ive-been-reading.html
As far as Fancy-Pants books go, I've been enjoying the recent spurt of "sustainable food practices" books a lot.
For the record, I consider most of the books on my list to be of "medium" density. I might just be making that one up, however.
Sure, sure, sure. Not all of them are academically "heavy," but as far as I know, only one of those books is fictional, the Le Guin one. I'm more of an escapist than you are, I guess!
Hey, some of them are biographies! Those are usually easy, except when they are written by old radical leftists. See the Albert book and the Hayden book.
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