And yet I still feel like I haven't read anything...

I consider myself semi-tagged by bz. (does an encouraging email count?) These have been read in the last few months, not just in March.

Tithe, Holly Black

Them, Jon Ronson

Forty Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson

Fifty Degrees Below, Kim Stanley Robinson

Sixty Days and Counting, Kim Stanley Robinson

American Gods, Neil Gaiman (if you've never read this, DO SO RIGHT THIS INSTANT)

Sun of Suns, Karl Schroeder

Lady of Mazes, Karl Schroeder

Prancing Lavender Bunnies, Paul Turner

Last Night at the Lobster, Stewart O' Nan

This list feels incomplete - I think there are some books I've borrowed and returned (some William Gibson in particular) that are not included here.

Currently reading:

Capers in the Churchyard, Lee Hall

Possibilities, David Graeber

Threshold, Sara Douglass

More Books

Some further book recommendations I have received via email or through conversation (thanks everybody!), as well as a few I've dug up on my own:

The Einstein Intersection - Samuel Delany

Triton - Samuel Delany

Dhalgren - Samuel Delany

Nova - Samuel Delany

Johnny Mnemonic - William Gibson

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

Spook Country - William Gibson

The Difference Engine - William Gibson

Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

Misfortune - Wesley Stace

The Ivy Tree - Mary Stewart

Books!

I have been compiling a list of books I want to read for a few years now. While I've gotten to a fair chunk of said list (all the books that are bolded near the bottom have been read, purchased, started or some combination of the above), the growth rate is much higher than the completion rate.

Below is the entire list; you should note there's no distinction between fact or fiction (or anything else).

In the last few months, I have read more for fun (i.e. fiction) than in a long time - probably since before college. I'm a much different person now, and I get both more and different things from reading.

One thing I've found myself feeling as a result of reading the books am I is hope for the possibility of change. This is both extremely gratifying and extremely surprising.

UPDATE: Of course I have also read plenty of books not on this list - including a big chunk from a friend who has made his personal library available to me. Considering his personal library is probably 1000+ books, this will take some time...

Feel free - encouraged, even - to leave your wanted book lists in comments.... and to talk about what you get out of reading. Or, perhaps, to give me suggestions.

Thanks in advance.

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A Thousand Plateaus - Deleuze & Guattari

The Stars My Destination/Tiger Tiger – Alfred Bester

Demolished Man – Alfred Bester

Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner

Teaching Community – bell hooks

Sex on the Brain – Deborah Blum

Uprooting Racism - Paul Kivel

Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice - John Stoltenberg

Racial Formation in the United States - Michael Omi and Howard Winant

Zines – Stephen Duncombe

Velocities – Stephen Dobbins

Man of Reason – Genevieve Lloyd

Being and Time – Martin Heidegger

The Moral Equivalent of War – William James

The Death of Nature – Carolyn Merchant

Metaphors We Live By – George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (UO)

Geography of Nowhere: The Rise And Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape - Kunstler

Freakonomics – Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

Stigma - Erving Goffman

Cinderella’s Big Score – Maria Raha (Women of the Punk and Indie Underground)

Lipstick Traces – Greil Marcus

Mystery Trains – Greil Marcus

The Society of Spectacle – Guy Debord

The Revolution of Everyday Life – Raul Vaneigem

The Failures of Integration - Sheryll Cashin

Baltasar and Blimunda - Jose Saramago

Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy -
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson (for AK)

Access All Areas – Ninjalicious (also Infiltration zine)

Russell Jacoby - The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe

Russell Jacoby - The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy

Themepunks - Cory Doctorow

Eastern Standard Tribe – Cory Doctorow

Unembedded - Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson and Rita Leistner

Sundown Towns: a Hidden Dimension of Racism in America - James Loewen

The Fibromyalgia Story: Medical Authority And Women's Worlds Of Pain - Kristin K. Barker

Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities – Michael Berube

The Republican War on Science, by Chris Mooney

The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History – Manuel DeLanda

Dog Days – Ana Marie Cox

Inclusive Pluralism – Naomi Zack

Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out - Edited by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow

Do You Suck as Well as Fuck? Totally Sexed Up Tales of J. Edgar Hoover's America – Ken Ichigawa

Neuromancer – William Gibson

Self-Made Man – Norah Vincent

Revealing Male Bodies - Nancy Tuana (Editor), William Cowling (Editor), Maurice Hamington (Editor), Greg Johnson (Editor), Terrance Macmullen (Editor)

Doorway into Summer – Robert Heinlein

Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1

James Wolcott: The Catsitters

Inventing the University - David Bartholomae

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town - Cory Doctorow

The City of Joy - Dominique Lapierre

Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush – Eric Boehlert

Sun of Suns – Karl Schroeder

Ghost Brigade – John Scalzi

Old Man's War – John Scalzi

Learning to Labor - by Paul Willis

Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Pacific Edge and Sixty Days and Counting – Kim Stanley Robinson

Radio On: A Listener's Diary (Paperback) by Sarah Vowell

Paul LaFargue, The Right to Be Lazy

Trapeze Collective; Do It Yourself, Pluto Press

Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories - Katha Pollitt

Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular

Charlie Stross's - Halting State

Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste - by John Waters

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism - Naomi Klein

Dude, You're A Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School – C.J. Pascoe

Norman Mailer - Miami and the Siege of Chicago and Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song

What Are Journalists For? by Jay Rosen

IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea (Hardcover) by Stephen Murdoch
Interface – Neal Stephenson

Attack of the 50-Foot Mikhaela! Cartoons by Mikhaela B. Reid

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick.

David Graeber, Malagasy folktakes

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse - (Anthology) John Joseph Adams

Robert Anton Wilson – Schrodinger's Cat

Ursula K. LeGuin – Left Hand of Darkness

Alfred Bester – Demolished Man

Alfred Bester – Stars My Destination

Alfred Bester – Virtual Unrealities

John(?) Brunner – Stand on Zanzibar

Ourspace – Christine Harold

Soldier of Sidon – Gene Wolfe

Soldier of Arete – Gene Wolfe

Soldier in the Mist – Gene Wolfe

Latro in the Mist – Gene Wolfe

Stardust – Neil Gaiman

American Gods – Neil Gaiman

Neverwhere- Nail Gaiman

The Dance of Gods – Mayer Brenner

Public Works, DMZ comics, Brian Wood

Transmetropolitan Vols. 1-10 (Transmetropolitan Collections) – Warren Ellis

Dave Eggers - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis

Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation – Isaac Asimov

Democracy Defended – Gerry Mackie

Out of the Sea and Into the Fire: Latin American-US Immigration
in the Global Age - Kari Lydersen

Savage Inequalities – Jonathan Kozol

The Way We Argue Now : A Study in the Cultures of Theory - Amanda Anderson

What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education – Michael Berube

Crashing the Gate – Markos Moulitsas Zuniga & Jerome Armstrong

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Days of the Dead – Agnes Bushnell

The Fifth Sacred Thing – Starhawk

Magic Journey – John Nichols

The Postman – David Brin

Neal Stephenson – Snow Crash

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization – Franklin Foer

Feminist Epistemology – Sharyn Clough

Fences and Windows – Naomi Klein

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs – Chuck Klosterman

Collapse – Jared Diamond

The Years of Rice and Salt – Kim Stanley Robinson

Stop the Presses

Hering writes something I completely agree with... or, at least, enough so that I'm actually willing to paper over the very minor differences in opinion I have with it:

In the words of NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, the report “confirms — without any serious qualification — the central importance of reading for a prosperous, free society. ... Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media, they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

Don’t blame the schools. Ninth-graders nationally are doing better on reading than they used to. It’s among 12th graders where there’s a drop, but also there’s been a decline in reading comprehension among college graduates and among people with advanced degrees.

Though, as always, I wish he'd dig a bit deeper.

That last sentence suggests a direction to dig in, even.

Questions are Important, Dammit

Update: It's post number 300...whatever that means.

If there's one thing that frustrates me about my current job (Ha! There's definitely more than one!), it's the students' unwillingness or inability to ask questions of the material.

I get that they don't bother because they don't care or don't think the material is relevant, I do. But I'm a hopeless romantic when it comes to the intellectual life, and it slays me a bit every time when students fail to get excited by the awesome and interesting material they are being exposed to, especially when it's so obvious that the poem or story in question has something to tell them about how to navigate their lives. I'm also die-hard about interrogating the hell out of pop culture, just to be clear I am a) that boring and b) not talking just about Teh Classics.

That said, I really liked this Q & A from Rate Your Students. I doubt the students I work with could really utilize the method, at least not without some practice, but you never know:

Q: How in God's name do you get your students to stop writing book reports and start writing actual papers with actual theses?

...

A2: I build my literature classes around the idea of asking questions. We begin the semester with a challenging poem -- usually something fairly modern that they wouldn't have seen before -- and instead of my telling them anything about it, I simply instruct them to read it and make a list of questions. They pair up, see which questions they can answer, and ask more questions. With their lists of questions, we can talk about the 3 basic types of questions about literature (as I define them): Questions that could be answered by knowing more background information -- about culture, history, writer's biography, etc.; Questions that could probably be answered by reading more closely, more carefully, or (in the case of a longer text) further; Questions that could probably only be answered by analyzing or interpreting the text. We discuss some major branches of literary theory, but primarily in the context of what questions each theory asks about literature (How do socioeconomic issues shape the characters' interactions? What is significant about George taking on the typically feminine role of caring for the baby?). This sets the stage for what I tell my students all semester: scholars -- your professors, the people writing your texts and journal articles -- don't know all the answers. Scholars know which questions to ask. The class is then built around the students asking -- and struggling to answer -- questions. We are discussion-based from the beginning, and the discussions come directly from the students' questions (I only put forth my own questions if I think they are critical to understanding the text, and no one in the class has gotten there. I'm always surprised by how rarely this happens.) I make it clear that the "Questions that could be answered by reading more closely, carefully, or further" are questions that students should attempt to answer before coming to class. Once it becomes clear that if they bring those questions to class, I am not going to answer them, the students usually buckle down and get to work. When it comes time for the papers, I ask the students to write several questions about course texts. They work in groups and with me to evaluate the questions -- are they likely to have a complex answer? Is there likely to be an answer at all? When the student has a good, solid question, I explain that the paper should answer that question, and show the reader how the student came to the answer. The thesis to the paper is the answer to the question. Since students are comfortable with asking questions, with struggling to answer questions on their own, and with accepting that there may be multiple plausible interpretations of a text, most of them do relatively well. Even the worst papers I see are more complex than book reports.

The LCSD School Board and the Book

The more I think about it, the less I think the collaborative book discussion thing is going to work. Disclaimer: I think it's a great idea, but my undergraduate training was all about reading something and then talking about it with others who had read the same thing, so Sprenger's idea is right up my alley.

LT's post about the pre-meeting discussion, which is sort of funny and not really all that surprising, is part of my evidence.

Here's the thing: I doubt Rick, Josh, or Chris have ever done anything remotely like this before.

And what are they being asked to do, exactly?

Have a book club meeting - and more than that, have a book club meeting in which they, as LT noted, discuss the ways in which they communicate as individuals and board members. In front of people.

Put that way, I'm not surprised it didn't work, at least as according to LT's description.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I didn't see this coming.

None of the three (Chris, Josh, Rick) strike me as anything but your average, off-the-shelf male (with Rick being the Lebanon version, ha-ha) when it comes to gender socialization; as such, they've all been socialized not to share their feelings in public (for that matter, the idea of the book club has long been perceived as feminine in American culture - see the reaction from 'the right' when it came out that Barack Obama was using a book club as a campaign tactic; the reaction, for the record, was to call him a sissy). Furthermore, like many males they've most likely never been asked to be introspective about their communications styles. And finally, and I think this is probably only true of Rick (but maybe Josh) they have no real interest in the book since their true interest is in power, and not in overseeing an improving school district.

At the least, I think it was a bad idea to hold the discussion in public. I'm guessing it would be illegal under Oregon public meetings law to, say, hold the discussion during the day on a weekend at someone's house, but still - one would think they could find a way to create a better environment for this than the dais. An executive session sounds unfair and unwieldy for this, but it might be the only realistic way to get some privacy - which seems necessary for the creation of a safe environment.

On the other hand, I doubt the six of them - the board plus Jim Robinson - would happily coexist (much less consider it a safe environment!) in a private setting for long. I suspect the public pressure to behave at least semi-professionally is one reason things are as civil as they are.

In any case, I am not surprised to hear that the discussion was less than a resounding success. I almost wonder if Sprenger made the offer in good faith, or if she used - and is using - it as a bludgeon to illustrate what jerks and/or how incompetent she thinks Josh and Rick are. I mean, it's not hard to predict that they weren't really going to buy in, and asking in public (though public meetings laws could have required that) is one way to make them look like buffoons.

Oh well. In either case, I'll volunteer right now to try and facilitate any kind of discussion between the five board members and the superintendent. I might be in over my head, but I think that those folks have absolutely got to find a way to be honest without the usual consequences of anger and rancor. Things. Will. Not. Get. Better. Until. This. Happens.

The Only Bush I Trust is My Own

During my recent Internet hiatus, I read a lot, just sort of whatever was at hand. One of the things I read - quickly, since it's a short book - was Periel Aschenbrand's The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own. It's a quick read filled with a no-bullshit attitude and a dangerous sense of humor. There are two passages I wanted to highlight from the book that stood out to me:

From page 190:

[Walt] Whitman said: I am large, I contain multitudes, and I wallow in my inconsistency.

Perfect. Internal coherency is overrated, anyway, not to mention nearly impossible to achieve. We are human, after all.

The second passage, from later on the same page, is Roland Barthes on what he termed The Fashion System:

Fashion is a social fact; those who exclude themselves "suffer a sanction: the stigma of being unfashionable."

I'd never thought about it that way before, but I think Barthes is essentially correct. I think that goes a long way towards explaining the tension in my style of dress: Just acceptable enough not to be noticed.

Anyway, grab the book some time if you can. It's pretty funny, especially the first section.

On the Reading

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.

Read A Book....Please

This has been making the rounds, and I've decided to throw it up here....while I like most of this video, there are a few parts that I either don't get or don't agree with.

Anyway, watch it...and please leave a comment with your reaction.