What Are We Reading?

• January

  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley: 5/5 Stars​

  • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk: 3/5 Stars, the "Whodunnit" is pretty obvious from the start even with the characters pretending that it isn't that person

  • Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë: 4/5 Stars

  • I, Robot, Isaac Asimov: 4/5 Stars

  • Buy Yourself the Fucking Lilies, Tara Schuster: 4/5 Stars

• February

  • How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell: 5/5 Stars, marked a turning point in the kind of cultural commentary I was reading​

  • The Moviegoer, Walker Percy: 4/5 Stars

  • Too Much, Rachel Vorona Cote: 1/5 Stars, I know it's like "confirmation bias"-y to say something in reaction to a book like this that the author is a little histrionic, except she very much is, and the leaps of logic and her insistence on focusing on herself as representative of all female experiences I don't think works as well, or is as supported by the scholarship she tries presenting in this book. Other feminist scholars have talked about the personal as political much more effectively.

  •  Adventures in the Anthropocene, Gaia Vince: 4/5 Stars

  • Under the Sign of Saturn, Susan Sontag: 4/5 Stars

  • The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett: 2/5 Stars

• March

  • The Fuck-Up, Arthur Nersesian: 3/5 Stars, extremely mid, "edgy" for the time it was published, but already cliched by that point​

  • The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald: 4/5 Stars, about as good as most people say it is

  • True Grit, Charles Portis: 4/5 Stars, classic Western

  • The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan: 4/5 Stars, Pollan can be pretty dry a lot of the time, but he's still someone I'd want to talk to at a dinner party

  • Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt: 4/5 Stars, people are nuts

• April

  • We Can Only Save Ourselves, Alison Wisdom: 3/5 Stars, I had to Google the cover to remember which book this was. If you like The Girls, you'd probably find this at least a little enjoyable.​

  • On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry: 5/5 Stars, thank you Elaine Scarry for my life

  • Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes: 5/5 Stars, very much a book that set me onto thinking about femininity in a different, important way

  • Cosmogony, Lucy Ives: 4/5 Stars, read this if you like Karen Russell

  • The US Constitution: A Very Short Introduction, David Bodenhamer: 4/5 Stars, I read this for work and it does give a general overview of the history of the US Constitution

  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick: 4/5 Stars, I did enjoy this book and do generally like Dick's writing

  • Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, Nigel Warburton: 4/5 Stars, I read this for work, too

  • Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne: 5/5 Stars, very good and useful text in feminist studies

• May 

  • Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Susan Sontag: 5/5 Stars, I know Sontag expressed not necessarily regret, but some concerns regarding this book later in life, as I think most people who look back at the stuff they said when they were younger kind of feel cringy about it, especially when people continue to refer back to it. There's plenty that's still relevant, but I understand why Sontag spoke against her own arguments later​ on.

  • Transcendence: How Humanity Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time, Gaia Vince: 5/5 Stars

  • Everything Matters!, Ron Currie: 5/5 Stars, even though I no longer talk to the person who recommended this book to me, I still really like this book

  • In Cold Blood, Truman Capote: 5/5 Stars

  • Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys: 100/5 Stars, incredibly good.

  • Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut: 5/5 Stars

  • The Use of Bodies, Giorgio Agamben: 5/5 Stars

  • Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann: 5/5 Stars

  • The Bog People, P. V. Glob: 7/5 Stars, I love this weird little vintage paperback about bog people

• June

  • Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides: 5/5 Stars, this is my favorite book by this author​

  • Parzival, Wolfram Von Eschenbach: 5/5 Stars, but like...it's a medieval narrative so?

  • The Overstory, Richard Powers: 4/5 Stars

  • Rites of Spring, Modris Eksteins: 4/5 Stars, a pretty good analysis of the cultural impacts of World War I, though I think that I gained more from The Great War and Modern Memory

  • SPQR, Mary Beard: 5/5 Stars

  • The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough: 6/5 Stars, but only if you can get over how much of a soap opera it is

  • The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred Price, Wendy Jones: 2/5 Stars

  • Hannibal, Thomas Harris: 3/5 Stars

• July

  • Vittorio the Vampire: Anne Rice: 3/5 Stars​

  • Skeleton Crew, Stephen King 3/5 Stars, this was actually a book I started in the early pandemic and then just didn't finish until more than a year later

  • Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, 5/5 Stars, even though it took me a year of owning it before I actually sat down and read it

  • Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar: Over 9000/5 Stars, this is the best book I have ever read in my entire life

  • Breast and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami: 5/5 Stars

  • The Final Girl Support Group, Grady Hendrix: 2/5 Stars, I have read a lot of things by Grady Hendrix by now, and I really appreciate how much he very clearly loves women based on how he writes, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that Grady Hendrix does not actually know at all how to write women, and yet he persists in writing almost exclusively female protagonists with extremely limited third person narrator points of view. 

• August

  • In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan: 4/5 Stars​

  • The Dread of Difference, ed. Grant: 4/5 Stars, significant horror scholarship collection

• September

  • Prairie Fires, Caroline Fraser: 5/5 Stars​

  • Food of the Gods, Terence McKenna: 5/5 Stars, McKenna is probably not entirely right here, but he's an enjoyable read regardless

  • Yolk, Mary HK Choi: 4/5 Stars, content warning for disordered eating

  • The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard: 4/5 Stars, Ballard is one of my favorite sci-fi writers, but also, reading him is like playing a game of "Wait for the British Guy to Say Something Racist," which like, obviously sucks.

  • Fellowship of the Ring, JRR Tolkien: 5/5 Stars

  • The Two Towers, JRR Tolkien: 6/5 Stars

  • Return of the King, JRR Tolkien: 3/5 Stars, worst part of the trilogy

• October

  • Swamplandia!, Karen Russell: 80/5 Stars, this is so, so good​

  • The Star Thrower, Loren Eiseley: 5/5 Stars, please read the dolphin essay

  • Piranesi, Susanna Clarke: 4/5 Stars

  • The False Prince, Jennifer Nielsen: 4/5 Stars, I read this for work but it's not bad middle reader fantasy

  • Follow Me to Ground, Sue Rainsford: 3/5 Stars

  • The Women of Troy, Pat Barker: 4/5 Stars, a good follow up to The Silence of the Girls, and Barker's narratives are better constructed than a lot of the other contemporary reimaginings of the Trojan War, but I think that's because she has spent a lot of time writing war narratives (WWI) before.

  • Civil Rights for Beginners, Paul Von Blum: 1/5 Stars, this was a work read. It is not well written or edited. There are typos. Von Blum will always opt for the word with higher SAT point value even if the connotation does not fit the sentence instead of a simpler way to say it. The illustrations, because they are in black and white, often feel as though they have whitewashed major figures in the Civil Rights Movement. Other movements for equality are lumped into one chapter at the end. It aims to be comprehensive but is not a well-written or well published book.

• November

  • The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki: 5/5 Stars​

  • A Hazard of Losers, Lloyd Biggle, jr.: 5/5 Stars

  • The Little Friend, Donna Tartt: 5/5 Stars, this is Donna Tartt's best book

  • The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman: 4/5 Stars

  • Hurricane Season, Fernanda Melchor: 3/5 Stars, the translation wasn't bad, and the book itself isn't poorly written or anything, but it is like, belligerently miserable

  • Erosion, Terry Tempest Williams: 5/5 Stars

  • Be Here Now, Ram Dass: 100/5 Stars, go get some Ram Dass in your life

  • A Thousand Ships, Natalie Haynes: 2/5 Stars

  • Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger: 3/5 Stars, go be in a Wes Anderson movie

  • Billions and Billions, Carl Sagan: 5/5 Stars, thank you Papa Sagan for my life

  • History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Michel Foucault: it feels arbitrary to give it a rating.

  • The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway: 5/5 Stars, I did not have to read this book in high school, which means that I got to approach it with the eyes of someone who never had to hate it. I love this book. I love Hemingway. This is just how life is sometimes.

  • Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac: 5/5 Stars, speaking of problematic (or problematique, Jean!) male faves, I really do love Kerouac, too. 

  • Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth Samnet: 5/5 Stars, by the time I read this book, I had mostly stepped away from my life as someone who studies conflict narratives, but this book is a good analysis of the rhetoric of war narratives following WWII.

• December 

  • Big Sur, Jack Kerouac: 5/5 Stars​

  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, 5/5 Stars: I think that Charlotte does well along the "romance" lines, Emily does well along the "these people fucking suck" lines, and Anne does well along the "STAY AWAY FROM HER / GET A JOB" lines. Charlotte's writing is the most poetic of the sisters, in my opinion, though.

  • Black Sails Before Troy, Rosemary Sutcliff: 3/5 Stars

  • How to Read Literature Like a Professor (for Kids), Thomas C. Foster: 4/5 Stars, also read for work

  • Scoop, Evelyn Waugh: 4/5 Stars, if you only think about Waugh as the guy who wrote Brideshead Revisited, you miss how funny he is

  • All Over Creation, Ruth Ozeki: 10000/5 Stars, I love Ruth Ozeki so much

  • If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino: 5/5 Stars

  • Homesick for Another World, Otessa Moshfegh: 3/5 Stars, do you ever get the sense that some authors write "offensive" characters to get away with writing slurs?

  • Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman: 5/5 Stars

  • Periods Gone Public, Jennifer Weisz-Wolff: 3/5 Stars

  • How to Be Black, Baratunde Thurston: 5/5 Stars

2020

• January

  • Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino: 8000/5 Stars, I literally cried. This is a beautiful book. Calvino was actually a master.​

  • Little Women, Louisa May Alcott: 4/5 Stars, I hated Amy less as an adult than I did as a kid, but I'm going to say that Greta Gerwig's film did a shitty job adapting specifically Jo. 

  • The Cabin at the End of the World, Paul Tremblay: 1/5 Stars, this book is, as the kids say, booty, Tremblay's writing is very similar to Stephen King's, which is to say, not excellent, and, while I haven't seen the 2022 movie adaptation, based on trailers, I'm willing to bet it was also as bad as the book.

  • The Wonder, Emma Donoghue: 4/5 Stars, Donoghue has a great narrative style and I think it does a good job of concealing and revealing throughout the plot

  • Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury: 4/5 Stars, I reread this book with a group of students, and uh, unfortunately, Bradbury predicted a lot of modern problems stemming from modern tech.

  • The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf: 4/5 Stars, I know that she's been kind of...well, you know, but there were some pretty significant observations made by Wolf in this book.

• February

  • Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides: 4/5 Stars, this is not his best work, but I think that it is what everyone knows him for.​

  • Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado: 2/5 Stars

• March

  • The Natural, Bernard Malamud: 5/5 Stars, I love baseball and I love this book​

  • Karman, Giorgio Agamben: 5/5 Stars

  • My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki: 160/5 Stars, I loved this book, and it goes along really well with Michael Pollan's food writing.

  • Reviving Ophelia, Mary Piper: 4/5 Stars

  • Misery, Stephen King: 4/5 Stars

  • The Fire & the Tale, Giorgio Agamben: 5/5 Stars

  • What Kind of Creatures Are We?: Noam Chomsky: 5/5 Stars, Chomsky gave me the language I needed in order to most accurately describe my political leanings

  • Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino: 4/5 Stars

• April

  • Supper Club, Lara Williams: 2/5 Stars, kind of grotesque​

  • St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Karen Russell: 5/5 Stars, thank you for my life

  • Fox 8, George Saunders: 100/5 Stars, there is nothing else I have read that puts human cruelty as truthfully and unobscured as this little book. 

• May - September

  • Nothing that I recorded, though I was reading. I was in a weird headspace during the summer of early COVID, and was coping with it by spending a lot of time drinking in the woods.​

• October

  • Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction, David Seed: 3/5 Stars, read for work, serviceable intro to the genre​

  • The Trojan War Museum & Other Stories, Ayse Papatya Bucak: 5/5 Stars, incredibly good

  • This Is How You Lose the Time War, El-Motar & Gladstone: 3/5 Stars, everyone else loves this book, but I'm not really hot on time travel, so what did I expect?

• November

  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick: 4/5 Stars​

  • Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey, Kathleen Rooney: 3/5 Stars

  • On Photography, Susan Sontag: 5/5 Stars

• December

  • The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix​: 3/5 Stars, Hendrix really drops the ball about halfway through the book. There was a clear end point and he decided to keep going past it.

  • The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino: 5/5 Stars, Calvino is my favorite writer.

  • The Watcher & Other Stories, Italo Calvino: 5/5 Stars

2019