2020 Reading List

So, that year was a whole thing unto itself, wasn’t it? Lots of time at home under lockdown meant lots of time to read. So, in the tradition of Sarah over at Dogs, Coffee, & Books, here’s my year in reading. 61 titles (63 if you count rereads I ended up doing within the year). Lots of classics this year as I buffed up on background reading for my World Lit courses. Also a lot of escapism because…well, 2020. (R) indicates a reread. Asterisks indicate titles I particularly enjoyed or found enlightening.

Happy New Year!

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2020 Reading

1. Crowley – Empires of the Sun*
2. Latour – Down to Earth (x2) (R)
3. Hudes – Water by the Spoonful (x2) (R)
4. Pynchon – Inherent Vice* (R)
5. Winchester – The Professor & the Madman
6. Munroe – How To
7. Muir – Gideon the Ninth*
8. Schweblin – Fever Dream
9. Simmons – Hyperion*
10. King – the Gunslinger
11. Aeschylus – Agamemnon (R)
12. Aeschylus – The Libation Bearers
13. Aeschylus – The Eumenides
14. Currey -Daily Rituals
15. Gibson – Neuromancer (R)
16. Wilkman – Floodpath
17. Collins – Sailing Alone Around the Room
18. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (R)
19. Pynchon – Bleeding Edge (R)
20. Chayka – The Longing for Less
21. Winters – Golden State
22. Wilson – Fences (R)
23. Tanizaki – In Praise of Shadows
24. Wilson – Seven Guitars
25. Heller – Catch-22 (R)
26. Gibson – The Peripheral
27. Wilson – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
28. Coates – Between the World and Me*
29. Roe – In Montemarte
30. Tokarezuk – Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
31. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (R)
32. Johnson – The Ghost Map*
33. Wilson – Joe Turner’s Come & Gone
34. Hudes – The Happiest Song Plays Last
35. Barry – The Great Influenza*
36. Rowling – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (R)
37. Ibsen – A Dolls House*
38. DiAngelo – White Fragility
39. Sunjata
40. Epic of Gilgamesh (R)
41. Asbridge – The Crusades*
42. Muir – Harrow the Ninth*
43. Rose – Twelve Angry Men*
44. Homer – The Odyssey (R)
45. Virgil – The Aeneid (R)
46. Sophocles – Oedipus the King (R)
47. Euripedes – Medea (R)
48. Sexton – Live or Die: Poems
49. Oliver – New and Selected Poems vol. 2
50. Cervantes – Don Quijote*
51. Hansberry – A Raisin in the Sun (R)
52. Dante – The Inferno (R)
53. Sapkowski – Blood of Elves
54. Simmons – Fall of Hyperion
55. Corey – Leviathan Wakes*
56. Euripedes – The Bacchae
57. Holiday – The Obstacle is the Way
58. Aeschylus – Prometheus Bound
59. Schumacher – Dear Committee Members
60. Oliver – Blue Horses*
61. Molière – Tartuffe

Restart – 2019 Reading List

I’ve kept this space on the back burner for the better part of the last decade. Given that we’re on the cusp of a new one, it seems like a fitting time for me to start using it for something. So, thanks to the inspiration of Sarah at Dogs, Coffee, & Books, here’s a look back at my reading for 2019 to kickstart me into a new decade that’ll hopefully be filled with more words – both those I write and read.

The year was above average in terms of the number of books I made it through – but perhaps not pages. I didn’t have many of the massive tomes that I tend to be drawn to this year. Still, the total is still below what I set out to read 365 days ago. The list is incomplete due to the fact that I don’t feel like typing up a list of the 69 some odd graphic novels I worked through over the course of the year. It felt like there was a lot of…meh this year. I feel good for reading a number of books, but I didn’t spend much of my time enthralled either (looking at you Dostoyevsky).

Highlights of the year are noted by a * below. Rereads with a (R).

2019 – Reading

1. Urrea – House of Broken Angels*
2. Wilson – Fences
3. Loomis – History of America in 10 Strikes
4. Ondaatje – Warlight
5. Gaiman – Coraline (R)
6. Obren – Six Days of War*
7. Adams – The Viking Wars
8. Christie – ABC Murders
9. Tucker – City of Light, City of Poison
10. Savage – Every Tool is a Hammer
11. Gleick – The Information*
12. Payne – The Broken Ladder
13. Murakami – Wind up Bird Chronicle*
14. Sobel – Longitude
15. Ghosh – The Great Derangement*
16. Odell – How to do Nothing
17. Higginbotham – Midnight in Chernobyl*
18. Sebald – Rings of Saturn* (R)
19. Caro – Working
20. Humes – Garbology
21. Epic of Gilgamesh (R)
22. Okorafor – Binti Trilogy*
23. Pynchon – Against the Day* (R)
24. Homer – The Odyssey (R)
25. Euripedes – Medea (R)
26. Sophocles – Oedipus Rex (R)
27. Wu – The Curse of Bigness
28. Dante – The Inferno (R)
29. Dostoyevsky – The Brothers Karamazov
30. Yamashita – Tropic of Orange (R)
31. Orange – There There*
32. Wedgewood – The Thirty Years War*
33. Oliver – New and Selected Poems vol. 1
34. Norris – Clybourne Park
35. Joyce – Dubliners
36. Vuong – On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous*

Onward to 2020!

Lampshades on Fire

Darden Road

This Old World

I’ve been on a big blues and bluegrass kick lately. Mostly I’ve been trying to fill in some of my ignorance of the these genres by listening to work from artists from the 20’s and 30’s. By chance, Blind Willie Johnson’s “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” was the first song to come up this morning. I was struck dumb by the sheer beauty of this song and the interplay of Johnson’s voice with that the female vocalist (either his first wife, Willie B. Harris, or his second, a Angeline – It’s not readily clear) is haunting and sublime.

(Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Lest We Forget: The Ludlow Massacre One Century Later

One hundred years ago, on the afternoon of April 20, 1914 William Snyder and his children made the mistake of climbing out of the pit they had dug under their tent in Ludlow Colorado. Outside, the Colorado National Guard and striking coal miners were engaged in a war that had raged since morning. For much of the day the pit had been their shelter from the indiscriminate gunfire that had ripped through the tent city that striking coal miners had erected near the town. The immediate reason for the battle has been lost to history, and both sides have claimed that the other started shooting first. Whatever the cause, the fighting seemed to be letting up and the Snyders took the opportunity to escape their pit and return to the relative comfort of the tent itself. Frank Snyder, a young boy of eleven, went to sit in a chair and his sister joined him on the floor between his knees. According to his father, Frank was in the act of leaning forward to kiss or caress his sister when the bullet that killed him ripped through the family tent and struck Frank in the head (Snyder 133). In his affidavit to the Commission on Industrial Relations William reported, “I was standing near the front door of my tent and heard the impact of the bullet striking the boy’s head, and the crack of the bullet as it exploded inside of his head” (133).

Elsewhere in the tent colony a strike leader named Louis Tikas was arrested and confronted by the militia leader, Karl Linderfelt, about who was at fault for the violence. According to Scott Martelle, as the argument escalated “Linderfelt grabbed his rifle by the barrel and swung it hard at Tikas, striking him in the head and breaking the gunstock” (175). Incapacitated by this attack Tikas and two other striking miners were murdered moments later by the mob of militiamen that surrounded them (176). Tikas was killed by three shots in the back. As Tikas was murdered, the tent colony was going up in flames. How the fires started remains a matter of contention. Guard members claimed that they started thanks to sparks caused by stray bullets and fueled by explosives hidden by the miners in the camp. The strikers contended that that attacking militia purposefully set the fires. Whatever the cause, the fire was deadly. In another pit under a tent like the one the Snyders had sheltered in, hid a group of women and children: twenty-seven year old Fedlina Costa her two children, Onafrio age six, and Lucy, age four, Rodgerio Pedregone, age nine, Cloriva Pedregone age four, Frank Petrucci, age six months, Lucy Petrucci, age three, Joe Petrucci, age four, thirty-seven year old Patria Valdez and her children Rudolph, age nine, Eulala, age eight, Mary age seven, and Elvira, age three months (223). In all, two women and eleven children remained hidden as the fires spread through the tents. They suffocated to death as the fires above them ate the oxygen in their supposed safe haven. They were not found until the morning after the gun battle (2).

Collectively these atrocities have come to be known as the Ludlow Massacre.

Interlude – Pynchon’s Trail

I wanted to briefly comment on Boris Kachka’s piece at Vulture on Pynchon and his new novel Bleeding Edge. Kachka’s work is, on the whole, nothing new. It’s not a bad piece, but pretty much any biographic piece on Pynchon falls into the same old trap: there’s no there there. Pynchon’s left such a meager trail that the story generally falls entirely to hearsay and speculation and Kachka is inevitably caught in that snare. Despite Kachka’s premise that Pynchon has fully ceased the wandering that marked the years when he wrote V. and Gravity’s Rainbow and returned home to New York to a life of luxury and comfort, there’s a real failure to show much of anything new (besides a brief review of Bleeding Edge that I purposefully avoided) in this piece.

Step in front of a runaway train…

Currently listening to José González’s “So Far Away” from the Red Dead Redemption soundtrack. Great track, great game. I probably should go play it again. Or, you know, do some work. There’s always that.

Have a listen.

V. Chapter Six – In which Profane returns to street level

It might have been appropriate to begin this post with a declaration about my vacation. Something like: “I’m back from vacation refocused, reenergized, and ready to jump into the writing process.” I woke up about two hours earlier than I’m used to this morning in an effort to get back into a work schedule and I’m far too bitter with the universe about consciousness to exude such frivolities. Instead, while I try to get some coffee in my system, let’s just say that my vacation was superb and I’m in mourning about my vacation’s passing. I’ll get around to writing about it once I move through the stages of grief.

So, in the meantime, it’s back to writing about Pynchon and this is a fitting chapter to return with. Just as I’m returning from a sojourn away from the troubles of the world, Benny resurfaces in New York in this chapter. Admittedly, I didn’t go on vacation in the sewers where I explored the remains of a mad priest’s chapel and shot an albino alligator / Stencil in a diving suit. We can’t have everything though. 

Archival Gems

One of the elements that I miss from my doctoral work was the archival and historical research on the progressive era that I did on a regular basis. While I was usually searching for specific information, I regularly stumbled across little gems of information or research tracks that I never had the time to follow up. Lately I’ve found myself looking into some of the larger resources available online like the Library of Congress. I have a couple projects that are driving my work, but I’ve been coming up with enough intriguing snippets that I wanted to start collecting them here.  I hope that this will be the start of a new series of posts here. Sometimes I’ll include commentary. Other times I’ll just post the document, photo, or whatever it is I’ve stumbled across and let it speak for itself. I’ll always cite my sources in case any one else is interested.

First up is a sonnet by Katharine Warren from 1900. Originally published in The Atlantic, There’s a clear religious tone here. After reading so much radical literature during my doctoral work, it was intriguing and fitting to see this note struck in this particular poetic form.

A SONNET OF WORK.

WHERETO our labor and our bitter sweat?
The seed we sow we trample in the dark.
The flame we strike, our own tears quench the spark.
The white that we would purify we set
Our grimy print upon. And we forget
Thy ways and thoughts are not as ours, and hark
Toward what we take to be some heavenly mark,
And find we serve the devil to abet.
Then do Thou blind us, that we may not see
The measure of our own futility,
Lest, seeing, we should cease to work, and die.
Or give us sight, that we may know thereby
How through our labor, whatso end it meet,
We reach toward Thee who knowest no defeat.

Here’s the source and here are some other works by Warren.