What Book Are You Currently Reading? (2.0.)

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Work (and Talking about Elections™️) is making my progress very slow but I'm a little less than half way through Daniel Markovits's "The Meritocracy Trap"

Really outstanding and (for my level) novel book. Highly recommend that anybody with a professional degree read this book or at least familiarize him/herself with the arguments therein.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Currently at various stages of the following:

Jane Mayer - Dark Money
Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone
Shane Hamilton - Trucking Country

will probably not finish Dark Money before my library loan expires and I'm moving very slowly through Trucking Country so at some point I'll probably give up on that. I also have two texts I'm skimming for some work projects.

Also in the fall I got about 100 pages into William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth, which I enjoyed and hope to return to later in the spring.

---

edit: actually, because I've always wanted to see it in writing and am trying to avoid work, here are the audiobooks I listened to (and finished) since April 2020. I starred ones that I particularly enjoyed.

Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower *
James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time
Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States
Sebastian Junger - Tribe
Bob Woodward - Fear
Stephen Hawking - Brief Answers to the Big Questions
Patrick Radden Keefe - Say Nothing *
Robert Wright - Why Buddhism is True
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio - The Undocumented Americans *
Anna Wiener - Uncanny Valley *
Greg Grandin - The End of the Myth
David Brooks - The Second Mountain *
Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow
Stephanie Land - Maid
Nancy Isenberg - White Trash *
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn - Tightrope
Mary Bears - SPQR
Jared Sexton - The Man They Wanted Me To Be *

I also managed to get my hands on a physical (library) copy of Daniel Markovitz's "The Meritocracy Trap" right before everything shut down in March. That was also an outstanding read.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Books finished in 2021. Asterisk indicates a book I especially enjoyed.

Audio:

Emily Ratajkowski - My Body (*)
Rick Perlstein - Reaganland (*)
Jessica Bruder - Nomadland (*)
Michael Bender - Frankly We Did Win This Election
Charles Mann - 1493
Grace Olmstead - Uprooted
Anton Treuer - Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians but Were Afraid to Ask
Rick Atkinson - The British are Coming
Anne Case and Angus Deaton - Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
Bakari Sellers - My Vanishing Country
Matthew Desmond - Evicted (*)
Charles Mann - 1491 (*)
Isabel Allende - The Soul of a Woman
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs, and Steel (*)
Jonathan Cohn - The Ten Year War
Les and Tamara Payne - The Dead Are Arising (*)
Michael Sandel - The Tyranny of Merit
Lulu Miller - Why Fish Don't Exist
Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz - An Indigenous People's History of the United States
Richard Rothstein - The Color of Law (*)
Isabel Wilkerson - Caste
Jane Mayer - Dark Money
Lawrence Wright - The Looming Tower (*)
James Baldwin - The Fire This Time (*)

Paperback:

Dan Flores - Horizontal Yellow (*)
Truman Capote - In Cold Blood

Also in progress with the following e-books when I have the time energy and interest (difficult these days)

David Fischer - Albion's Seed (*)
Robert Putnam - Bowling Alone

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I’m sorry for you having to pull through with that kitsch trash

Why would you go out of your way to make a rude and dickish comment like this? Just let people enjoy what they're reading without trashing it.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Books read (completed) in 2022. As usual, asterisks for books I particularly enjoyed

Robin Wall Kimmerer - Gathering Moss
Neil Postman - Technopoly
Amia Srinivasan - The Right to Sex (*)
Joan Didion - South and West
Lauren Hough - Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing (*)
Derek DelGaudio - AMORALMAN
Lawrence Wright - The Plague Year
Oprah Winfrey and Bruce Perry - What Happened to You?
Lindsay Gibson - Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
Rosa Brooks - Tangled Up in Blue (*)
Danielle Geller - Dog Flowers (*)
William Cronon - Changes in the Land
Jay Caspian Kang - The Loneliest Americans (*)
Vanessa Springora - Consent
Dee Brown - Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (*)
Chuck Klosterman - The Nineties (*)
Sarah Smarsh - Heartland
Ian Frazier - Great Plains
Ted Conover - Cheap Land Colorado

Books I made good progress in and hope to finish next year (or some time)

David Treuer - Rez Life
Alec MacGillis - Fulfillment
Rob Dunn - A Natural History of the Future
Robin Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
Lawrence Wright - God Save Texas

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Joan Didion - South and West

I read this late last year and found that it was exactly what I expected, which is to say that I liked it. At least in the e-book version I got from the library, the book had a preface that was written in December 2016 and it was painfully obvious that it was written in late 2016. I'm really glad that I was taking a very long break from the forum then so I don't have to see anything I wrote at that time.

I think my version (also an e-book, borrowed from my local library) also had this forward. I'm sure I read it but evidently forgot entirely about it. Such things are so commonplace now ("these are places where people like and vote for Donald Trump" appeared in maybe a quarter of books I read this year and of course is part of "God Save Texas" which I'm halfway through right now) that they seem obligatory and all somewhat blend together. I read South and West probably in February so I don't remember very many specifics but I actually don't remember race/racism playing an outsized role.

William Cronon - Changes in the Land

I've had many people recommend this to me, so I don't really have any excuse not to have read it.

The main reason I didn't enjoy it more was because it was about one of the areas of the countries that I'm least familiar with. But otherwise, yes, it seems like a quite special book both in and of itself and also in its novelty. A kind of cult classic; I've since seen it on at least one person's office bookshelf and stumbled upon another person reading it in my favorite local coffee shop. Ecology, colonial history, physical geography, and economics all tied together into one. Not sure of any other books quite like it.

I finished it on vacation and left my copy on a bookshelf in a coffee shop in Montrose, Colorado. I hope someone out there found and enjoyed it.

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Now reading John McPhee's Annals of the Former World.

Funnily enough I just finished McPhee's "Rising From the Plains" (which I assume is part of or at least related to this book) today. I've been looking for a pop-geology book for years. He is a gifted writier. and this definitely was fun to read, but you can only do so much with a geology text.

Anyway I usually save this for the end of the year but here is my list so far:

John McPhee - Basin and Range
Ashley Ford - Somebody's Daughter
Oprah Winfrey - The Path Made Clear
Anne Proulx - Fen, Bog, and Swamp
Garrett Graft - The Only Plane in the Sky
Matthew Desmond - Poverty by America
Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz - Red Dirt
Cal Newport - Digital Minimalism
bell hooks - The Will to Change
Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing - The Big Sort
Charlotte Weber - Tell Me What You Want
Sebastian Junger - Freedom
Jill Levoy - Ghettoside
Erika Sanchez - Crying in the Bathroom
Jennette McCurdy - I'm Glad My Mom Died
Rachel Aviv - Strangers to Ourselves
CJ Hauser - the Crane Wife
bell hooks - Ain't I a Woman
Joshua Prager - The Family Roe
Katie Worth - Miseducation
Richard Reeves - Of Boys and Men
Deborah Copaken - Ladyparts
Isaac Fitzgerald - Dirtbag, Massachusetts
Lawrence Wright - God Save Texas

[💥💥 brandon bro (he/him/his)]

Here are the books I finished in 2023. Asterisks for books I particularly enjoyed. Double asterisk for the book I've enjoyed most in a very long time.

Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man (*)
Donovan Ramsey - When Crack was King (*)
Alejandra Oliva - Rivermouth
Will Bunch - After the Ivory Tower Falls
James Clear - Atomic Habits
Eckhart Tolle - The Power of Now (*)
Terry Tempest Williams - Refuge (**)
Marion Turner - The Wife of Bath
Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror
John McPhee - Rising from the Plains (*)
Oliver Sacks - The River of Consciousness
Ashley C. Ford - Somebody's Daughter (*)
Oprah Winfrey - The Path Made Clear
Anne Proulx - Fen, Bog, and Swamp
Garrett Graft - The Only Plane in the Sky (*)
Matthew Desmond - Poverty by America
Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz - Red Dirt
Cal Newport - Digital Minimalism
bell hooks - The Will to Change
Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing - The Big Sort
Jill Levoy - Ghettoside (*)
Charlotte Weber - Tell Me What You Want
Sebastian Junger - Freedom
Erika Sanchez - Crying in the Bathroom
Jennette McCurdy - I'm Glad My Mom Died
Rachel Aviv - Strangers to Ourselves
CJ Hauser - the Crane Wife (*)
bell hooks - Ain't I a Woman (*)
Joshua Prager - The Family Roe (*)
Katie Worth - Miseducation
Richard Reeves - Of Boys and Men
Deborah Copaken - Ladyparts
Isaac Fitzgerald - Dirtbag, Massachusetts (*)
Lawrence Wright - God Save Texas

Right now I'm reading:

Tom Holland - Rubicon
Jordan Ellenberg - Shape