Saturday 30 December 2017

What I've Been Reading Recently

More books from the last quarter. They are:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens
How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck
Into Everywhere by Paul McAuley
The Corbyn Effect edited by Mark Perryman
The Doomed City by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Movement Parties Against Austerity by Donna della Porta et al
Fair and Free edited by Kate Murray
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte
Beyond Bourdieu by Will Atkinson
Archangel by William Gibson and Michael St John Smith
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
Bodies That Matter by Judith Butler
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism edited by Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn
America by Franz Kafka
Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Gender in Late Modernity by Shelley Budgeon
Forget Baudrillard? edited by Chris Rojek and Bryan S Turner
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Sociology and the New Materialism bu Nick J Fox and Pamela Alldred
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens
Energy Flash by Simon Reynolds

As you can see, this lost has kept me out of mischief for a good while. In the next quarter you should see a bit more focused reading when it comes to the more weighty tomes as I have a project bubbling order, but more news about that in good time. Apart from that, if you're into this sort of thing I do recommend the final Dickens on the list. Barnaby Rudge is the novel no one has heard of, and for someone who finds Dickens hit or miss I do rate this among his finest. The mob scenes, set during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 are compulsive and readable.

What have you been reading lately? And has Santa brought you any interesting books?

3 comments:

Kriss said...

I regret not havng more time to read - on that list I can probably manage Goffman as relevant to work but nothing else. My brother bought me Orwell's 'On Truth' which looks like a good read, and short.

Probably not up your street in terms of topic but I read Rothman's 'The tentative pregnancy' for the first time a couple of months ago. What a fantastic piece of work, and an easy read.

asquith said...

Well I've been gripped by this
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/14/featuresreviews.guardianreview17

Due to spending a lot of time in Birmingham visiting my girlfriend who lives there, I've become more aware of the life and history of the place and it's fascinating to get the theoretical underpinnings of it.

The anti-Joseph Priestley riots in Birmingham covered similar ground, the "bribed tools of reactionary intrigue" being stirred up by the right, as so often happens including the recent incidence in 2016.

http://www.jquarter.org.uk/webdisk/moreriots.htm

Nevertheless the lunar men and their descendents forged ahead with their vision.

Heather Herbert said...

The New Girl - Ryannon Styles
To my Trans Sisters - Various (Ed. Charlie Craggs)
Persepolis Rising - James S A Corey
Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari