What I’ve Been Reading (short reviews)
Reading
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
It took Lisa Taddeo eight years and six trips across the US to write and connect the raw stories of three different women—three people spread across a spectrum of age, class, and philosophy. It is the examination through testimony of events more common than we like...
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
My copy of Caste is covered in notes and questions. Nearly every page has a question, or a note of a contradiction. Her work is thoughtful, bold, and at the same time, confounding. The classism and elitism in her conclusions is hard to hear. The reduction of...
The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsbawm
1789 to 1848 was a time of revolutions. There was a dangerous, revolutionary fervor that swept across Europe, threatening the old feudal order. Capitalism oozed across the globe, replacing monarchs with barons, and promising to replace the old class system of...
What I’m Reading or Just Read (or have next up on my stack):
Beneath the Wheel by Herman Hesse
Race, Women, and Class by Angela Davis
The Age of Capital by Eric Hobsbawm
Toward Freedom by Toure Reed
The Undiscovered Self by CJ Jung
Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott
God, Christ, Church by Margeret Suchocki
Class Notes by Adolph Reed
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom
In the woods, I was Huck Finn—and more Tom Sawyer in the institutional duties of school and household
Why I Read
In the woods, I was Huck Finn—and more Tom Sawyer in the institutional duties of school and household
My tragic-folk hero—born and died with a hammer in his hand
Read around my own overnight shift duties to listen for my sister’s seizures
Ray Bradbury’s Dinosaur Tales, full of the Sound of Thunder and the fragile nature of time travel
Reading is how I explored the world beyond my physical boundaries. I ran somewhere between Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer through the woods of Western Pennsylvania as a boy.
At 4, I read of John Henry and imagined a life of principle and toil, of sacrifice and battle against the machines of cowards.
At 5, I started into Stephen King, Mark Twain, and the Hardy Boys’ adventures.
At 6, I was along for a summer roadtrip through the West. I spent birthday money on a boomerang and book of Lakota and Sioux fables. One story kept coming back to me, though the boomerang never would. It was a boy my age, trapped high on a cliff with eaglets, using his leather clothing to feed them, growing frail and light until they were strong enough to fly and carry him back to his people.
At 7, I found Ray Bradbury, then a collection of science fiction from the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s at a garage sale down the street. I was obsessed with UFOs and hoped for my own close encounter.
The rust of an aging industrial town had me searching for stories unpublished, asking and listening to older people for tales of the past. I went deeper into the woods, the streets, the stories of the living and their tales of the dead.
At 15, I moved to New Mexico. I read Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky.
Reading is now one form of how I understand people: their histories, and their futures. Entire lifetimes can be summed in a few pages or years of study. I listen for the complexity of individuals in stories—through their own words or the view of others. I dialogue, therefore I learn.
I now attempt a balance between non-fiction and “purposeful fiction.” Anything else is a luxury, due to my crippling belief that my time is very limited in this life cycle. My less-restrained ego tells me I cannot “waste” hours or cumulative days wandering in the imagination of others, or my own, unless those imaginings are applied to the world as it is or may soon be.
Here is what currently has a place in the various stacks of “to be read” on my desk, on my table, and at the end of the shelf:
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