reading

2022: My Year in Books

Posted on by Eric Harvey
A grid pattern with the covers of all 48 books I read in 2022
Hooray! It’s time for my annual book post. It’s always fun for me to look back at the reading I’ve done in a year and think about which books have stuck with me the most.

I got to 48 books this year. Most of them were really good,  but I’m not going to go overboard reviewing the standouts like I did last year. Instead, I’m going to recommend two thematic groups that could be read as loose trilogies on topics I find important. I hope you enjoy them!

And before you leave, let me know what you read this past year and what I should put on my 2023 list!

Trilogy One: Family Values

American society has a skewed approach to family values.

Too often, we mandate one acceptable path for everyone and punish those who deviate from it, rather than supporting and empowering people to make the best of where they find themselves.

We withhold tools for avoiding difficulty and then penalize people for encountering it.

We build slippery ramps into poverty and then punish people for being poor. 

We create impossible hurdles and then punish people for non-compliance.

These points were drilled into me by several books I read this year, two of which I already summarized in my final post on abortion. Gabrielle Blair’s Ejaculate Responsibly shows how we erroneously and unrealistically place the full responsibility for avoiding unwanted pregnancy on women, while providing them too few resources to either prevent them or support the children that result. That point is made even more strongly by Diana Greene Foster in The Turnaway Study, which shows that women denied an abortion are overwhelmingly worse off as a result than women who received one at the same gestational age. Anyone who makes any decisions about abortion policy at all—from writing laws or deciding Supreme Court cases to simply voting—should read both of them.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking book I read this year was Dorothy Roberts’s Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. It is a searing indictment of the child welfare system as a fundamentally racist and classist institution that subjects poor and non-white parents—and mothers especially—to intense government surveillance, control, and punishment.

Families can attract the attention of CPS on the smallest of pretexts, and from there can be separated for anything from real abuse to non-compliance with unrealistic court requirements. And family separation does not reliably improve children’s lives. There are many wonderful foster parents—I know quite  a few—but many separated children find themselves in situations as harmful or more than the ones they left. Group homes especially are associated with higher levels of incarceration, institutionalization, and sex trafficking.

Critics argue that Roberts underemphasizes the seriousness of child abuse and neglect. To be clear, she doesn’t deny the problem or pretend it isn’t important. She does think, however, that the current child welfare system does more to exacerbate the problem than to lessen it. Earlier in her career, Roberts urged reform to the system, but in this book she argues for its complete demolition and a whole new approach to family welfare.

This is the thread that ties these three books together. They advocate for reversing our approach to family and the law. Instead of issuing punishments after things go wrong, why not use those resources to prevent problems in the first place? Upstream support and care can make a far more profound difference than downstream consequences.

Robust sex education, contraception, and trust in young people’s reproductive agency reduces unexpected pregnancy rates and prevents the psychological, social, educational, and economic struggles associated with parenting unwanted children. Supporting parents who have children in difficult circumstances with child care, health care, nutritional support, etc., reduces rates of neglect (and, by lowering parental stress, probably abuse as well).

To me, family values means valuing and supporting actual families, not using the state to mandate  a rigid archetype of the ideal family. 

Trilogy Two: Climate and Cultivation

It took me almost a year to wend my way through Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. I listened to her read it in her own voice and, unlike most of my reading, I listened to it at normal speed. The book and her reading of it were calm and meditative, and I dipped in to it from time to time when I was in the right head space rather than plowing straight through. I won’t lie: I have some low-key climate anxiety that needs somewhere to go, and this book helped push it in a productive direction. Kimmerer is both an accomplished academic ecologist and a student of indigenous American land stewardship practices. She combines these two aspects of her life in this book, a sprawling mix of memoir, ecology, history, and philosophy. It’s a beautiful book, and I am grateful for the ways it expanded my imagination regarding the climate crisis and its potential solutions.

In the chapter titled “The Sacred and the Superfund,” for example, she ruminates on the shortcomings of mainstream environmentalism:

We are deluged by information regarding our destruction of the world and hear almost nothing about how to nurture it. It is no surprise then that environmentalism becomes synonymous with dire predictions and powerless feelings. Our natural inclination to do right by the world is stifled, breeding despair when it should be inspiring action…

“If people only knew that snow leopards are going extinct,” “If people only knew that rivers are dying.” If people only knew … then they would, what? Stop? I honor their faith in people, but so far the if-then formula isn’t working. People do know the consequences of our collective damage, they do know the wages of an extractive economy, but they don’t stop. They get very sad, they get very quiet… [The]  toxic waste dumps, the melting glaciers, the litany of doomsday projections—they move anyone who is still listening only to despair.

Kimmerer pushes past this despair, igniting an imagination that recognizes thrilling potential for mutually beneficial relationships between humans and the “more-than-human world,” as she calls it. We can hope for more than mere mitigation when it comes to our environment—more than just curbing our harmful effect on global and local ecosystems. Yes, we do need to cut extraction and pollution, but human activity can be a net benefit to the world of plants and animals if it is properly conceived and organized.

This leads nicely into my other mini-obsession: permaculture. I’m interested in restorative agriculture more broadly, but since I’m not likely to be in charge of any large-scale restoration projects any time soon, I’ve been learning about things i can do in my own yard.

The best book I read in this vein this year was Toby Hemingway’s Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. Hemingway adapts the principles and findings of permaculture to the real challenges of small spaces, ranging from a few acres on the large side to apartments in urban spaces on the smaller end.

What is permaculture? It is an approach to gardening/farming that minimizes the need for human labor and interference by designing communities of plants that work together in harmony with their landscapes. It moves away from homogenous plots with tidy rows of single plant varieties, which require inordinate amounts of fertilizer, water, weed killer, and insect repellant, and toward mixed plantings of varieties that support and protect each other.

Plant some crops that deplete the soil of nitrogen alongside ones that add it to the soil, along with low vines that prevent weeds and repel insects. Add some flowers that attract pollinators and repel pests, and you have a nice, low-maintenance plot that will produce better yields than single-variety plantings!

At least, that is how it works in theory. I’m starting small with some experimental hugelkultur beds this year, and I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Climate activists are quick to point out that individual solutions are too small to counteract the systemic and industrial degradation of our environments. Honestly, they are right. My backyard hugelkultur beds are not going to slow climate change. 

I still think it’s worth it, though. To build habits of nurturing the Earth, rather than just taking from it. To learn to use our little parts of it to produce food and build ecological resilience. And of course, it doesn’t preclude support for climate policies that have more systemic impact. In fact, the work of permaculture and restorative agriculture can point the way out of our current extractive and destructive practices.

But let’s be honest. Chances are good that we are facing some rough years ahead. The climate is already changing and its effects will get more pronounced as they ripple across the globe. If you are worried about the societal implications of climate change, I recommend Chris Begley’s The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival.

Begley is an archaeology professor and wilderness survival instructor who has lived and worked in Kentucky, Honduras, and the Mediterranean. In recent years he has seen increased  interest in his survival courses, motivated by fear of the looming climate crisis. In his opinion, though, people will not need the skills they think they need if climate change causes societal collapse.

In this book, he surveys the archaeology of collapsed societies to show that the process looks nothing like we imagine them in our apocalyptic film and fiction. And since civilizational collapse doesn’t look like our fiction, the best candidates for survival don’t look like our post-apocalyptic heroes. Prolonged survival in a period of collapse probably won’t depend on combat skills or fortifications, but on collaboration and mutual aid. It is not the rugged individual who will make it through, but the interdependent community that values unique skills and contributions, knows how to select prudent leaders, and makes wise corporate choices. 

Two More on Education

I love Elizabeth Berkshire and Jack Schneider’s podcast, “Have You Heard?” so I was excited to read their book on the school privatization movement, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door. It’s a great look at the problems underlying charter schools, voucher programs, and their deleterious effects on American public education.

Will Bunch’s After the Ivory Tower Falls is a helpful look at the cultural fracas surrounding higher education. Is college the pathway to opportunity and economic mobility? An indoctrination machine and the root of all cultural ills? Or something else entirely? Bunch looks at what college is, what it has been, and what it has become in diverging popular imaginations, and makes some excellent suggestions regarding how it can function as part of a healthy and thriving democracy.

The Whole List

  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
  • Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West
  • Black Disability Politics by Sami Schalk
  • The Next Apocalypse: The Art and science of survival by Chris Begley
  • The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Giridharadas
  • Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin
  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to think About Abortion by Gabrielle Blair
  • The World We Make (Great Cities, #2) by N. K. JemisinΩ
  • Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West by John M. Riddle
  • Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America by Christian Williams
  • The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin (re-read)
    • The Fifth Season
    • The Obelisk Gate 
    • The Stone Sky
  • After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up our Politics, and How to Fix It by Will Bunch
  • On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters and Why You Should Care by Victor Ray
  • The performance of Doom: Ritual in Deuteronomy by Melissa Ramos
  • Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families, and How Abolition can Build a Safer World by Dorothy Roberts
  • The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, A Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion by Diana Greene Foster
  • Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust and What We Believe by Hugo Mercier
  • Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities by Rogers Brubaker
  • East of Eden by John Steinbeck (re-read)
  • Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy by Derek W. Black
  • The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids who are Grounded, Generous, and Smart about Money by Ron Lieber
  • A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire
  • The Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. LeGuin
    • A Wizard of Earthsea
    • The Tombs of Atuan
    • The Farthest Shore
    • Tehanu
    • Tales from Earthsea
    • The Other Wind
  • White Evangelical racism by Anthea Butler
  • Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman
  • You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and our Polluted Media Landscape by Whitney Phillips and Ryan Millner (re-read)
  • Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemingway
  • Building a Better World in your Back Yard, Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys by Paul Wheaton
  • Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal
  • The Golem and the Jinni (Golem and the Jinni, #1) by Helene Wecker
  • Complaint by Sarah Ahmed
  • A Master of Djinn (Dead Djinn Universe, #1) by P. DjÈlÍe Clark
  • Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant
  • God: An Anatomy by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
  • Abolition for the People by Colin Kaepernick
  • Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design by Bess Williamson
  • Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel Perry
  • Abusing Religion: Literary Persecution, Sex Scandals, and American Minority Religions by Megan P. Goodwin
  • The 1619 Project by Nicole Hannah Jones
  • A Song for the Wild-Built (Monk and Robot, #1) by Becky Chambers

Best Books of 2021: Disability and Embodiment

Posted on by Eric Harvey

In today’s installment of Eric’s Favorite Books of 2021, we move into nonfiction. Stop 1: readings on disability and the body. Check out yesterday’s fiction picks and the full list if you haven’t already!

Front cover of Extraordinary Bodies by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

 

Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

It is no understatement to say that this book transformed my thinking on disability and embodiment. Garland-Thomson brilliantly disentangles, names, and examines physical, biopolitical, and socio-cultural aspects of living with a body in societies that do not view all bodies as equal.

For Garland-Thomson, the discourse of disability has little to do with the physical parameters of our bodies per se, and everything to do with “cultural rules about what bodies should be and do” (p. 6). Human bodies come in a dizzying diversity of forms, differing in myriad ways across a  variety of spectra. This alone cannot explain the concept of disability or its function in the differential allocation of status, power, and material resources in society. The discourse of disability, rather, does the work of collapsing that manifold diversity into manageable binaries—bodies that are essentially “normal” in contrast to those that are not. In short, it is “the attribution of corporeal deviance” (p. 6).

By beginning her analysis with the deviant, Garland-Thomson silhouettes the phantom majority against which this deviance is defined. She coins the concept of the “normate” body, one that bears no marked or stigmatizing characteristics within a given cultural frame. The normate presents itself as the universal subject, the unqualified and definitive human being. In reality, the normate creates the normalcy it claims to reflect, as only a small minority of people in any given society actually inhabit such bodies.

The first third of the book lays out her theory: disability and the normate identity, its connection with stigma and social limitation, and its interactions with gender and race. The remainder then explores the theory in relation to American culture (e.g., the phenomenon of freak shows) and literature (the writings of Harriet beecher Stowe and Audrey Lord). This should be mandatory reading for anyone who wants to write about or just understand disability better.

Front Covers of the two Disability Visibility anthologies—one for adults and a second adapted for younger readers

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories for the 21st Century, edited by Alice Wong

This remarkable collection is composed entirely of first-person narratives describing the experience of living as a disabled person in the early 21st century. Alice Wong, a powerful advocate and activist for disability justice and the volume’s editor, has done an extraordinary job ensuring representation of contributors with many diverse identities, living  in a broad variety of situations with many different disabilities. The essays cover many topics, including personal experiences of joy and struggle, discrimination and institutionalization, and disability activism and mutual aid. Struggle runs throughout, but it is often combine with strength, defiance, connection, and collective action—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s “wild dreams of disability justice at the end of the world.” Read it yourself and buy it for all of your friends!

Front Cover of Their Plant Eyes

 

Their Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, by M. Leona Godin

This fits broadly within the genre of “blind memoir,” as Godin tells the story of her progressive vision loss and life with blindness, but she interweaves it with stories and biographies of blind people at different points in history to very enjoyable effect. Come for the salacious story of how Athenian Tyreseus was blinded and given prophecy by the gods; stay for Helen Keller’s often-glossed-over Vaudeville years, and meet a host of fascinating blind people in between. My one small critique? Like everyone, she starts her history of blindness with the Greeks, those late-comers to history who somehow get first credit for everything. Guess I’d better get working on that book on blindness in the ancient Middle East!

Front cover of Down, Girl!

Down, Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate manne

I wasn’t quite sure which category to put this book into, but since it deals broadly with the ways we police people based on the bodies they inhabit, I thought it might as well go here. I first heard of this book in connection with its coinage “himpathy,” which denotes the excessive sympathy given to men who are accused or convicted of gendered or sexual violence against women. The term struck me as a little too cute and didn’t motivate me to read the book right away, but I’m glad I did.

Now I use Manne’s model of misogyny all the time. It is so clear and powerfully explanatory that once you have read it you see the pattern at work everywhere. Misogyny and its manifestations in gendered violence are not illogical, incomprehensible, or inexplicable, as news outlets tend to conclude when gendered atrocities take place. Rather, misogyny in its various forms serves, in Manne’s words, as “the enforcement wing of patriarchy.” Misogyny is not the same thing as patriarchy, then, and it must also be differentiated from sexism. Patriarchy specifically describes any system in which roles and possibilities are determined by gender, with greater authority and autonomy going to men and submission and subservience allotted to women. Patriarchal systems are justified by sexism—that is, beliefs regarding the different natures of men and women and their relative social positions and value. Within a patriarchal system, gender roles are policed on both sides for deviance. Improper manhood and womanhood can both be stigmatized and sanctioned. Here, Manne focuses primarily on misogyny—acts of aggression and violence intended to control women who venture outside the prescribed boundaries of their gender’s assigned role(s). As such, it appears most predictably when women seek to resist or escape the control of men. With detailed argumentation and plentiful examples, Manne develops the intricacies of this broad thesis and its manifestations in different areas of life. As a work of academic philosophy it can get pretty dense, but the payoff is 100% worth it.

Best Books of 2021: Fiction

Posted on by Eric Harvey

Yesterday I shared the full list of books I read in 2021. Today I’m going to start sharing some favorites, beginning with the best from the fiction category.

Front Cover of the novel Piranesi

Piranesi, by Susanna Clark

Reading this book is an otherworldly experience—not only for the prosaic reason that it takes place in another world, but also because the writing creates a dreamlike atmosphere that is at once tantalizing and elusive. It takes the form of a detailed field journal kept by a man called Piranesi. He is mostly alone, navigating and charting a massive complex he calls the House. The House contains many halls, filled with thousands upon thousands of stone statues—some human, some animal, some creatures of story and myth. Through cracked roofs he sees an unending sky, and the floor below is flooded by an ocean of violent and interacting tides. Piranesi keeps meticulous notes, mapping the complex but always returning to the beginning lest he lose himself in the unending series of halls. Occasionally he is joined by a man he calls the Other, who is eager to hear the results of Piranesi’s exploration though he himself never ventures far into the House. This is a book I recommend highly, but mainly for the experience of reading it. The plot itself I found mildly disappointing, and the ending perhaps more so. I say perhaps because I haven’t been able to decide whether it ruined the book for me, and so perhaps this is also a testament to the novel’s magnificent indeterminacy.

Front Cover of the Dictionary of Lost Words

The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams

A book that hits the sweet spot for all you lovers of both historical fiction and lexicography. Williams tells the story of Esme, the daughter of a lexicographer working under Dr. Charles Murray to create the Oxford English Dictionary at the turn of the twentieth century. Esme’s father is a young widower, and She spends her early days playing at his feet under the large table in the Scriptorium while he works. Occasionally, she finds slips of paper with words and definitions written on them, sent in by the dictionary’s many volunteer contributors. As she grows and learns more, she begins working on the dictionary herself and notices that some words—particularly to do with the lives and experiences of women—are conspicuously left out or defined in ways that do not satisfy her. She begins a secret project of her own, collecting and defining women’s words that do not rise to the standards of masculine “importance” demanded by the intellectual giants of the dictionary. The novel is beautifully and gently written, yet uncompromising in its lament for the lost stories and language of women.

Front Cover to The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, the first book of the Wayfarers Series

 The Wayfarers Series by Becky Chambers

 This is a delightful science fiction series set in a vibrantly imagined and beautifully constructed universe. Each book is tenuously related to the last, usually picking up on and developing the story of a minor character from a previous book. Though events of extraordinary interplanetary significance are going on around her characters (and indeed they sometimes find themselves in the middle of such events), Chambers keeps the focus tightly on the characters themselves, navigating adventures they often did not choose and do not want within a complicated web of alien cultures and political agendas. It is exactly this quotidian bent and narrow focus that make the Wayfarers books so enjoyable to read—indeed, the final book covers a lot of ground even though it takes place during what amounts to a prolonged travel delay. If you want high-quality, character-centered sci-fi that explores issues of gender, intersectionality, colonialism and its aftermath, and a whole host of other big topics in little ways, give these a read!

Bambi: A Life in the Woods, by Felix Salten

Honestly, I’d never had any desire to read this book. Never, that is, until I learned it was banned by the Nazis because they (rightly( identified it as n allegory for the persecution of European Jews in an era of accelerating anti-Semitism and fascism. Bambi was first published in 1923 to immediate success, but it was banned in 1935 lest it create sympathy for Germany’s Jews. The novel is a different animal entirely from the 1942 Walt Disney adaptation (pun intended)—an unflinching account of lives of forest animals born into a hostile, dangerous world and the price they pay to survive within it. Even its moments of joy and exuberance are muted by the tense undercurrents of threat that run through every page. The creatures of the forest fear death in every shadow and across every sunlit meadow, and even the leaves on the trees debate the mystery of death. Above all other predators is “He,” the human who brings death with his gun, who seeks only to kill and makes fools or traitors of all animals who serve him. In the end, Bambi learns not of love and the bliss of family life (as Disney would have us believe), but of life conditioned by constant wariness and the solitary sorrow of survival. It’s a masterful book, but I’ll probably wait a few years before I read it to my kids.

2021: My Year in Books

Posted on by Eric Harvey

The covers of every book I read this yearm, arranged in a grid pattern

 

 Hi! What is your pandemic coping strategy? Apparently, mine involves piping a constant stream of audiobooks into my ears at every moment I’m not working or actively conversing with my family. 

Cooking? Audiobooks.

Dishes? Audiobooks.

Laundry? Audiobooks.

You get the picture. 

I guess that’s how I made it through 78 books this year (on top of the reading I do for research, etc.). Looking back over the list, I see too many amazing reads to make just one book post (as I’ve done in previous years), so this time I’m going to break up my top picks into a few posts that I’ll publish over the next couple of days.

But before that, here’s the whole list. See if you can guess which ones were my favorites.

And please let me know what you read and loved this year. I’m always looking for the next thing!

The List

(In the order I read them)

  1. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, by C. L. R. James
  2. The Bible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently, by Marc Brettler and Amy-Jill Levine
  3. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, by bell hooks
  4. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
  5. The metanarrative of Blindness: A re-reading of 20th Century Anglophone Writing, by David Bolt
  6. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
  7. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott
  8. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, by bell hooks
  9. Religion is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the 21st Century, edited by Grace Yukich
  10. What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World, by Sarah Hendren
  11. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, by Sasha Costanza-Chock
  12. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories for the 21st Century, edited by Alice Wong
  13. Dawn (Xenogenesis #1), by Octavia E. Butler
  14. Adulthood Rites (Xenogenesis #2), by Octavia E. Butler
  15. Imago (Xenogenesis #3), by Octavia E. Butler
  16. How the University Works: Higher Education in the Low-Wage Nation, by Marc Bousquet
  17. The Instruction Myth: Why Higher Education is Hard to Change and How to Change It, by John Tagg
  18. Understanding and Preventing Faculty-on-Faculty Bullying: A Psycho-Social Organizational Approach, by Darla J. Twale
  19. The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the 21st Century, by George E. Walker
  20. The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible, by Yael Avrahami
  21. Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi
  22. Blood in my Eye, by George L. Jackson
  23. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
  24. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, by Adrienne Maree Brown
  25. Demons, Angels, and Writing in Ancient Judaism, by Annette Yoshiko Reed
  26. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and how WE Can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee
  27. Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky #1), by Rebecca Roanhorse
  28. Feminist, Queer, Crip, by Alison Kafer
  29. Piranesi, by Susanna Clark
  30. Decolonial Pedagogy: Examining Sites of Resistance, Resurgence, and Renewal, by Njoki N. Wane
  31. Music in Ancient Greece and Rome, by John G. Landels
  32. The Divine Institution: White Evangelicalism’s Politics of the Family, by Sophie Bjork-James
  33. Down, Girl! The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate Manne
  34. The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, by Alicia Garza
  35. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in this Crisis, by Dean Spade
  36. Holy Resilience: The Bible’s Traumatic Origins, by David M. Carr
  37. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917–2017, by Rashid Khalidi
  38. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
  39. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s, by Elizabeth Hinton
  40. The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, by Daniel Greene
  41. Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything, by William Germano
  42. The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
  43. All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries #1), by Martha Wells
  44. Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2), by Martha Wells
  45. Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries #3), by Martha Wells
  46. Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries #4), by Martha Wells
  47. Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries #5), by Martha Wells
  48. Their Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness, by M. Leona Godin
  49. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, by Kevin M. Kruse
  50. You Are Here: A Field Guide for Navigating Polarized Speech, Conspiracy Theories, and our Polluted Media Landscape, by Bryan M. Milner and Whitney Phillips
  51. No Study Without Struggle: Confronting Settler Colonialism in Higher Education, by Leigh Patel
  52. The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade #1) by Seth Dickinson
  53. Where do we go from here” Chaos or Community, by Martin Luther King, Jr.
  54. Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch
  55. Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America from my Daughter’s School, by Courtney E. Martin
  56. Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World, by Michael Edwards
  57. The New Ph.D.: How to Build a Better Graduate Education, by Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch
  58. Tell the Machine Goodnight, by Katie Williams
  59. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers #1), by Becky Chambers
  60. A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2), by Becky Chambers
  61. Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers #3), by Becky Chambers
  62. The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4), by Becky Chambers
  63. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, by Toni Morrison
  64. Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, by Charlene Carruthers
  65. We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, by Mariame Kaba
  66. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, by Robin D G. Kelly
  67. Bullshit Jobs: A theory, by David Graeber
  68. Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America, by John McWhorter
  69. Liquid Scripture: The Bible in a Digital World, by Jeffrey Siker
  70. Christitainment: Selling Jesus Through Popular Culture, by Shirley R. Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe
  71. Evangelicals, Incorporated: Books and the business of Religion in America, by Daniel Vaca
  72. A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops obsolete, by Gio Maher
  73. Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the pursuit of Freedom, by Derecka Purnell
  74. Ill Fares the Land, by Tony Judt
  75. The Bright Ages, by Matt Gabriele and David M. Perry
  76. The 9.9%: The new Aristocracy that is Entrenching Inequality and Warping our Culture, by Matthew Stewart
  77. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, by Harsha Walia
  78. Bambi: A Life in the woods, by Felix Salten

Audiobooks are Books, Too

Posted on by Eric Harvey

Every so often, some iteration of the same debate pops up somewhere on the internet: does listening to audiobooks really count as reading?

Predictably, this takes the form of one person calling out another because they didn’t really read a book, they just listened to it. Audiobooks, in other words, Don’t “count” in the same way print books do.

Now, I’ve interacted with the written word in a lot of ways—eyes on print, fingers on Braille, and audio red by humans and synthesized by text-to-speech. So I have some thoughts about this. I wrote them out in a massive twitter thread, and a few people asked me to publish it here as well. Here it is (slightly cleaned up and with links to relevant resources).

***

 

First Things: Words and their Jobs

First, let’s take a brief foray into linguistics and acknowledge that words do not have inherent meanings. People use and combine words to create and communicate meaning with others.

As semanticists say, “Words don’t mean. People mean.”

And in different contexts, people use words to mean different things. For the verb “to read,” there are three relevant usages to consider:

  1. reading as an ability
  2. reading as an activity
  3. reading as an accomplishment

To understand the differences and why they matter, we have to think historically. As time passes culture, technology, and lifestyles change in ways that create new communicative needs. Most of the time, these needs are met not by inventing wholly new words, but by adapting pre-existing words by analogy. The process by which this happens is seldom reasoned or systematic, tending rather to be intuitive and incidental.

Tactile writing is only two hundred years old and audiobooks are less than ninety, so it shouldn’t be surprising that our language has not fully adapted to their use. We are recycling the language of older technologies—spoken language and visual writing—to describe these new things and the ways we use them.

In the case of Braille and other tactile writing systems, the analogy with visual writing was clear and straightforward. Both used characters in a sequence to represent language across a page or other flat surface, and both were stable over time. Thus, the adoption of “reading” and “writing” language presented few problems outside of very technical contexts.

(Note—I don’t know if there were debates in the 1800s over whether the verb “to read” could be legitimately applied to Braille. If there were, that would be super interesting and I’d love to see them. In either case, reading quickly became the dominant way of talking about consuming Braille)

Controversy over audiobooks, I think, stems from uncertainty over which pre-existing technology they should be analogized to: printed texts or spoken language. The format is auditory, and thus resembles speech, but books, magazines, newspapers, signs, menus, etc. . are understood as essentially textual entities, which are read.

So in our language, do we privilege the format and delivery method, or the original/essential nature of the content?

The problem is different in each of the three usages of the verb “to read,” because each at its heart is trying to convey different information. Lets consider each in turn:

1) Reading as an ability

Basically, this answers the question “can you read?” In other words, if presented with a given physical object containing text, will you be able to decode its meaning?

There’s a lot to unpack about reading as an ability, but I’m not going to do it here. In this context, I think it’s safe to say that if you cannot read at least one print or tactile script in at least one language, you should not say you can read.

However, that doesn’t get to the heart of the debate or the ways people use the reading/listening distinction to flex on each other.

2) Reading as an activity

This answers the question “what are you doing?” Consider four answers:

  1. “I’m reading a book.”
  2. “I’m listening to a book.”
  3. “I’m listening to an audiobook.”
  4. “I’m reading an audiobook.”

If we imagine ourselves as sticklers who insist that print and audiobooks are so different that they require different verbs, then only the first and third answers make any sense at all. I mean, I suppose I could press my ear to my paperback copy of War and Peace, but I won’t get much out of it).

Now consider another scenario. I am pointing my phone at a large sign. I have the Seeing AI app up and it’s reading any text that comes into my camera’s view. You ask “what are you doing?” Two possible answers:

  1. “I am trying to see what that sign says.”
  2. “I am trying to read that sign.”

Now, you and I the imaginary sticklers know that both of these are absurd. I am not reading, in a literal sense, nor will I ever truly *see* what it says. What I should say is “I am pointing my phone at that sign so it can feed the image into an optical character recognition engine then translate the results into sound using text to speech software so that I can apprehend the information encoded on its surface.”

But the point of the first two answers is not to communicate the sum of their words. They are trying to communicate a more general point: I am trying to get the information from that sign into my head using a newfangled kind of technological mediation.

There are times when we can all turn off our inner literalists and realize that “reading” can be shorthand for getting textual information from a physical object into our heads.

So let’s not be sticklers, ok?

Of course, there may be times when it is important to specify the exact mode and method we used to apprehend some bit of text. This should be done to prevent or correct misunderstandings, but it applies equally to Braille and print.

For example, if a sighted someone asks to borrow your copy of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, you might disappoint them by saying you have it on audio, but they would probably not be thrilled if you dropped off ten massive Braille volumes, either.

And that leads to usage number 3.

3) Reading as an accomplishment

This is where it gets real, because this is where people start adding value judgments and putting each other down.

The pertinent question here is “did you read X?”

I often hear people say things like “you didn’t actually read X, you just listened to it.” What’s the point of saying this? It does more than maintain a procedural distinction, it establishes a hierarchy where reading is superior and listening is inferior. It implies that listening to a book is not an accomplishment in the same way that reading it visually or tactilely is. In some sense, it doesn’t “count.”

The foundations of this hierarchy lie in cultural notions regarding the types of material that are usually conveyed in written and oral form and the relative merits of each. Books, especially, are prestige objects because of their historical associations with education and class privilege. Historical roots notwithstanding, though,, is this hierarchy justified? Is there any inherent superiority to reading words from a page by eye or finger as opposed to hearing them read or synthesized into speech?

It depends on our goals. In my research, I use Braille for close reading (especially in non-English languages) and audio to work quickly through long articles and books. Keeping two lists in my head—one of things I have read in Braille and one of books I have listened to—would be untenable and pointless.

This is because the point of saying I have read something is to indicate that I have interacted with the information it contains and internalized it to some degree. If it could be demonstrated that comprehension and retention rates differed significantly between auditory and visual/tactile book input, then I could be convinced that we should insist on the terminological distinction. But they do not.

Neurological imaging studies reveal that listening to audiobooks activates the same cognitive and emotional regions of the brain as reading print, and tests of comprehension and retention do not show significant differences between audio and print consumption of text.

Additionally, a moment’s reflection reveals that not all visual or tactile reading leads to the same learning. Sometimes print and Braille reading are done with care and attention, and sometimes they are done while unwilling or distracted. I have learned a lot from reading print books and articles, and I have finished others and realized immediately that I could not tell you anything about what I had just read. The same can be said for audio reading. Most often, the returns we get from the time and energy we invest in reading have more to do with our focus and attention than with inherent qualities of the medium or modality.

To my mind, then, insisting on a value distinction between print/Braille and audio is baseless and counterproductive. The value of tine spent reading is in the changes it makes to your base of knowledge and depth of thought. Neither of these result directly or necessarily from the part(s) of your body you use in the process. So as a flex?? To boost your own intellectual achievements and cast doubt on those of others? It doesn’t work and it doesn’t make sense.

To sum up, here are a few takeaways:

Should we learn Braille? YES. I hope nothing I’ve said here implies that I don’t think Braille is important. Learn Braille to the extent that you are physically and neurologically able, because it gives you the opportunity to interact with information in a greater variety of ways in a greater variety of circumstances. Even if all you can do is read bathroom signs and label your medications, that’s better than nothing. And if you gain the fluency to read whole books? Go to town!

But should we enforce the distinction between Braille and audio, relegating audio always to second place? NO. Indulge your curiosity. Read widely in whatever medium is most accessible to you. Expand your perspective with print, Braille, audio, whatever. Don’t be discouraged and don’t be held back. Read read read read read!

And come on, people, if someone says they read a book and you KNOW they listened to the audio, don’t call them out or “correct” them on it. There’s no point to it and it’s not a good look.

Basically, be as precise as you want but don’t try to prove Braille is important by denigrating audio.

Braille is important.

Audio is important.

Nitpicking each other’s language to enforce a baseless distinction between the two is not.

2020: My Year in Books

Posted on by Eric Harvey

A grid view of the covers of the 60 books I read this year

It’s time for year-end “best of” lists, and so here again is my annual rundown of books (see also the  2017, 2018, and 2019 versions).

2020 was strange and hard, but that did not keep it from bringing me some very good books. As I look back, i am struck by the excellent quality of this year’s reads. I would recommend nearly all of the 60 books I read and it’s not easy to choose my favorites, but I’ve pulled out some top picks below.

Let me know what you thought of these books in the comments, or which books were your favorites this year!. I’m always looking for new recommendations!

 

Top Picks

Fiction

The Daevabad Trilogy by S. A. Chakraborty

The world of this phenomenal fantasy trilogy builds upon medieval Islamic mythology from the Indian Ocean Rim. The story centers around Nahiri, a young orphan turned con artist in French-occupied Cairo. In the course of a hustle she accidentally summons the ancient jinn Darayavahoush (Dara for short), who recognizes her as part jinn herself. Together they journey to Daevabad, the jinn capital city, where she becomes embroiled in palace intrigue and the city’s volatile politics. The magical world is lush and nuanced, the characters are deep and engaging, and the writing is simply wonderful. These books will not disappoint.

 

Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

This lovely YA read deals frankly and sensitively with topics of mixed heritage, teenage identity formation, and mental illness. Sixteen-year-old Darius Kellner lives with chronic depression, which complicates his efforts to negotiate his identity as a “fractional Persian.” He constantly feels too Persian for his white family, too white for his Persian family, and too awkward and nerdy for both. When his family travels to visit his grandparents in Iran, he struggles to find where and how he fits in the family, The saving grace of the trip is Sohrab, a neighbor with whom he develops a strong and meaningful friendship. Khorram does not trivialize or catastrophize depression, but writes a complicated main character who must live with it as one enduring feature of his life. 

 

A special shout-out goes to author Tamora Pierce. for getting me through election season. Even though she started writing her Alanna books in the early 1980s, I hadn’t heard of them until this October (thanks to M Tong and Matthew Chalmers). They were fun, quick reads that provided distraction in the days surrounding Nov. 4, and on top of it all they have aged really well over the past three decades—strong heroines, engaging characters, and imaginative world-building, combine with grand adventure to create delightful escapist rides.

 

Nonfiction 

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

I read this book as March gave way to April. The Coronavirus pandemic was gaining steam and government and society were weighing options for potential responses. The process was a real-time illustration of Disaster Capitalism, Klein’s term for an economic strategy pioneered and propagated by economists at the University of Chicago in the latter half of the 20th century—most notably Milton Friedman and his students. These were the vanguard of the economic philosophy that has come to be known as neoliberalism—hardline support for privatization and market deregulation, general distrust of public goods and government interventions, and the elevation of competition over collaboration as an ordering economic and social principle. 

Friedman understood the value of disaster. In 1982 he wrote “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around” (cited on p. 140). He made it a point, therefore, to spread his students and his ideas to as many places as possible, where they would implement the same crisis playbook again and again until his brand of ultra-capitalism moved from fringe to mainstream and then to orthodoxy. This much happened, certainly, but neoliberalism did not bring with it the widespread prosperity and happiness that the Chicago Boys predicted. Klein uses in-depth case studies from Chile, South Africa, post-Soviet Russia, Argentina. and mid-2000s Iraq to show the pattern that unfolded in place after place: “an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by the ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; decimation of nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to private hands, followed by a huge transfer of private debts into public hands” (p. 86). In short, a pattern in which the wealthy leverage disasters to further enrich themselves at the expense of those most vulnerable to the crisis itself.

Klein’s theory of disaster capitalism has held up depressingly well since the publication of this book in 2009. The recent Rand Report on income inequality shows that fifty years of trickle-down economic policies have siphoned $50 trillion upward from the bottom 90% of the U.S. wealth distribution to the top 1%. The financial crisis of 2008–2009 created another massive wealth redistribution upward, and in 2020 America’s 644 billionaires have used the Coronavirus pandemic to increase their collective net worth by $1 trillion while pushing 8 million people from the middle class into poverty.

 Economic orthodoxy needs revision—or revolution. Privatization and competition will not save us. The problems we face now require collaboration and collective action for the public good.

 

The Surprising Design of Market Economies by Alex Marshall

Economic markets do not just happen. There is no such thing as a “free market,” proceeding in its natural state without government intervention or regulation. Governments do not only intervene in natural market processes; they set the parameters for market operation and participation from the ground up. All markets operate under sets of rules, and those rules can vary on every factor. What can be owned, and by whom? What can be bought and sold, and on what terms? Who can participate in the market and who is excluded? What obligations do the various parties in economic transactions have to each other and to society? None of these answers is fixed in stone or mandated by natural law. They are changing and changeable, as Alex Marshall demonstrates with this torrent of studies and examples from U.S. history. Investigating common law, intellectual property, the nature of the corporation, private/public partnership, and the enforcement of property rights and norms, he demonstrates the contingent nature of market behavior and the dramatic differences that changes in market governance can make. 

The analysis in some examples could be questioned, but Marshall makes his overarching point with strength and clarity. There is no neutral, unregulated form of a capitalist market economy, only different types of regulation that favor different parties in the system to greater or lesser extents. “In reality, deregulation means abdicating public governance in favor of corporate self-regulation, which tends to devalue workers and shirk responsibility for externalities. Luckily, we can choose different rules for our markets—rules that empower workers, ensure responsible production and consumption, and promote the public good.

 

How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the soul of America by Heather Cox Richardson

Caricatures of American history often focus too heavily on either its high ideals of freedom and equality or its cruel patterns of exploitation and extraction. These two tendencies—one toward the concentration of wealth and power and the other toward equal participation and empowerment of all people—have coexisted in tension from the United States’s founding, and in this book Heather Cox Richardson uses the battle line itself as a through line in American history. Beginning with the Constitution, which propounds inalienable human rights and equal treatment at a time when both were denied to the majority of the population, she traces the tension forward to its crescendo in the Civil War and beyond to western expansion, Jim Crow, and our current battles over race, gender, religion, and economics. 

In their mythical self-representation, Southern slaveowners portrayed themselves as rugged individualists—strong and self-sufficient men who asked nothing from the government except to be left alone. In reality, their wealth and position (not to mention the entire slaveholding system) were propped up by government support and intervention at every level. The three-fifths compromise in the U.S. Constitution gave white men in slaveholding states outsized influence in national policy, and local law enforcement kept enslaved Southerners in check while protecting their enslavers from harm and insurrection.

Emancipation and abolition were important steps toward freedom, but they did not usher in full inclusion or equal rights. , Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, Southern ideology did not die out but spread westward into new territories and states. Western pioneers, like the Southern slaveowners before them, cultivated an image of rugged self-sufficiency that was actually propped up by a substantial government apparatus. Laws limited  the immigration and citizenship of Native American, Mexican, and Chinese populations. Courts prioritized the property rights of white settlers, and military and law enforcement tolerated and perpetrated acts of terrorist violence against all of these groups to the advantage of the white pioneers. In the 20th century the expansion of voting rights to women and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s both represented significant gains toward democratic and egalitarian ideals, but we are still far from embodying the highest values of a free, just, and equal society. Those striving to reduce entrenched disparities in power and status face ongoing opposition from those who would see them limited to a chosen few. Though Richardson’s framework may seem simplistic,  it helps to clarify the goals and stakes in the brutal tug-of-war of American politics. 

Heather Cox Richardson also writes an amazing daily newsletter that digests the day’s news and places it in historical context. It is an excellent way to get the news without all the frenzy, and you can find it on her Substack or her facebook page. I read it every day and you might like it too!

 

Jesus an John Wayne: How White Evangelicals corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Riffing on the title of a 2008 song by the Gaither Vocal Band, Kristin Kobes Du Mez traces the nature of masculinity and male role models in white American Evangelicalism across the past 75 years. She argues that Christian leaders and cultural icons have championed a rough and rugged male ideal defined by competition and domination. This masculinity affects all areas of life, from rigid gender roles and unquestioned male authority in the family to religious supremacy in society and militant imperialism abroad. Evangelicals have remade Jesus in the image of John Wayne, and the results have been disastrous.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the current state of evangelicalism in the United States. It does for gender what Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise has done for race—shows how unhealthy hierarchies and the pursuit of dominance are not alien intrusions upon American Christianity, but are central to its identity and functioning. 

 

The Full List

In chronological order from January to December

  • How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
  • Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Kate Raworth
  • There will be no Miracles Here: A Memoir by Casey Gerald
  • Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini
  • Inferior: How Science got Women Wrong and the Research that’s Rewriting the Story by Angela Saini
  • The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
  • The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone
  • The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein
  • From Dissertation to Book by William P. Germano
  • Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics by R. Marie griffith
  • The Hidden History of the War on Voting: Who Stole your Vote and how to get it Back by Tom Hartmann
  • The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
  • From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century by William A. Darity Jr. and Kirsten Mullen
  • So You Want to be a Wizard? by Diane Dwayne
  • TheWind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
  • Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
  • Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred E. Taylor
  • The Surprising Design of Market Economies by Alex Marshall
  • The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Rise of the People’s Economy by Stephanie Kelton
  • The Scepter and the Star: Messianism in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls by John J. Collins
  • Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? A Story about Women and Economics by Katrine Marcal
  • TheFearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist by Marcus Rediker
  • The Formation of the Book of Psalms: Reconsidering the Transmission and Canonization of Psalmody in Light of Material Culture and the Poetics of Anthologies by David Willgren
  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • Whiteness in Higher Education: The Invisible Missing Link in Diversity and Racial Analyses by Nolan L. Cabrera
  • Critical Race Theory in Higher Education: Twenty Years of Theoretical and Research Innovations by Dorian L. McCoy, et al.
  • The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic
  • An Afican-American and LatinX History of the United states by Paul Ortiz
  • The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
  • Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
  • The Daevabad Trilogy by S. A. Chakraborty (The City of Brass, The Kingdom of Copper, and The Empire of Gold)
  • Evil: the Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side by Julia Shaw
  • The Passover Haggadah: A Biography by Vanessa L. Ochs
  • Resisting Neoliberalism in Higher Education, Vol. 1: Seeing Through the Cracks by Dorothy Bottrell and Catherine Manathunga (eds.)
  • Industrial Strength Denial: Eight Stories of Corporations Defending the Indefensible, from the Slave Trade to Climate Change by Barbara Freese
  • How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the soul of America by Heather Cox Richardson
  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcom X and Alex Haley
  • Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives by Elizabeth S. Anderson
  • Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
  • Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women by Kate Manne
  • Song of the Lioness Series by Tamora Pierce (Alanna: The First Adventure, n the Hand of the Goddess, The Woman who Rides Like a Man, and Lioness Rampant)
  • White Rage: The unspoken Truth of our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
  • Immortals Series by Tamora Pierce (Wild Magic, Wolf-Speaker, Emperor Mage, and The Realms of the Gods)
  • Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
  • Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed
  • Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
  • How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
  • The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel
  • Metaphor Wars: Conceptual Metaphors in Human Life by Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
  • Ableism in Academia: Theorizing Experiences of Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses in Higher Education by Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh (eds.)
  • Teaching to Transgress: A Pedagogy of Hope by bell hooks

My Year in Books: 2018!

Posted on by Eric Harvey

Picture: A collage composed of the covers of many books i read in 2018

Continuing the tradition I began last year, I’ve decided to celebrate the increasing availability of books to the blind by sharing my full 2018 reading list, with some of the best and most meaningful given special comment.

In 2017 I read 59 books, and thought I might have to slow down. So of course in 2018 I read 67 books! Many of them were meaningful and formative, and I struggle to narrow down the list to recommend just a few. Below are some notable works in no particular order, followed by the rest of my reading list.

Top Picks

Fiction

The Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy by Cixin Lio (The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death’s En)

This imaginative, thinky trilogy is quintessential speculative fiction for super nerds. If you like your novels pumped chock full of wonky physics and written in a non-Western cultural idiom, these books are for you. 

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky)

I thought I had lost the taste for straight fantasy, but then I read this series by N. K. Jemisin. The world she builds here is spectacularly creative, and she delves deep into some very real and very rough parts of human nature. There’s a reason she’s just become the first author to win the Hugo award three years in a row (once for each of these books)—you won’t regret reading them. 

Non-Fiction: Race, Society, and Inequality

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

A detailed and masterfully-argued examination of the changing face of racial discrimination in America. Writing at the height of the Obama era, when many Americans were heralding the onset of a post-racial society, Alexander revealed their optimism to be largely unwarranted. Discrimination is still rampant, though it now adopts subtler and less explicit means than slavery or Jim Crow segregation. Alexander shows how the construction of an unnecessarily punitive and differentially-applied justice system has effectively created a new iteration of the same old racial caste system—exploiting Black Americans for free labor, diminishing their economic prospects, and reducing their access to voting and other rights and responsibilities of full citizenship. All of this goes on within a culture of nominal colorblindness, a thin veneer of propriety and unbiased objectivity that peels away under Alexander’s relentless scrutiny.

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

This book is dizzying in its scope and utterly surprising for many who learned a sanitized version of American history in school. Kendi defines three strains of thinking on race and traces them across four centuries through the life, work, and context of five paradigmatic American thinkers: Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W. E. B. DuBois, and Angela Davis. Each of these individuals exhibits one or (more often) more than one of Kendi’s three strains of thought: segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist. Kendi does an excellent job of showing how racist ideas were created and perpetuated to justify exploitative economic practices, as well as how the particular expressions of those ideas changed and adapted to new cultural, legal, and economic context. Racist thinking has changed, but never disappeared from American life.

I have a few residual questions about the nature and scope of Kendi’s assimilationist category, but they do not diminish the overall value of the book. This book would pair well with Paul Ortiz’s An African-American and LatinX History of the United States  or Karen Fields’ Racecraft, mentioned below.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

The world of big-money philanthropy operates under the assumptions that market solutions provide the best hope to rectify societal ills and that it is possible to become extremely wealthy in a way that also benefits society as a whole. Long an insider to this world, Anand Giridheradas has become disillusioned with these beliefs and argues effectively against both in this incisive book. He questions the basic premise that one can “do well by doing good,” that every problem has a win-win solution that allows for both the reduction of inequality and the accumulation of fabulous personal wealth. Instead, he urges the creation of more democratic and more egalitarian institutions and social structures to combat growing inequaltiy and the worsening prospects faced by many Americans. 

Non-Fiction: Bible

Womanist Midrash by Wilda C. Gafney

Gafney combines rigorous scholarship and imaginative storytelling in this quest to rediscover important female characters of the Hebrew Bible. She provides fresh and well-argued interpretations of the text and explores the evocative importance of its gaps and holes. This welcome and challenging contribution honestly probes the concerns and perspectives of biblical women, addressing in the process a host of neglected questions that will benefit all readers and interpreters.

The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity by Eva Mroczek

The Bible was not always the Bible. Before the diverse texts we now call biblical were gathered into one binding, each of them had a life of its own (and some more than one). They existed alongside and together with a vast library of other writings—some were lost to history and others survived in non-biblical contexts. How did people think about these texts before there was a Bible, before there were even books? Mroczek approaches that question with clarity and creativity, suggesting a number of productive metaphors that can guide our thinking about the Bible before there was a Bible.  

Nonfiction: Blind Lit

Crooked Paths Made Straight: A Blind Teacher’s Adventure Traveling Around the World by Isabelle D. Grant

Dr. Isabelle Grant was a Scottish-born Los Angeles schoolteacher who was forced out of her job after she went blind as an adult. So of course she embarked on a trip around the world with her cane and Braille typewriter. Alone. In the 1950s. She visited five continents and many countries to observe and assess the quality of education for blind children, encouraging teachers and authorities to invest in blind youth and improve their self-sufficiency and self-determination.. Her intelligence, good humor, and openness to new ideas and relationships make for a delightful and surprising read. Foreword by Debbie Kent Stein, who found this manuscript decades after it was written and saw it through to publication. 

Non-Fiction: Personal Growth & Effectiveness

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris

A master class in humility. Tavris digs deep into wrongness—why it’s inevitable, why we have trouble recognizing it, and why we avoid doing anything about it. The process is so universal and so relatable that you can’t help but begin to recognize unwarranted certainty and misplaced confidence in your own life and thinking. Everyone should take the lessons of this book to heart.

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

This book can help address some of those pernicious human problems described in the last entry. Duke applies her experience as an international poker champion and Ph.D. in psychology to the problem of making good decisions in an uncertain world. Excellent theoretical frameworks as well as practical tips. Let’s all work on thinking better!

French Kids Eat Everything: How Our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking, and Discovered Ten Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters by Karen Le Billon

A much more nuanced book than the title implies. I found it extremely helpful—not for definitive answers, but for opening up new avenues of thinking about food and food education within the family. French parents consider good eating a crucial skill to be acquired, and teach it as intentionally as reading, writing, or math. They do not consider children’s tastes to be immutable, but condition them by repeated exposure to and discussion of healthy and diverse foods. A great read for parents of young children trying to escape power struggles over food.

The Rest of the List

  • The Time Quintet by Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, An Acceptable Time)
  • You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church…and Rethinking Faith by David Kinnaman
  • How to Write Short: Wordcraft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark
  • So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
  • Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman
  • How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation by N. J. Enfield
  • Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
  • R. J. Rommel: An Assessment of His Many Contributions, edited by Nils Petter Gleditsch
  • Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey
  • An African-American and LatinX History of the United States by Paul Ortiz
  • Can We Talk About Race? and Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation by Beverly Daniel Tatum
  • The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong
  • Rethinking Expertise by Harry M. Collins
  • God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says by Michael D. Coogan
  • Reality is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli
  • Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture by Peggy Orenstein
  • Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape by Peggy Orenstein
  • Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just by Timothy J Keller
  • The Formation of the Jewish Canon by Timothy H. Lim
  • Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary F. Marcus
  • What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics by Adam Becker
  • The Talmud: A Biography by Barry Scott Wimpfheimer
  • Insight: Why We’re Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life by Tasha Eurich
  • People of Vision: A History of the American Council of the Blind by James Megivern
  • Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow
  • The Anne Shirley Series by L. M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne’s House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside)
  • 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
  • Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love by Rob Schenck
  • What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael J. Sandel
  • Manhood: How to be a Better Man or Just Live with One by Terry Crews
  • Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
  • How the Bible Became Holy by Michael L. Satlow
  • The Akata Witch Series by Nnedi Okorafor (Akata Witch and Akata Warrior)
  • The Blind Doctor: The Jacob Bolotin Story by Rosalind Perman
  • Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse
  • Love and War: How Militarism Shapes Sexuality and Romance by Tom Digby
  • On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
  • Becoming by Michelle Obama
  • Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields
  • How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley
  • Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind by Osagie Obasogie

What is the best book you read in 2018? Leave a comment and help me build my 2019 reading list (as if it isn’t 20 books deep already)!

2017: My Year in Books

Posted on by Eric Harvey

An image collage of book covers for all the books I read this year.I set a goal to read 40 books this year, and according to my Goodreads Reading Challenge, I read 59!

I am profoundly grateful to be able to read this much and this widely, considering the historical “book famine” that has plagued blind readers. Only about 10% of English books ever make it into an accessible Braille or audio format, and in most world languages that number is closer to 1%, Advances in technology (like Bookshare and the NLS) and policy (the Chaffey Amendment to U.S. copyright law an the Treaty of Marrakesh internationally) are allowing for more books to be made accessible in Braille and audio more quickly than ever before.

And so, to celebrate, I have taken a cue from my friend Emily K. Michael and decided to share my full 2017 reading list. I’ve pulled out a few that I highly recommend to everyone and added a few comments (choosing which was hard—almost everything I read this year was good!).

Top Picks

(grouped by subject, not quality):

Fiction

 The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears

This intricate and well-crafted historical novel traces the lives of three men who live in southern France at different times in history: a fifth-century Roman philosopher-turned-Christian-bishop, a poet in the court of the fourteenth-century Avignon papacy, and a scholar of medieval French poetry in the years leading up to World War II. The three men’s lives parallel one another as each reads and interprets the work of the one who came before.

The King Must Die, by Mary Renault

Mary Renault is a master. This historicized novelization of the myth of Theseus is infused at every turn with her deep knowledge of the ancient Mediterranean world. It perfectly balances the foreignness of the past with the universality of human experience. Historical fiction at its finest.

Non-Fiction

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass

I have thought of this book often since I read it. It is the third and last of Frederick Douglass’ autobiographical works, revised in 1892, three years before his death. Douglass’ life and accomplishments are, of course, astounding, and his prose is masterful. He is a model of the courage to risk everything for freedom, the passion to fight for justice and equity, and the strength to forgive even those who have harmed us most.

The only fault is Douglass’ meticulous effort to thank and acknowledge every abolitionist and freedom fighter he ever met, which results in long lists of names otherwise forgotten to history. Those aside, the writing is excellent, and this book is well worth the read.

Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice, by Dr. Willie Parker

This is a must-read for all American Christians, and probably for most other Americans as well. Dr. Willie Parker is a Southern, African-American, Pentecostal Christian abortion provider—a unique perspective in a political landscape known for entrenched positions and hostility to productive discussion.

Dr. Parker argues from his life history and his Christian faith that access to safe abortions is a moral imperative in a loving and just society. It is precisely the Christian foundation for his beliefs and practice (often in the face of abuse and threats of violence) that makes this book so unusual and valuable. It defies the notion that Christianity can permit only one stance on reproductive rights, and I hope by the end readers will see that there is more to being truly pro-life than simply voting against abortion.

Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, by Roy F. Baumeister

Probably the best book I’ve read on the dark side of human nature. Baumeister’s broad synthesis of the research debunks the common simplistic notion that only unusual, intrinsically bad people (i.e., “bad apples”) can commit acts of horrific violence. He also avoids the emerging popular view that these terrible deeds are primarily the product of external, situational factors (i.e., “bad barrels,” an approach typified by Philip Zimbardo in The Lucifer Effect, below).

Instead, Baumeister presents a complex interaction between individuals and their contexts. The seeds of evil are present in every person to a greater or lesser extent, but how they manifest depends greatly on the social and cultural context. 

The theoretical backbone is strong, but it is still a 20-year-old book. I would love to see an updated second edition informed by more recent research and world events.

Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, by Michael Tomasello

This is a pretty dry, technical linguistics book, but I loved it so much. Tomasello blew my mind on nearly every page as he completely reconfigured the way I think about language and human interaction. If you are interested in fundamental aspects of what language is, how it works, and how we use it, I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

The End of White Christian America, by Robert P. Jones

Important reading for pretty much everyone in the U.S. Whether the title inspires glee, fury, or anything in-between, it is difficult to deny that in the coming century the “default American” will no longer be both white and Christian. This book gives a good overview of the rise and decline of White Christian America over the course of the last century, with an insightful epilogue written after the 2016 presidential election.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It, by Richard V. Reeves

Phenomenal book. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institute shows that rising income inequality cannot be blamed on the wealthiest 1% alone. The entire top 20% of the American income distribution have done their best to elevate their position and then “pull up the ladder” behind them. Laws governing taxes, housing, education, and inheritance have all been shaped to protect the upper middle class and their children from downward mobility, and have stifled upward mobility in the process. As the top 20% pulls further and further ahead of the rest, the meritocratic American ideal becomes less and less a reality. I was convinced, convicted, and inspired to reanalyze my policy views and voting choices.

Personal Development

Designing Your Life: Build a Lifethat Works for You, by Bill Burnett andDave Evans

This superb book applies design thinking to life choices, demystifying some of the most perplexing aspects of wayfinding in life and career in the process. I plan to reread this and work through the exercises in detail, probably multiple times throughout my life.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown

A strong argument for ruthless focus. If you, like me, have the tendency to make “a millimeter of progress in a million directions,” this book might help you reframe and refocus on the few essential things.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, by Cal Newport

A practical guidebook for developing practices, habits, and schedules that foster deep focus and productivity. Great framework for getting things done!

The Rest of the List

(in the order I read them): 

  • Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, by Jill Lepore
  •  Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, by Paul Bloom
  • Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform our Lives, by Tim Harford
  • Empirical Models Challenging Biblical Criticism, edited by Raymond F. Person and Robert Rezetko
  • America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, by Jim Wallace
  • Little Book of Restorative Justice, by Howard Zehr
  • Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild
  • The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
  • Why Wall Street Matters, by William D. Cohan
  • Crashing Through: A True Story of Risk, Adventure, and the Man who Dared to See, by Robert Kurson
  • The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, by Norman Doidge
  • Intelligence in the Flesh: Why Your Mind Needs Your Body Much More than it Thinks, by Guy Claxton
  • On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt
  • The Shadow Series by Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, and Shadow of the Giant)
  • Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt
  • The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
  • Dreamblood Series by N. K. Jemisin (The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun)
  • The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
  • Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet can tell us about Who we Really Are, by Seth Stephens Davidowitz
  • The Sellout, by Paul Beatty
  • Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond
  • The Babylonian World, edited by Gwendolyn Leick
  • The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
  • The Egypt Game, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
  • What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly
  • When Breath Becomes Air, by Paul Kalanithi
  • Small Great Things, by Jodi Picoult
  • The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language, by John McWhorter
  • The Song of Achilles, by Madeleine Miller
  • Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
  • The Giver Series by Lois Lowry (The Giver, Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son)
  • Engines of Liberty: The Power of Citizen Activists to Make Constitutional Law, by David Cole
  • The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles, by Steven Pressfield
  • The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo
  • The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, by Jean Aitchison
  • The “Lotus Sutra”: A Biography, by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
  • The Book of Mormon: A Biography, by Paul C. Gutjahr
  • Nefertiti, by Michelle Moran
  • The Reign of Nabonidus, by Paul Alain Beaulieu
  • The Time Keeper, by Mitch Albom
  • Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters, by John Steinbeck

What is the best book you read in 2017? Leave a comment and help me build my 2018 list!

The Speed of Sound

Posted on by Eric Harvey

Image representing the sound wave of an audio file.

On the recommendation of blog reader Margaret, I’ve been reading through Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain that Changes Itself. The book investigates neuroplasticity, the process by which the brain rewires itself and changes its physical structure in response to specific demands. There are a lot of interesting insights in there for people with sensory loss, and I’m already planning to write a longer post about it once I finish. 

In the meantime, I just wanted to share a short passage that caught my attention, and a few thoughts about it. Doidge writes:

I was at a dinner party with a friend, whom I shall call Emma; her writer husband, Theodore; and several other writers.

Emma is now in her forties. When she was twenty-three, a spontaneous genetic mutation led to an illness called retinitis pigmentosa that caused her retinal cells to die. Five years ago she became totally blind and began using a seeing-eye dog, Matty, a Labrador. Emma’s blindness has reorganized her brain and her life. A number of us who were at the dinner are interested in literature, but since she has gone blind, Emma has done more reading than any of us. A computer program from Kurzweil Educational Systems reads books aloud to her in a monotone that pauses for commas, stops for periods, and rises in pitch for questions. This computer voice is so rapid, I cannot make out a single word. But Emma has gradually learned to listen at a faster and faster pace, so she is now reading at about 340 words a minute and is marching through all the great classics. “I get into an author, and I read everything he has ever written, and then I move on to another.” She has read Dostoyevsky (her favorite), Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dickens, Chesterton, Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Flaubert, Proust, Stendhal, and many others. Recently she read three Trollope novels in one day. She asked me how it might be possible for her to read so much more quickly than before she went blind. I theorized that her massive visual cortex, no longer processing sight, had been taken over for auditory processing.

Naturally this caught my eye, since I have RP and—like Emma—have taken to consuming most of my books in audible form. I too have increased the speed incrementally, and now listen at between 400 and 450 words per minute.

Anyone who has heard blind people use their phones knows this is pretty common. The advent of smartphone technology in the decade since this book came out has improved text-to-speech synthesis by leaps and bounds over the old Kurzweil machines. It is cheaper and more widely available, and the voices are more pleasant and natural-sounding, clearer and easier to understand at higher speeds.

Now that I’m used to it, I actually love using my phone to listen to books. For one thing, the high rate of speed keeps me engaged and focused. I know exactly how long it will take to read a book, because my reading app tells me, down to the second. And It makes note-taking easy—I just pause, highlight the text I want, and export all of my highlights once I’m done with the book. 

But there’s good news for those of you whose eyes still rule your brains: this is not some kind of blind superpower, and you can learn it too. I know, because my wife Kristin does it, and her vision is completely intact. She found herself getting impatient with the pace of audiobooks and podcasts and, since she knew I listened fast, she started increasing the speed. Now she listens to everything sped up anywhere from 1.5x to 2x normal speed, depending on what it is and what else she is doing at the time.

You can always learn new skills, even if large tracts of your cortical real estate haven’t been recently vacated. Much of the rest of Doidge’s book discusses how regions of the brain can be recruited for novel tasks, at the same time as they continue to do their old jobs. So it seems hiss explanation here is overly simplistic. Blindness had certainly prompted changes in Emma’s brain, but some—like fast-listening—could have happened even if she was sighted.

Brain function is not a zero-sum game, where gains in one domain can only happen at the expense of another. We haven’t found—or even gotten close to— the limits of the human potential to learn. We don’t know how many skills a person can master, or to what depth. The brain is glorious in its flexibility and ability to change, at any age and in any circumstances..

I’m excited to share more from this book and a few others I’ve read recently in the same vein, they all tend to show the benefits of that hard work I wrote about last week. The grueling work of learning to live again without sight not only allows us to lead happy and fulfilling lives. but could protect the health and longevity of our very brains.

Stay tuned!