gkur 75 books in 2016!

So for 2015 I made it to 35 books. I got a little bit of a late start. But this year, I'm hoping to make it to 75! That is a lot more reading than I normally do so we will see what happens. - Greta

Here is a link to my 2015 thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/189064

Summary of books read in 2016:

January

Book 1: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Book 2: Saga #1 by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples
Book 3: Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann
Book 4: The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis by Greg Myers
Book 5: Roy Lichtenstein: October files edited by Graham Bader
Book 6: Saga #2 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Book 7: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

February

Book 8: Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings by Paul Theroux
Book 9: My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem
Book 10: Heads or Tails by Lilli Carré
Book 11: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer
Book 12: Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success by Adam Grant
Book 13: Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems by James Tate

March

Book 14: Saga #3 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Book 15: The View from the Barrio by Lisa Peattie
Book 16: In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri
Book 17: Saga #4 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Book 18: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown
Book 19: The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Book 20: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
Book 21: Notorious RBG by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik
Book 22: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

April

Book 23: Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly by Bernadette Jiwa
Book 24: Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel
Book 25: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

May

Book 26: The Map Thief by Michael Blanding
Book 27: When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future by Abby Smith Rumsey
Book 28: Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine
Book 29: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

June

Book 30: The Library and Innovation Toolkit edited by Anthony Molaro and Leah L. White
Book 31: Nice Weather by Frederick Seidel
Book 32: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With edited by Sherry Turkle
Book 33: Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant
Book 34: Redefining Realness by Janet Mock
Book 35: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Book 36: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

July

Book 37: V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
Book 38: Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa
Book 39: The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse
Book 40: Soundtrack: Short Stories 1989-1996 by Jessica Abel
Book 41: The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage
Book 42: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Housseini
Book 43: Bossypants by Tina Fey
Book 44: Being Peace by Thích Nhất Hạnh

August

Book 45: Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
Book 46: College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 4, June 2016 edited by Jonathan Alexander
Book 47: Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct by P. M. Forni
Book 48: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

September

Book 49: Sunny Side Up by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm
Book 50: Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education by Mychal Denzel Smith
Book 51: Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude M. Steele
Book 52: The Girls by Emma Cline
Book 53: The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean by Trevor Corson
Book 54: The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld
Book 55: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

October

Book 56: The Lost Boy by Greg Ruth
Book 57: Dan Graham Rock My Religion By Kodwo Eshun
Book 58: The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant
Book 59: Ayiti by Roxane Gay
Book 60: Cardboard by Doug TenNapel
Book 61: Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness by Nathaniel Tkacz

November

Book 62: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
Book 63: The Fifth Petal by Brunonia Barry
Book 64: Crowdsourcing (MIT Press Essential Knowledge) by Daren C. Brabham
Book 65: Kiki de Montparnasse by Catel & Bocquet
Book 66: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

December

Book 67: Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
Book 68: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Book 69: Jeff Koons One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank by Michael Archer
Book 70: The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch
Book 71: How to Architect by Doug Patt
Book 72: The Adventures of Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey by Tony Millionaire
Book 73: The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
Book 74: Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems by Alice Walker
Book 75: The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Welcome back! I hope life lets you read enough to make 75. :)

Book 1: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

This is a great book. Hard to put down until you finally "get it."

Book 2: Saga #1 by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples

I'm really enjoying this series. The story is familiar - a young couple with a new baby are on the run and are being hunted by multiple parties - but the characters they meet are very original looking and the art work keeps it surprising.

>3 gkur: That one has been on my radar for a good long while. I'm glad to see that you enjoyed it!

>3 gkur: - What a wonderful book to start off your 2016 reading! I love Barnes writing style.

Book 3: Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann

I loved reading this book and I love that amazing memoirs by female artists are being written and are so popular these days. This is a longer memoir that has a ton of research into family history behind it. I was not expecting to find chapters dedicated to her parents and nanny, but the book is richer for it. Her reflections on racism and living in the south were also very interesting. The parts about Cy Twombly were fascinating - I had no idea that they were friends or worked in the same town in Virginia.

I didn't know much about Sally Mann before I started reading - just that she takes amazing and controversial photographs of her kids - but her work about the landscape of the south, portraits of black men, and the Body Farm (a place where dead bodies are studied as they decompose), gave me a fuller understanding of her oeuvre. Her personal history is extremely tied up in the subjects of the photographs and that really came through in the book. Her writing voice is so different from the voice that comes through her images that it was interesting to see the two together as there are a lot of images throughout the book.

The later chapters delve into genealogical research that is a little less fascinating, though I did enjoy reading about her father's family who was very rich and obsessed with bicycles. All the children got custom made small bikes at a very early age.

Book 4: The Discourse of Blogs and Wikis by Greg Myers

The book was more about the blog side of things, and by wikis it just meant Wikipedia. Most of the book featured discussions about the discourse of blogs, and it was interesting to read how people add in words that indicate a statement is a personal opinion and that in general blogs as a genre are very personal. In contrast people can't write original research or their opinion in Wikipedia, making it a very different thing to study. But Myers focuses on the History and Talk pages in Wikipedia, and the community, and how Wikipedians communicate, rather than the discourse of articles. Which is fine, but I was hoping for more info about Wikipedia.

Book 5: Roy Lichtenstein: October files edited by Graham Bader

I stumbled upon the Carpe Librum bookstore (http://www.carpelibrum.org/) in Washington DC in December and picked up this and a couple other art books for very cheap. That place is a good deal!

The book, like others in the October files series, consists of interviews and articles written about one artist. Lichtenstein is an interesting artist, I love his subject matter and the way he portrays it. Some of the coolest pieces featured in the book were "Imperfect Painting (Gold)", "Like New", both discussed in probably my favorite article in the book "Slide Lecture" by Yve-Alain Bois, and his art deco inspired piece "Modular Painting with Four Panels". These were works that I hadn't seen before and they are beautiful. One image in the book of the back of the "Imperfect Painting (Gold)" piece made me think of Vik Muniz and his recreations of the backs of canvases. Since that piece has an extra triangle jutting out from a side, the back is particularly striking. I also enjoyed the essay about Lichtenstein's monocularity - how he often features one viewpoint, or a person with only one eye - and the last essay in the book that is about one work, Lichtenstein's first work involving cartoon characters Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse.

Book 6: Saga #2 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Saga is a really fun read! I'm super enjoying the series.

Book 7: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

I started reading this last fall, and then put in down for a few months. I found the story sort of unappealing at first, but as it dives into the history of his family in the DR it got more interesting. Usually I find the beginning of stories more compelling and then tend to lose interest, especially with fiction, but this was the exact opposite. Glad I stuck with it and finally finished it!

Decent start to the year. On target for 75 at least this year so far. How do we address you? GK?

Hi Paul, you can address me as Greta, thanks for the support!

Book 8: Fresh Air Fiend: Travel Writings by Paul Theroux

This was one of the largest books I've read in a while (~463 pages) but it was easy going because it was a lot of shorter essays with different topics. I learned that Paul Theroux is from Massachusetts (me too!), and I especially enjoyed the essays about kayaking and traveling around Cape Cod. Most of this book is travel essays, but there is a section toward the end about books by other authors, this was like reading a bunch of book reviews (which I love to read) and personal reminiscences about meeting famous authors. The author I wasn't familiar with that I want to know more about now is Bruce Chatwin.

Book 9: My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem

This book was on my radar, but then I started noticing the Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club and I was even more interested. I love that celebrities are getting into book clubs and are promoting reading. My Life on the Road is a great intro to the Feminist movement and Steinem. Starting with a chapter about growing up and her father's obsession with traveling we see where her passion for the road comes from. I didn't know much about Steinem before reading this, but it's a great intro to her and her work. The part about Native American history and Wilma Mankiller were very interesting and made me want to read more about Mankiller and her life and work. Reading it after Paul Theroux's book was interesting too because they are both about traveling, but traveling for very different reasons and with very different perspectives.

Book 10: Heads or Tails by Lilli Carré

This is a graphic novel - but it is a collection of short stories. Wonderful, absurd, surreal stories with near perfect illustrations. The art makes the stories in many ways. I'm looking forward to reading more by Carré.

Book 11: Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer

I was inspired to read this because the author did a reading at the MIT Libraries. And even though I didn't get to attend, I was instantly drawn to her writing.

This collection of 8 short stories is a wonderful read. The characters are complex, defy stereotypes, and seem realistic. There are stories of people that are dealing with their own issues, and issues outside of their control. Most of the main characters are young women struggling for independence and to find meaning in their life. The time changes story by story and they seem to be set in either the 1960s or the present. I especially enjoyed the ending to a story about a young woman who recently moved to Baltimore, took a class, and then became a teacher in the public school system. She wanted to make a difference, but mostly just wanted to make rent. By the end of the story she is as jaded and powerless as you would expect someone to be in her shoes. Religion is also a theme that comes up regularly, and it is depicted as a force in one's life that may hold one back rather than make one free. The other theme that I thought was very powerful in this book was that the characters - two in particular, one is a young man who drives his father to Washington DC, another is a girl who runs away from her legal guardians to find her mother in Atlanta - don't make one bad or questionable decision and then their life is suddenly out of their control - they make a series of smaller decisions, most of which don't seem like they would have negative consequences until they all add up, and suddenly the protagonist is in over their head. Overall I loved it, and am looking forward to reading more by Packer.

Book 12: Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success by Adam Grant

So the premise of this book is that givers (people who are good collaborators, don't hog all the credit, make an effort to put others ahead of themselves) are actually much more successful and do better work than takers (you know, those selfish assholes you hate). There are also matchers (who are very blah).

Working in a library I think most of the people I know at work fit into the giver category. We could always do better, but in general the (mostly) women I've found that work in libraries still need to work on being more aggressive, assertive, and confident - the book seems to be saying "tone down your aggressiveness and assertiveness and become a giver," but for many in female dominated professions it is probably a message of "beef up your aggressiveness and assertiveness to make yourself a more effective giver," that needs to be made. And I think that perspective wasn't explored that much. Grant does have a chapter focusing on different types of givers - selfless givers are wayyyy less successful than anyone else cuz they give too much and burn out, but otherish givers are more successful in general because they look out for themselves as much as they look out for other people.

Most of the examples (and there are a ton of examples) in the book were of men in high ranking, prestigious positions of power in fields that (I get the impression) men care a lot about - finance, sports, tech companies. So I felt there was a bit of a gender bias to the book, but I think overall there was a lot of good advice. It is nice to read about successful people and to think maybe I have some of those qualities, or at least I could try to embody some of those qualities and maybe that will make me more successful, because don't we all want to be more successful (in whatever that means for us?)

For example here is some good advice:

"...when we're not experiencing a psychologically or physically intense state, we dramatically underestimate how much it will affect us." "...successful givers shift their frames of reference to the recipient's perspective. For most people, this isn't the natural starting point." p. 87, 89

"The psychologist Angela Duckworth calls this grit: having passion and perseverance toward long-term goals. her research shows that above and beyond intelligence and aptitude, gritty people - by virtue of their interest, focus, and drive - achieve higher performance." p. 105

"By looking for opportunities to benefit others and themselves, otherish givers are able to think in more complex ways and identify win-win solutions that both takers and selfless givers miss." p. 213

Book 13: Dome of the Hidden Pavilion: New Poems by James Tate

I picked this book up when I learned that James Tate died last year. I saw him read when I was an undergrad at UMass, and was instantly drawn to his surreal story telling way of writing. This book seemed concerned with the absurd in the everyday. Many of the poems start off innocent enough but then there are zombies, people dieing, mistaken identities, and confusion. I pictured the main character often to be an older man who was constantly on the brink of completely losing it or just hallucinating. There are a lot of "I said" "he said" "she said"s that structure many of the poems. I bought the e-book and read it on Kindle which definitely distorted the lines and made it a little harder to read. Probably not his best collection of poems, and I found it hard to read a lot in one sitting. It's great for picking up, reading one poem, ruminating, and then going back in for another.

Book 14: Saga #3 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

I'm still loving the saga! I wish the author didn't have to die, and I'm really hoping that the protagonists took his writing with them!

Book 15: The View from the Barrio by Lisa Peattie

I read this to learn more about Peattie's experience in Venezuela. She was part of a team of urban planners that worked in the Ciudad Guayana area during the 1960s from the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies (formed in 1959 and split from MIT in 1989). This was a work related read for me and I probably wouldn't have picked it up otherwise. But it was pretty interesting.

Book 16: In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri

This book is very honest and Lahiri is very forthright about her concerns and fears of writing and publishing in Italian. Reading about her struggles with the language was very encouraging, because I do not learn languages easily and I can understand how frustrating it is. I also loved how she wrote about her own relationships with multiple languages - how Bengali was something spoken at home, but how English was the way she expressed herself through writing, and now Italian is taking over her thoughts and her writing. Her frustrations with how others perceive her language skills were also very interesting and honest. To read that she doesn't feel like she really fits in with the dominant linguistic culture of India, America, or Italy was eye opening.

Sort of by chance, Lahiri is one of the only authors where I've read almost everything they've written. I think because of that I consider her one of my favorite authors. This glimpse into her more personal side only made her more interesting and I look forward to her next book.

Book 17: Saga, volume 4 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

This volume especially had a few moments that reading in panel mode started with a close up and a word bubble and then expanded to a bigger picture that took me off guard and made me laugh out loud. One example was with the robot king and his giant TV screen head.

Book 18: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg Mckeown

I'm sort of getting into these management-y, self-helpy, how to be successful types of books. I picked this one up because I was starting to feel a little overwhelmed and scatterbrained at work, and thought this could provide some focus, which it did.

There was an ongoing metaphor of keeping your closet clean and orderly, reminded me of the tidying up book. A lot of this book was about the power of choice. We all choose to do certain things over others and when we aren't making those choices, other people will make them for us. One big theme is to distinguish between the "trivial many" and the "vital few" so that we don't overextend ourselves and do a lot of crap jobs that don't add up to much, but rather choose a few important things to do that will have larger payoffs. On page 62 we are told: "Essentialists spend as much time as possible exploring, listening, debating, questioning, and thinking. But their exploration is not an end in itself. The purpose of the exploration is to discern the vital few from the trivial many."

Another theme was to focus not on the particulars, but rather the big picture - "focus on the broader patterns or trends. ... Small, incremental changes are hard to see in the moment but over time can have a huge cumulative effect." (p. 78) Mckeown also advocates for play, the importance of clarity of purpose (my job has a lot of ambiguities, so this is something I struggle with), saying no when you need to, and I really liked the advice of starting a project far in advance and just working on it for 10 minutes or so every few days. I try to do that with presentation or papers and it really helps.

Book 19: The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I read Between the World and Me last year, and plan to reread it soon, so I wanted to read The Beautiful Struggle and learn a little more about Coates family and childhood. This book is very telling, but is a little more written in code than Between the World and Me and isn't as clear in some ways. There is a flow to it that is like high school - some things stand out and seem very important when in fact they aren't much of a thing to anyone else. His father has an interesting story - Black Panther, father to 7 kids with 4 women, African history buff, and librarian, and educator and disciplinarian to his kids. As an archivist I was very interested in his role at the library at Howard. At one point Coates writes about his father, "Dad would leave the crib for days, off to do the math on a forgotten historian, track down the copyright for a book, or persuade someone to donate their papers to the Mecca." (p. 56) Again on page 89, "When I was three, he got his BA, then shipped off to Atlanta University for a master's. He came back and took his first professional job sorting histories for the official library of the Mecca. By then, he boiled down his dream of vertical integration to the step that fascinated him most. He'd begun publishing just before he left Atlanta. Now he plumbed through all the old works by black scholars, works lost to time, and brought them back, restored in all their splendor."

A great quote / life lesson from towards the end of the book: "I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles."

Book 20: People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

I loved reading this because it dove into the stories that surround an object. The book starts with a woman in the 1990s writing a detailed catalog entry about a Haggadah from the 1400s. The chapters alternate between the past and the present and with each chapter set in the past we go back further in time and learn about the people who saved, altered, and eventually the ones who actually created the book. It's a work of fiction, but I feel like I got some history lessons too.

Book 21: Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik

Perfect timing reading this when there is a new Supreme Court Justice nominated. I don't know much about the legal system or the Supreme Court, but reading about Ginsburg's life is inspiring and the book does throw in some breakdowns of her dissents.

Book 22: An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Book 23: Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly by Bernadette Jiwa

This is another management self help book. I was interested in this one because it had to do with storytelling as a way to sell products. Really the main message of the book is that as a business (or an entity with a product/service) you need to stop the cycle of making a product and then finding a customer. Instead you need to know your customers and make products for them, or as Jiwa states, "The blueprint I am sharing with you in this book helps you to start with the customer's story."

In the archives world (in which I work) I think we could know our customers better and use that information to change not just how we conduct reference and access services, but also how we arrange and describe collections. It is with this in mind that I read this book. It really made me think, how can we focus on our users? How can we talk and listen to them better, what services should we be providing, and how will that change our jobs? Because I think there is a lot we could do better, but it is a constant juggle between lack of staff, tech support, and limited resources.

I enjoyed this book a lot and thought there was a lot of good general advice. There were also a lot of examples featuring women which I liked. Most of the other management books I've read feature mostly examples of men.

Here are some selected quotes from the book:

"The two most important things we can do are to allow ourselves to be seen AND to really see others. The greatest gift you can give a person is to see who she is and to reflect that back to her. When we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work." location 149

"If marketing is about making people aware of the value you create, to do that, you have to unlock the value in your story. If innovation is about creating value, to do that well, you must unlock the value in the stories of the people you hope to serve." location 180

"Today there is a shift. Technology is helping us to once again embrace the values of a time when business was about seeing the individual customer." location 272

"As customers, what we crave more than the commodity we think we are paying for is to be understood." location 279

"The value isn't just in the data that businesses collect. What counts is how they use it to make our lives better." location 281

"Every business today, no matter its size or legacy, faces four massive challenges. They are: Clutter, Competition, Commoditisation, Consumer consciousness." location 306

"It turns out that affinity that is earned, not attention that is bought and paid for, is what's powering business growth now." location 318

"For many, digital space has become akin to physical space. And that changes everything about what is possible to achieve in any industry." location 334

"The nearness advantage is now open to anyone who cares to leverage." location 335

"...innovating is about creating something that makes a difference in the lives of users." location 374

"We got very good at telling customer what we wanted to them to know, and we forgot to consider what they wanted us to understand." location 404

"The truth about disruptive innovations isn't that they disrupt industries, but that they disrupt people's lives for the better." location 587

"...watching what people do is not the same as paying attention to how they feel." location 676

"The desire for a more personalised experience has spawned multiple trends and innovations, as people strive to add meaning to their lives while removing friction." location 758

"We can't help but be drawn in by emails that address us by name or services that allow us to express our individuality. Companies are getting wise to the fact that we want to customise everything..." location 786

"And if you have an area you're working, talk to customers. Every day. Talk to users of your product, active, inactive, new, and old. Talk to people who don't want to use your product. Talk to people who are using a competitor's product. Talk to customers of products in adjacent markets. Now, reread this paragraph and replace talk with listen. Understand how customers see the world. They don't know the solutions, but they know the problems." location 838

"New rules of brand awareness: Understand the customers' story. Make something they want. Give them a story to tell. Create brand affinity." location 879

"Awareness of our products and services is not what spreads our stories. Our stories spread when we are aware of our customers." location 883

Book 24: Ooga-Booga by Frederick Seidel

Book 25: Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

I found the story interesting and I enjoyed reading it but the characters weren't very likeable and it was a depressing story. It is about two students who fall in love at Harvard in the late 1960s. The young woman abandons her dreams of becoming a doctor for family life. She never quite reconciles this with herself or her husband, who doesn't realize how much of a sacrifice this was for her. They have three children together who suffer from their parents lack of communication and honesty about what they want out of life. Lydia the middle child dies suddenly and this catalyst causes the whole family to reassess how they live their lives and the things they have failed to say to each other.

Hi, Greta! (I almost spelled your name "Great," which I'm sure you are!)

I found your thread, and we have a lot of books in common, if only that I've got the books on my to-be-read.

See you around!

Karen O.

Book 26: The Map Thief: The Gripping Story of an Esteemed Rare-Map Dealer Who Made Millions Stealing Priceless Maps by Michael Blanding

Book 27: When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future by Abby Smith Rumsey

Book 28: Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

I loved this book! It is filled with examples of microaggressions that when pointed out and isolated especially have the power to shock. I was surprised by the amount of references to sports and contemporary art. I plan to read more Claudia Rankine in the future, and a book mentioned - Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant. Here are a few quotes / parts I found interesting.

"...a friend once told you there exists the medical term - John Henryism - for people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. ... They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure. Sherman James, the researcher who came up with the term, claimed physiological costs were high." Location 77

"A friend argues that Americans battle between the 'historical self' and the 'self self.' By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning." Location 88

Hennessy Youngman - Art Thoughtz

I loved the framing of Serena Williams using the Zora Neale Hurston quote "I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background." And then also bringing in Glenn Ligon's art using the quote. Glenn Ligon - America

"The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness - all the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through..." Location 172

"Though you can retire with an injury, you can't walk away because you feel bad." Location 338

Book 29: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

My husband suggested reading this because he thought it was a short book. So I bought the Kindle edition without looking at the length and starting reading it. Then I noticed I was barely ever making any progress reading it and it seemed to go on and on. I then checked the page length and noticed it was almost 600 pages. So it took me probably about 6 months to read this and I haven't finished the postscript and notes to the new edition yet. But finally I made it through the main text!

It was a fairly enjoyable read for me. I liked imagining the middle ages. It takes place in the 1300s in an Italian abbey with a terrific library. A detective and his apprentice have been called in to investigate a killing and it is quickly established that it has something to do with the librarians and the library. The apprentice is the narrator of the story and is writing this all down when he is an old man. He must have a photographic memory because the conversations and passages about what he is thinking and feeling have a lot of detail in them. Like he says "But again, I digress, and tell things other than those I should tell."

Here are some quotes I liked about the library towards the beginning of the book, there are far too many quotes that I highlighted to put them all here:

"...a list of titles often tells very little; only the librarian knows, from the collocation of the volume, from its degree of inaccessibility, what secrets, what truths or falsehoods, the volume contains. Only he decides how, when, and whether to give it to the monk who requests it..." Page 41 (Location 568)

"'...a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.'" Page 42 (Location 579)

"And since the sight of the beautiful implies peace, and since our appetite is calmed similarly by peacefulness, by the good, and by the beautiful, I felt myself filled with a great consolation and I thought how pleasant it must be to work in that place. As it appeared to my eyes, at that afternoon hour, it seemed to me a joyous workshop of learning. I saw later at St. Gall a scriptorium of similar proportions, also separated from the library (in other convents the monks worked in the same place where the books were kept), but not so beautifully arranged as this one." Page 78 (Location 1121)



In general I was most interested about passages describing the library, the monks work on manuscripts, the adventures in the labyrinth of the library itself. I just found out there is a movie about the book, so that is now on my watchlist!

Book 30: The Library and Innovation Toolkit: Ideas, Strategies, and Programs edited by Anthony Molaro and Leah L. White

Many of the case studies in the book are from the public library world, but I think the public library is often doing the most innovative things. The public library user is everyone - all economic/cultural/ethnic backgrounds come together in a common space. I found the articles about going outside of the walls of the library to interact with library patrons or potential library patrons very inspiring - Audrey Barbakoff wrote about a book group that meets on a ferry during the night commute. I was reading the book during my train commute and thought, wouldn't it be nice to be riding on a ferry instead of this train with absolutely no room for anyone and it's usually running late. But really a ferry ride is a great time to have a book group. There was also a chapter on hosting trivia at a local bar as a way to move beyond the physical space of the library.

My absolute favorite idea was found in the "innovative spaces" section and was by Monica Harris who wrote about a space in the library that serves as a creative zone. It could house exhibits, installations, anything and would change often. I liked how it was not just a wall for hanging pictures, but a full space that could be used for a variety of purposes, even turned into a grassy sunny spot in the middle of the winter.

There were a few articles about hosting events - one on diversity that was inspired by a conservative speaker at a university, another article talked about hosting a local comic-con for young people at a public library. These are interesting because I think the library should be not just providing a space for people to gather, but host events as well.

And lastly I want to write about an interesting project that was a problem solving innovation at Yale. Apparently the books had to be checked by security before people exited the library (this sounds insane to me) and it was taking way too long. The article explains the new practice of giving the security people scanners that pop up a green light to let the book go or a red light meaning it has to go back to the desk. Honestly going to public schools my whole life and now working in a fairly open private school, I was surprised at the amount of security that one had to go through to check out a book.

Book 31: Nice Weather by Frederick Seidel

I enjoyed this book more than Ooga-Booga. I love all the rhyming, and the mentions of an unavoidable death to come, memories from the past, and current events.

Book 32: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With edited by Sherry Turkle

>36 gkur: Well it is relative, I suppose. I think it would have been short had you been comparing it to War and Peace!

Greta, I am not sure how I missed your thread these last few months,

>40 PaulCranswick: PaulCranswick

yep, it is all relative. I prefer books around 200 pages. Not lazy, but just a slow reader and I don't have a huge attention span.

>41 gkur: I wouldn't argue with that for myself either these days, Greta.

Book 33: Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant

Because I'm too lazy to paraphrase / summarize, these quotes from the intro say better than I could what the book is about...

"Cruel Optimism pays a lot of attention to diverse class, racial, sexual, and gendered styles of composure." - page 5

"Cruel Optimism turns toward thinking about the ordinary as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on." - page 8

"Each chapter enters the ordinary from the vantage point of ongoing crisis, and the book as a whole tracks the 'crisis ordinary' from multiple vantage points along many different vectors of privilege." - page 9

"This book thinks about the ordinary as a zone of convergence of many histories, where people manage the incoherence of lives that proceed in the face of threats to the good life they imagine. ... Crisis is not exceptional to history or consciousness but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what's overwhelming." - page 10

I love stories, movies especially, that deal with the ordinary - stories wherein "not much happens". Of course there is always a lot happening. Affect theory is the perfect lens to dissect these types of stories, so the cruel optimism book was very appealing to me. One of the works Berlant analyzes is the book "Two Girls Fat and Thin." That was the only work that I'd heard about, but I haven't read it. Other works analyzed include film and contemporary art.

It is a little depressing to think that what gives us hope and optimism in life is also what oppresses us and keeps us all from succeeding. The book is very academic and it was a bit over my head, but very interesting and important.

Book 34: Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

Book 35: The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

I hear that Truth is the Daughter of Time (Francis Bacon) and that this book is a classic. It is definitely an enjoyable quick read. As an archivist the quote about primary sources especially stuck with me: "The real history is written in forms not meant as history. In Wardrobe accounts, in Privy Purse expenses, in personal letters, in estate books." p. 106

I don't know much about British history, but now I know that Richard III was said in history books to have killed his nephews in a tower, but he probably didn't, it was probably Edward VII.

I've been watching a lot of Game of Thrones recently and Law and Order and this book reminded me of both. I haven't read Game of Thrones, just watched the show, but I've heard it is based on British history around the time period of Richard III. And since the main character in the book, Grant, is a detective there is an emphasis on finding evidence and establishing motive.

Book 36: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow's books are available for free from his website! My husband is a fan and downloaded this book for me and put it on my Kindle and kept bugging me until I read it. It is a fun read and I'm looking forward to reading more by Doctorow. This one is set in the future, so there are some sci-fi fantasy elements. The society no longer runs on money but rather reputation or Whuffie, which I thought was neat. The main character lives and works in Disney World with other people dedicated to keeping the park as it was made, and there are many die hard fans who love the park. People also live a lot longer and if they "die" they can be rebooted based on a backup copy of themselves. And they can "deadhead" through years / centuries if they so chose - basically sleep through it.

Book 37: V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd

Seems like the perfect read around July 4th! I did find it a little confusing to keep track of the characters, and then watched the movie when I was about half way through, which did not really help. But I think it's about how thought control and racism and prejudice suck, and true anarchy (where everyone is free and makes decisions that benefit everyone) is preferable. It was a fun read of a now classic text, with great art throughout.

Book 38: Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa

I lived in Seattle from 2005 to 2010. I was in my 20s and only talked about the WTO protests / chaos with a couple people. They told me that it was a crazy couple days and that tear gas sucks.

The book is a work of fiction based on a historic event. It got me very interested in the protests and parades and I am watching this news special

https://youtu.be/pFamvR9CpYw

and a lot of the coverage sounds very familiar and is repeated in the book. The author got some exact quotes from it and the news. I didn't know that it went on for four days and that there were curfews and then how it all moved up to Capitol Hill.

Overall the book told a good story - got into the mind and motivation of a handful of the protesters. It is suspenseful and keeps moving. There isn't a whole lot of talk about the politics behind it, the news coverage got into it a little more. All of the different groups that went to the parades from around the US, and some comments from local US politicians, former President Clinton, and some of the delegates. In the end there were no casualties, the book doesn't make that clear.

Book 39: The Journey to the East by Hermann Hesse

I picked this off the shelf without knowing anything about it. I thought it was a memoir about Hesse's real experience about traveling to the East. It isn't. So I was sort of confused, and then relieved, when he breaks with the narrative and says that his writing is not going very well. I was thinking, "I didn't want to say anything, but yeah, this story about this trip is kind of boring."

It is a story about how do you know what is true, how appearances can be deceiving, and your life might not be quite what you think it is. It also features archives!! And how difficult it is to write history because everyone has a different point of view about why / how things happen. After he reads through a couple accounts of the journey to the east that other people had written he realizes, "If the memory of this historian was so very confused and inaccurate, although he apparently made the report in all good faith and with the conviction of its complete veracity - what was the value of my own notes? If ten other accounts by other authors were found ... they would presumably all contradict and censure each other. No, our historical efforts were of no use; there was no point in continuing with them and reading them; one could quietly let them be covered with dust in this section of the archives." (p. 115)

I bet after reading this the archivist in the story - Lindhorst - was like "Please don't encourage the stereotype of the dusty archive. I'm here adding things, watching over it, I'm creating metadata, I'll keep it clean."

Book 40: Soundtrack: Short Stories 1989-1996 by Jessica Abel

I wish I had known about and read Abel when I was in high school or in my twenties. She would have been the person I wanted to be and in the scene I wanted to be a part of. She writes about being in her twenties in Chicago, going to bars, going to shows, working but not being able to concentrate on work, and having a lazy day at home and how music is integral to that. She hates TV. There are some reviews that she did for reading events. One was for Camille Paglia, who I'm now sort of interested in reading.

Book 41: The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant by Dan Savage

I found myself tearing up many times while reading this. Savage writes very honestly about the adoption process and the many emotions that perspective parents go through before they become parents. It is a fun read, and I especially enjoyed the descriptions of Portland and Seattle, and the culture of street kids.

Book 42: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Housseini

I loved this book! I now want to read the Kite Runner. This story was about two women, Mariam and Laila, living in Kabul and Herat, Afghanistan from the 1970s into the 2000s. I learned more about the politics of the region through this work of fiction than I have watching the news the past 30 years. That's not saying that I learned a ton, but I got a sense of what life was like living with the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets, and then what happened when the Taliban took over.

I started reading with no knowledge of the story so I was sufficiently manipulated by the twists and turns, both for the worst and then for the better. It does have a happy ending. The warning that hope is dangerous is proved true a few times, but by the end we are led to believe that it is ok to have some hope for the future.

Book 43: Bossypants by Tina Fey

This cover really bothers me, but I like Tina Fey and was interested in reading the book so I got past my dislike of the cover and bought the e-book. It is pretty interesting. Her voice def. comes through and at the end it recommends the audio book that is read by Fey herself. Yep, that seems like the way to go. There are plenty of jokes throughout the book and she keeps it pretty light but also seems honest about some of her life decisions (guys, gays, babies, in-laws) and how she became a success (seems like a combo of hard work and opportunities). When she discusses her work schedule and having a new baby at home I felt so tired for her, she must have a lot of energy.

Book 44: Being Peace by Thích Nhất Hạnh

Thích Nhất Hạnh has written many books. This is a slim volume of 118 pages and I took it to be an intro to Hạnh's work and life. It is mostly about finding peace in the everyday and learning how to deal with irritability and frustration.

Some interesting quotes / parts:

p. 23 "The root word 'budh' means to wake up, to know, to understand. A person who wakes up and understands is called a Buddha."

p. 33 "Sometimes if we don't do anything, we help more than if we do a lot. We call that non-action. It is like the calm person on a small boat in a storm. That person does not have to do much, just to be himself, and the situation can change. That is also an aspect of Dharmakaya: not talking, not teaching, just being."

p. 48-49 story Buddha told of a man not recognizing his son because he believed his son to be dead. Buddha quoted as saying "Sometime, somewhere you take something to be the truth. If you cling to it so much, when the truth comes in person and knocks at your door, you will not open it." Hạnh goes on to say, "Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge. ... The Buddhist was of understanding is always letting go or our views and knowledge in order to transcend. This is the most important teaching. That is why I use the image of water to talk about understanding. Knowledge is solid; it blocks the way of understanding. Water can flow, it can penetrate anything."

p. 53 "Meditation is not an escape from society. Meditation is to equip oneself with the capacity to reintegrate into society, in order for the leaf to nourish the tree."

p. 70 Words for contemporary life. Gatha ("Gathas are short verses that help us practice mindfulness in our daily activities." - http://plumvillage.org/mindfulness-practice/gatha-poems/) for starting the car:

Before starting the car,
I know where I am going.
The car and I are one.
If the car goes fast, I go fast.

p. 82 "The way you speak, the kind of understanding, the kind of language you use should not turn people off."

p. 91 "...if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions. ... Humankind suffers very much from attachment to views. ... In the name of the truth, we kill each other. The world is stuck in that situation."

p. 95 the sixth mindfulness training: "Aware that anger blocks communication and creates suffering, we are determined to take care of the energy of anger when it arises and to recognize and transform the seeds of anger that lie deep in our consciousness. When anger comes up, we are determined not to do or say anything, but to practice mindful breathing or mindful walking and acknowledge, embrace, and look deeply into our anger. We will learn to look with the eyes of compassion at those we think are the cause of our anger."

p. 111 "Understanding is another name for love; love is another name for understanding. ... When you grow a tree, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the tree. You look into the reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the tree. ... Blaming has no effect at all. Never blame, never try to persuade using reason and arguments. They never lead to any positive effect. ... If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change."

Book 45: Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit

This is my first time reading anything by Solnit, and I wasn't sure what to expect. I sort of thought this was a funny feminist piece, but it's really a collection of essays with feminism at their core. I was pleased to learn that Solnit is an art historian and my favorite essay in the book was "Grandmother Spider" featuring the work of Ana Teresa Fernandez.



Some quotes from that chapter:

"Here, in this painting by Ana Teresa Fernandez, a woman both exists and is obliterated." location 547

"...obliteration keeps showing up. I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it. She just discovered that herself did not exist, but her brothers did. Her mother did not exist, and nor did her father's mother. r her mother's father. There were no grandmothers. Fathers have sons and grandsons and so the lineage goes, with the name passed on..." location 549

"Her family is from India, but this version of lineage is familiar to those of us in the West from the Bible where long lists of begats link fathers and sons. ... The Tree of Jesse - a sort of totem pole of Jesus' patrilineage as given in Matthew - was represented in stained glass and other medieval art and is said to be the ancestor of the family tree." location 553

"Thus coherence - of patriarchy, of ancestry, of narrative - is made by erasure and exclusion." location 557

"Go back more generations and hundred, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning. I used to see it in art history all the time, when we were told that Picasso begat Pollack and Pollack begat Warhol and so it went, as though artists were influenced only by other artists. ... I remember a contemporary artist who was more polite but as upset as Irwin when she was saddled with a catalogue essay that gave her a paternalistic pedigree, claiming she was straight out of Kurt Schwitters and John Heartfield. She knew she came out of hands-on work, out of weaving and all the practical acts of making, out of cumulative gestures that had fascinated her since bricklayers came to her home when she was a child." location563

"Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life. Those excluded influences I call the grandmothers." location 563

Book 46: College Composition and Communication, vol. 67, no. 4, June 2016 edited by Jonathan Alexander

This is a journal, but what is a journal if not basically a book of essays?

Book 47: Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct by P. M. Forni

Book 48: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu

Book 49: Sunny Side Up by Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm

This is a cute graphic novel for a younger audience that focuses on the summer vacation of a young girl, Sunny. She is looking forward to spending summer vacation with her family, she even has a friend that will be joining them, but her older brother is going through some substance abuse issues and instead of the family beach vacation, she is shipped off to Florida to stay with her grandpa. He lives in a 55+ community and seems nice enough. Sunny is very lonely until she meets another kid that she can hang out with. He introduces her to superhero comic books, which she becomes engrossed in.

It was a nice short read - it took about an hour. I'll be trying to read more like this to bolster my numbers as I head into the next few months :)

Book 50: Invisible man, got the whole world watching: a young black man's education by Mychal Denzel Smith

Book 51: Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude M. Steele

This book was about psychology studies that were done to determine how much stereotype threat and identity contingencies affect us everyday. A very interesting topic, but the book is a little too technical for the light(er) reading I was hoping for. It goes into a lot of detail about how each study was conducted, when really I’m just interested in the results. One of the results was that students who study and socialize together are more likely to get better grades — pointing to why many African-American students do poorly in higher education — they often study alone and feel isolated instead of say their Asian counterparts who are more likely to blur the lines of studying and socialization and will divide up the work and learn from each other.

Steele also talks about the importance of critical mass — when “there are enough minorities in a setting, like a school or a workplace, that individual minorities no longer feel uncomfortable there because they are minorities … they no longer feel an interfering level of identity threat.” I think this is really important for people to keep in mind when issues of diversity and inclusion come up at the workplace.

The book got me thinking a lot about my own gender identity. There were a couple times while reading that I felt that Steele was taking a very male perspective — which of course he was — but it was still irksome. One example included a study involving 3 people in a doctor’s office waiting room. I did not assume all these people were men, but Steele did, and that meant a different reading of the situation. Men talking about “sensitive” issues differs immensely from how women would. He commented directly on how “Americans are wary about focusing on identity” and how we live “in a society leery of identity.” The fact that we all have multi-faceted identities and we should recognize that about ourselves and others can only make us more empathetic beings.

Book 52: The Girls by Emma Cline

Reading The Girls was like being stuck inside a sad, insecure, boy obsessed, 14 year old girl's head for the better part of one summer.

"So much of desire, at that age, was a willful act. Trying so hard to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love. We spoke of our desperate need for them with rote and familiar words, like we were reading lines from a play. Later I would see this: how impersonal and grasping our love was, pinging around the universe, hoping for a host to give form to our wishes." p. 43

"I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board." p. 277

And parts of it seemed familiar, but other parts were just so depressing. Even when we see the main character as a grown woman she is fragile and lonely.

"Living alone was frightening in that way. No one to police the spill of yourself, the ways you betrayed your primitive desires. Like a cocoon built around you, made of your own naked proclivities and never tidied into the patterns of actual human life." p. 16

"I'd recede in their minds - the middle-aged woman in a forgotten house - just a mental footnote getting smaller and smaller as their real life took over. I hadn't realized until then how lonely I was." p. 128

I never really liked the main character, but I appreciated her honesty and it was an engaging book. I did like the writing style a lot. Most of the sentences were fragments that really captured the mood of California in the 1960s and what a young depressed girl's motivation to join a cult / dirty commune would be (or so I imagine). There are some murders that happen but not until almost the very end. Really it was the self-loathing of being a woman that stuck with me.

Book 53: The Secret Life of Lobsters: How Fishermen and Scientists Are Unraveling the Mysteries of Our Favorite Crustacean by Trevor Corson

This books spends a lot of time documenting the work of scientists trying to figure out the sex life of lobsters. Who knew it was such a mystery? But figuring out when the animals molt, how they attract mates, and where they raise their young are major questions that the book goes into. The book follows scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod and lobstermen and scientists working up in the islands in Maine.

Molting: "The lobster must rip out the lining of its throat, stomach, and anus before it is free of the old shell. Some die trying." p. 36

Molting and mating: "The basic reproductive cycle of the American lobster begins when the female sheds her old shell. This arrangement gives the female time between molts to mate, lay her eggs, and carry the eggs until they hatch before she sheds her shell again - a schedule made necessary by the fact that the eggs are attached to the shell and would be lost during a shed." p. 43

Mating: Lobsters do some weird things when they mate. For one they pee at each other and "the American lobster urinates not from some posterior region of its body, but directly out the front of its face." p. 196 And the pee changes a fighting male lobster into a docile love making lobster. "He would stand on tiptoe and pulse his swimmerets, drawing her urine in and fanning it appreciatively about the boudoir." p. 199 The book goes into a lot of detail of how lobsters mate, which was surprisingly interesting and weird.

Hatching: "When lobster hatching season begins, usually between mid-June and early July, large numbers of females carrying fully developed eggs undergo abrupt contractions of their tail muscles during the night. Over the course of a week or so, these nocturnal contractions shake each lobster's thousand of embryos free. The embryos are soft and round when they break through the outer seal of the egg, but within a few minutes they assume the shape of larvae, pointy-tailed and shrimplike." "A first-stage lobster larva can detect the gravitational pull of the earth and swims upward and away from the bottom, beating its paddlelike appendages furiously. It can also detect light, and during the day it swims toward the sun. These instinctive behaviors deliver the larva to the surface, where it comes within reach of the wind. The larva slides along with the topmost layer of water, skimming the sea with the breeze." p. 241 I of course pictured all of this as if I was watching a Finding Nemo type animated children's movie.

On a different note I learned about a MIT connection where scientists were making RoboLobsters for military reasons, "...a beachhead assault that would begin with thousands of biomimetic lobsters dropped offshore from low-flying aircraft. Clambering over rocks and sniffing their way through currents toward shore, the lobster robots would search out mines and blow themselves up on command."

Through the book you also learn a bit about life on Little Cranberry island in Maine, where fishermen have been catching lobsters for hundreds of years. Also how the fishermen keep the population of lobsters from disappearing by releasing smaller ones back and cutting notches in females that should go back to the ocean. There is also much written about scientists and the government trying to get involved in creating policies that were also meant to protect lobster populations, but often were done without the approval of the fishermen.

Book 54: The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld

Book 55: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

I wanted to read this after reading Mychal Denzel Smith's Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching since he refers to Baldwin as an influence, and because I'd never read anything by Baldwin before. Most of the books I've read by African-American authors were in or for high school and included some Toni Morrison books, Invisible Man, A Raisin in the Sun, and Native Son. This book by Baldwin explores some of those titles in the first part. I found this part to be a little dull. The rest of the book though goes into his personal experiences in America and Europe and are much more interesting. Here are a few quotes.

"I want to be an honest man and a good writer." p. 10

"It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear." p. 25

"Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our own dehumanization of ourselves: the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his." p. 26

"The American image of the Negro lives also in the Negro's heart; and when he has surrendered to this image life has no other possible reality." p. 38

"The entire universe is then peopled only with his enemies, who are not only white men armed with rope and rifle, but his own far-flung and contemptible kinsmen. Their blackness is his degradation and it is their stupid and passive endurance which makes his end inevitable." p. 39

"Our good will, from which we yet expect such power to transform us, is thin, passionless, strident: its roots, examined, lead us back to our forebears, whose assumption it was that the black man, to become truly human and acceptable, must first become like us. This assumption once accepted, the Negro in American can only acquiesce in the obliteration of his own personality, the distortion and debasement of his own experience, surrendering to those forces which reduce the person to anonymity and which make themselves manifest daily all over the darkening world." p. 46

"I can conceive of no Negro native to this country who has not, by the age of puberty, been irreparably scarred by the conditions of his life. All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive." p. 74

"There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood - one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die." p. 96

"They face each other, the Negro and the African, over a gulf of three hundred years - an alienation too vast to be conquered in an evening's good-will, too heavy and too double-edged ever to be trapped in speech. This alienation causes the Negro to recognize that he is a hybrid. Not a physical hybrid merely: in every aspect of his living he betrays the memory of the auction block and the impact of the happy ending." p. 124

"The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history." p. 169

"At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself." p. 176

"The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again." p. 179

Book 56: The Lost Boy Greg Ruth

This graphic novel for young adults features two kids trying to figure out the mystery of a lost boy. The boy had ended up in a secret land in the woods and turned into a monster. But through the power of kindness the two kids are able to convert him back into a boy. He stays in the woods to help rebuild all that he has destroyed. It sets up an opening for further stories.

Book 57: Dan Graham Rock My Religion By Kodwo Eshun

Book 58: The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant

Book 59: Ayiti by Roxane Gay

Book 60: Cardboard by Doug TenNapel

Book 61: Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness by Nathaniel Tkacz

Book 62: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance

Book 63: The Fifth Petal by Brunonia Barry

I picked up this book at a library conference where I heard the author speak about Salem, MA and read from the book. I was very interested in it after hearing her read. It is set it Salem so that is my main motivation for reading it. I knew little about Salem before I moved there almost 2 years ago, but I quickly realized that it is a great city to live in. It is super walkable, on the ocean, and there are plenty of nice shops and restaurants.

Barry's book is set in Salem and does have to do with the Salem witch trials, but it's mostly set in 2014-2015. Because of it's setting I enjoyed it much more than I maybe would have otherwise. It is sort of a mystery, but the importance of the mystery went in and out throughout the story. It had a very cinematic feel to it. The most pleasant and romantic part of it is set in caves in Italy that I would love to see portrayed on film. Much of the rest of it is set in a mansion on the ocean in Beverly - so also would be a good setting for film.

Book 64: Crowdsourcing (MIT Press Essential Knowledge) by Daren C. Brabham

Book 65: Kiki de Montparnasse by Catel & Bocquet

Book 66: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Book 67: Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

Book 68: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Book 69: Jeff Koons One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank by Michael Archer

Book 70: The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch

Book 71: How to Architect by Doug Patt

Book 72: The Adventures of Tony Millionaire's Sock Monkey by Tony Millionaire

Book 73: The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

Wouldn't it be nice if 2017 was a year of peace and goodwill.
A year where people set aside their religious and racial differences.
A year where intolerance is given short shrift.
A year where hatred is replaced by, at the very least, respect.
A year where those in need are not looked upon as a burden but as a blessing.
A year where the commonality of man and woman rises up against those who would seek to subvert and divide.
A year without bombs, or shootings, or beheadings, or rape, or abuse, or spite.

2017.

Festive Greetings and a few wishes from Malaysia!

Book 74: Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems by Alice Walker

Book 75: The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Woot!!! So happy to have read 75 books this year! Just barely made it!

Congrats!

Congratulations on your 75!

Looking forward to your continued company in 2017.
Happy New Year!

Thanks for the congrats!! I'm going to keep track of articles read and books read in 2017 over in the Read it, Track it! Group - https://www.librarything.com/topic/244462

-Greta