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Books of 2012

Submitted by alycia on Mon, 12/31/2012 - 23:16


Here's my list of all the books I read this year, with my favorites starred. I read more books total than I ever have before, a full 60!

I returned to some childhood fiction this year but I also took a theory class which was some of the toughest.reading.ever. It was kind of a bipolar reading year.

  1. *Moby-Dick or the Whale/Herman Melville
  2. The Marriage Plot/Jeffrey Eugenides
  3. 1Q84/Haruki Murakami
  4. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology and the Future of the Academy/Kathleen Fitzpatrick
  5. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History/Franco Moretti
  6. In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction/Lee Gutkind
  7. Krik? Krak!/Edwidge Danticat
  8. The Dew Breaker/Edwidge Danticat
  9. Americus/M. K. Reed
  10. Zone One/Colson Whitehead
  11. Brave New World/Aldous Huxley
  12. Watchmen/Alan Moore
  13. The Big Sleep/Raymond Chandler
  14. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks/Rebecca Skloot
  15. Are You My Mother?/Alison Bechdel
  16. The Hobbit/J.R.R. Tolkien
  17. The Broom of the System/David Foster Wallace
  18. Debates in the Digital Humanities/Matthew K. Gold
  19. Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study/Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
  20. *Hark! A Vagrant/Kate Beaton
  21. The Press and the American Revolution/Bernard Bailyn
  22. *Just Kids/Patti Smith
  23. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?/Mindy Kaling
  24. Death Wish/Christopher Sorrentino
  25. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For/Alison Bechdel
  26. Woolgathering/Patti Smith
  27. *Monsters/Ken Dahl
  28. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic/Linda Badley
  29. The History of Street Literature/Leslie Shepard
  30. Habermas: A Very Short Introduction/Gordon Finlayson
  31. Little House in the Big Woods/Laura Ingalls Wilder
  32. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution/Bernard Bailyn
  33. Little House on the Prairie Laura/Ingalls Wilder
  34. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture/Anna Poletti
  35. On the Banks of Plum Creek/Laura Ingalls Wilder
  36. The Long Winter/Laura Ingalls Wilder
  37. Little Town on the Prairie/Laura Ingalls Wilder
  38. These Happy Golden Years/Laura Ingalls Wilder
  39. The First Four Years/Laura Ingalls Wilder
  40. Mythologies/Roland Barthes
  41. S/Z/Roland Barthes
  42. *The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self/Alice Miller
  43. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture/Stephen Duncombe
  44. On Deconstruction/Jonathan Culler
  45. Bossypants/Tina Fey
  46. Given Time: Counterfeit Money/Jacques Derrida
  47. Open City/Teju Cole
  48. A Wizard of Earthsea/Ursula LeGuin
  49. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity/Judith Butler
  50. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian/Sherman Alexie
  51. War Dances/Sherman Alexie
  52. Matilda/Roald Dahl
  53. Baudrillard: A Graphic Guide/Chris Horrocks
  54. The Year of Magical Thinking/Joan Didion
  55. *Simulacra and Simulation/Jean Baudrillard
  56. The Best American Comics 2012/Francoise Mouly
  57. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots/Deborah Feldman
  58. Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me/Ellen Forney
  59. Ten Little Indians/Sherman Alexie
  60. Read This! Handpicked Favorites from America's Indie Bookstores

Image by Natalia Osiatynska / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

Nice list!

Submitted by Maura (not verified) on Tue, 01/01/2013 - 17:34.

This is impressive, Alycia! Lots here that I'm going to add to my toread list, too.

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Daily Reading Log

May 23, 2013

  • 11 years. RIP.

May 22, 2013

May 12, 2013

  • Lots of reading, amidst the cracks of life as it goes, changes. Halfway through E. Biella Coleman's Coding Freedom, started David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and wanted to start, but probably have to wait until after the thesis, bell hooks' Where We Stand: Class Matters.

April 24, 2013

  • A piece in the New Yorker about Noah Baumbach, a person whose work I have a lot of sympathy for somehow, but in this piece he sounds like he wants to be a vampire sucking the energy off of his girlfriend's ideas. Is that a great way to have a relationship, or a terrible way?
  • I've also been reading Living Anarchy on the train, while very tired lately.

April 23, 2013

  • Zines from the Brooklyn Zine Fest: Alex #4 and #5, Deafula #5, and Indulgence #11.

April 22, 2013

  • Jeppesen, Sandra. "Becoming Anarchist: The Function of Anarchist Literature." Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2011.2
  • Imhorst, Christian. "Anarchy and Source Code - What does the Free Software Movement have to do with Anarchism?"

April 19, 2013

  • Going to try to finish In Praise of Copying today. This book has pleasantly surprised me in many ways and I'm greatly enjoying it. Highly recommended if you would like to think more deeply about copying (and its mimetic, ever-present nature) on a philosophical level.
    Many of the books about intellectual property I've looked at recently discuss the absurdities of various IP situations, or examine IP clashes via specific (often outrageous) legal cases. This book, on the other hand, talks more about the practices and traditions of copying, collaging or appropriating through many different perspectives, going back to the work of philosophers who are long dead but also looking for the mimetic in religious practices, theory, art, and even inside the human body. Totally fascinating.
  • Also this article on drone, also by Boon.

April 11, 2013

  • More Moonwalking with Einstein, enjoying the history of the book (as related to memory) section.

April 10, 2013

  • Inching my way through Moonwalking with Einstein, which I've only read over BC lunches in the office.
  • Insomnia had me reading Fosterhood in NYC

April 9, 2013

  • About half of In Praise of Copying by Boon, which I am enjoying.

April 8, 2013

  • Read the introduction to Common as Air by Hyde.
  • Last week watched the documentary, Kind Hearted Woman. Among many powerful scenes, was struck by those where Robin took family to go walking through the U of M, and how looking at the university and thinking about what it offered was a powerful activity for them.

April 1, 2013

  • While fighting some kind of bug finished Please Kill Me and ripping through Cometbus Omnibus and Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change

March 23, 2013

  • Been reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Not sure if it will help the thesis, but it's a good pick up/put down at random book.
  • Also still moving very slowly through Moonwalking with Einstein, my official over-lunch-at-work book of the moment.

March 13, 2013

  • Still finishing up Getting Things Done
  • Thesis reading: Living Anarchy by Jeff Shantz
  • Democracy Now! and WBAI, who could sincerely use your help.

March 9, 2013

  • Been reading Getting Things Done and trying to get things done.
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