Books Read In 2014

  1. Breathing Machine, A Memoir of Computers by Leigh Alexander
  2. Clipping Through: One Mad Week In Video Games by Leigh Alexander
  3. And Eternity by Piers Anthony
  4. vN by Madeline Ashby
  5. The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
  6. The Boss by Abigail Barnette
  7. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
  8. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003 by Roberto Bolano
  9. Fetish Sex: A Complete Guide to Sexual Fetishes by Violet Blue
  10. Borges On Writing by Jorge Luis Borges
  11. It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd
  12. The High Druid's Blade: The Defenders of Shannara by Terry Brooks
  13. Witch Wraith: The Dark Legacy of Shannara by Terry Brooks
  14. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino
  15. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
  16. The Divine Comedy by Dante
  17. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  18. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
  19. How To Read A Poem by Terry Eagleton
  20. A Case Of Hysteria by Sigmund Freud
  21. The Fear Of An Illusion by Sigmund Freud
  22. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald
  23. Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry by Clinton Heylin
  24. Never Let Me Go by Kazou Ishiguro
  25. Devilish by Maureen Johnson
  26. Critique Of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
  27. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil
  28. Collected Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay
  29. Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss
  30. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
  31. The Trial And Death Of Socrates by Plato
  32. Rouge Code by Mark Russinovich
  33. Trojan Horse by Mark Russinovich
  34. Zero Day by Mark Russinovich
  35. Dimension Of Miracles by Robert Sheckley
  36. Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser
  37. Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson
  38. Influx by Daniel Suarez
  39. Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves by Jill Walker Rettberg
  40. The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet by Neil Degrasse Tyson
  41. Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil Degrasse Tyson
  42. Conversations With Kurt Vonnegut by Kurt Vonnegut
  43. Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut
  44. Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal by Melanie Warner
  45. A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
  46. Come To Our Show: Punk Show Flyers From DC To Down Under

Books Read In 2013

  1. Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
  2. For Love Of Evil by Piers Anthony
  3. Amulet by Roberto Bolano
  4. Bloodfire Quest by Terry Brooks
  5. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
  6. Homeland by Cory Doctorow
  7. Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow
  8. Falling Man by Don Delillo
  9. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  10. What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Carolyn Maddux
  11. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
  12. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill
  13. And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life by Charles Shields
  14. Freedom by Daniel Suarez
  15. Kill Decision by Daniel Duarez
  16. In Defense of Terror: Liberty or Death in The French Revolution by Sophie Wahnich
  17. The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
  18. A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
  19. Conversations With David Foster Wallace
  20. Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner
  21. Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities Anthology

Books Read 2011

  1. Beowulf & Other English Poems
  2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  3. Roland Barthes by Graham Allen
  4. With A Tangled Skein by Piers Anthony
  5. Collection of Aristophanes’ Plays
  6. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
  7. Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
  8. Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes
  9. Incidents by Roland Barthes
  10. Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes
  11. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
  12. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
  13. High Druid of Shannara: Jarka Ruus by Terry Brooks
  14. High Druid of Shannara: Tanaquil by Terry Brooks
  15. The Path To The Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino
  16. Six Memos For The Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
  17. Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino
  18. The Cambridge Companion To Chaucer
  19. Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag by Stevie Chick
  20. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
  21. Matched by Ally Condie
  22. Context-Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century by Cory Doctorow
  23. Makers by Cory Doctorow
  24. With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow
  25. Ten Plays by Euripides
  26. Discipline & Punish-The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
  27. H.P Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq
  28. Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Invisible Presences by Molly Hoff
  29. The Odyssey by Homer (Butler translation)
  30. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
  31. Basrayatha: The Story Of A City by Muhammad Khudayyir
  32. New York Hardcore 1986-1991: A Time We’ll Remember by David Koenig
  33. Teaching Literature & Language Online (Edited by Ian Lancashire)
  34. Piers Plowman by William Langland
  35. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard
  36. Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism by Constance Markey
  37. Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos by McAlinden
  38. Utopia by Sir Thomas More
  39. Plato-Euthyphro
  40. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
  41. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott
  42. Civil Disobedience & Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau
  43. Look At The Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
  44. Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
  45. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
  46. The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf

Weekly Reader

Here is the last few weekend’s worth of weekend reading…

 

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is dead at 84.

I don’t really know what to say.  The first time I read Vonnegut was when I was fourteen.  A friend told me about Breakfast Of Champions so I went to the local library and borrowed it.

Reading that book broke my brain I think.

So much of what I was thinking, and still am thinking, Vonnegut wrote on those pages.  It is hard to put into words how great reading Vonnegut felt.  A few of my friends were also very interested in him and, despite our later differences, we could always talk about Vonnegut or reference Kilgore Trout together.

As I have said before, it is a pretty troubling thought that someone sixty years my senior is one of the people whom I relate to the most.  Into his eighties Vonnegut’s writing about contemporary issues was frighteningly right on.   When I was reading A Man Without A Country last year it was somewhat comforting, as the world spirals into the void around us, that someone else understood.

Take care, old friend.

 

That's Correct

Yesterday I sat down and read Kurt Vonnegut's latest book A Man Without A Country.  I'd read most of it before; the majority of the book is taken from his writing for In These Times.  However, reading through the book reminded how much I enjoy Vonnegut.  It's probably a pretty sad state of affairs when one of the people I relate to most is sixty years my senior. 

Anyhow, here is an excerpt from the book.