Books Read In 2015

1. The Battle for Justice in Palestine by Ali Abunimah
2. The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi
3. Jennifer Government by Max Barry
4. Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature by Jorge Luis Borges
5. Borges at Eighty: Conversations by Jorge Luis Borges
6. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
7. The Darkling Child: The Defenders of Shannara by Terry Brooks
8. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith Butler
9. Lilith's Brood by Octavia E. Butler
10. Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday by Italo Calvino
11. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
12. You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost): A Memoir by Felicia Day
13. Replay: The History of Video Games by Tristan Donovan
14. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
15. The Peripheral by William Gibson
16. Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant
17. Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema by Boaz Hagin
18. The Odyssey by Homer
19. A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
20. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan
21. Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs
22. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin M. Kruse
23. The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror by Arun Kundnani
24. Passing by Nella Larsen
25. The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
26. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
27. The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the US-Iran Divide by Christopher Petherick
28. The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
29. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 1 by James Roberts
30. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 2 by James Roberts
31. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 3 by James Roberts
32. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 4 by James Roberts
33. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 5 by James Roberts
34. Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye Volume 6 by James Roberts
35. The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made by Greg Sestero
36. The Oxford Shakespeare: Othello: The Moor of Venice (The Oxford Shakespeare) by William Shakespeare
37. The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker
38. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays by Susan Sontag
39. Automate This: How Algorithms Took Over Our Markets, Our Jobs, and the World by Christopher Steiner
40. The Epic Struggle for the Internet of Things by Bruce Sterling
41. Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Neil deGrasse Tyson
42. The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women by Jessica Valenti
43. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Worth Reading Recently

• Haruki Murakami's Passion For Jazz.
• Jenny Trout on 50 Shades Of Grey and BDSM.
• The Millions on Italo Calvino's excellent novel Cosmicomics.
• A new interview with Edward Snowden from The Guardian.
• io9's review of the excellent episode of Adventure Time that Masaaki Yuasa did last month.
• An excerpt from Laurie Penny's new book Unspeakable Things.
• A conversation about Haiti and Dominican Republic between Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz.
• The Millions reviews Murakami's new novel.
• Wallace Shawn's amazing "translation" of "liberal Hollywood!!!!!"'s justification of slaughtering children in Gaza.
• Ugliness, empathy, and Octavia Butler.

Stockton Book Donation

This summer, I was down at Stockton to have lunch with Tom Kinsella. On my way in, I stopped at the library to donate some books I had read in classes while a student from 2001-2006. I thought it was a neat idea and Stockton's librarians were very interested. I would like to do the same at Monmouth someday too when I am back up in that area.

Here is a list of the books I donated:

• The first Electronic Literature Organization collection CD

• Kindred by Octavia Butler (African American Literature)

• The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (From Books To Movies)

• Sexing The Cherry by Jeanette Winterson (Senior Seminar: Postmodernism)

• Acid Free Bits by Nick Montfort

• The Aspern Papers by Henry James (Readers, Writers, and Books)

• The Life Of Pi by Yan Martel (Readers, Writers, and Books)

• City Of Glass by Paul Auster (Senior Seminar: Postmodernism)

• The Nietzsche Anthology (Moral Theories)

• The Iliad (Homer)

• New York Trilogy by Paul Auster (Senior Seminiar: Postmodernism)

• Beloved by Toni Morrison (African American Literature)

• The Odyssey (Homer)

• Another Country by James Baldwin (African American Literature)
  

Octavia Butler

Reading the interview Scott Rettberg did with Octavia Butler from a few years back reminds me that I need to read Parable Of The Talents soon. It’s been sitting in my “to read” pile for about a year, and it is about time that changed.

Really cool comment from Butler during the interview-

Forget talent. If you have it, that’s great. If you don’t, don’t worry. If you think talent is essential, take a look at the best seller list and you’ll change your mind.