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

Weekly Reader

  • Amanda French’s creative use of Ada Lovelace Day to discuss Mary Shelley.  I really like her argument that Shelley was the first science fiction novelist.
  • Having read a lot of John Barth’s essays in the past year, I found Conversational Reading’s post discussing suggestions for reading his fiction to be quite timely.
  • Emily Short on the role of agency in Interactive Fiction.
  • Lauren Elkin discusses the new collection of Susan Sontag’s journals in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation.

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    Oxford English Dictionary Going Online Only

    Via the excellent On Purpose comes word that the OED is going to be an Internet based dictionary after its third printing:

    Biggest development?  The third edition of the 20-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary will also be its last!  After publication of “the first comprehensive and up-to-date edition of the OED in one alphabetical sequence since the original edition of 1928?, the OED will (figuratively) close all 20 of its covers and move on to a bigger and brighter future as an internet-only text.

    A few years ago I linked to a Susan Sontag interview in The Atlantic Monthly where she praised the idea of having the OED on a CD (which is funny considering she bashed electronic literature in a speech before her death).  The CD is quickly becoming an archaic, out of date, method for distribution.  I am glad the OED realizes this and has begun the transition to publishing on the Internet only.  The more accessible it becomes, the better.  I only wish a subscription came without such a steep price.