Winter 2011-2012 (H):
The Art of Loving – Erich Fromm
True Love – Thich Nhat Hanh
The Road Less Traveled – M. Scott Peck
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life – Marshall B. Rosenberg
Fall 2011 (H):
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color – edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga
Spring & Summer 2011 (H):
The Help – Kathryn Stockett
Come to Me – Amy Bloom
Borderlands/ La Frontera – Gloria Anzaldua
Good Night, Mr. Tom -Michelle Magorian
Some of Us Did Not Die – June Jordan
Sassafras, Cyprus, and Indigo – Ntozake Shange
remembered rapture – bell hooks
A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – Audre Lorde
February 2011 (H):
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 – Susan Sontag, ed. David Rieff
Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke, translated M.D. Herter Norton
December 2010/January 2011 (H):
Many Waters – Madeleine L’Engle
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neal Hurston
The Meaning of Marxism – Paul D’Amato
Class Matters - bell hooks
Upheavels of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotion – Martha Nussbaum
August 2010 (H):
Killing Rage: Ending Racism – bell hooks
July 2010 (H):
Communion – bell hooks
Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice - John Stoltenberg
Race Matters – Cornell West
Young Wives’ Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership – edited by Jill Corral & Lisa Meyer-Jervis
June 2010 (H):
The Post-Birthday World – Lionel Shriver
The Myth of You and Me – Leah Stewart
All About Love – bell hooks
The Diaries of Anais Nin: Volume 4
May 2010 (H):
A Path With Heart – Jack Kornfield
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations – bell hooks
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love - bell hooks
The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume 3
How We Decide - Jonah Lehrer
April 2010 (H):
Bone Black – bell hooks
towards a new psychology of women – Judith Baker Miller
Living by the Word – Alice Walker
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens – Alice Walker
Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery – bell hooks
The Diaries of Anais Nin: Volume 1
The Diaries of Anais Nin: Volume 2
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria – Beverly Tatum
In a Different Voice - Carol Gilligan
February/ March 2010 (H):
Body of Work: Meditations of Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab – Christine Montross
I Am Your Sister – Audre Lorde
Autobiography of a Face - Lucy Greely
Seeing the Crab – Christina Middlebrook
This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology – Christina Robb
I and Thou – Martin Buber
Death Be Not Proud – John Gunther
December 2009/ January 2010 (H):
The Wisdom of No Escape – Pema Chodron
The Wise Heart – Jack Kornfield
Destructive Emotions - Daniel Goleman
Perfect Match – Jodi Picoult
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
Seven Shades of Ambiguity – Elliot Perlman
Best Buddhist Writing 2006
Best Buddhist Writing 2009
The IHOP Papers
My Lonely, Miserable, Lesbian Pregnancy
Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For
Split-level Dykes to Watch Out For
Having Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person
Bearing Witness – Bernie Glassman
Adam: God’s Beloved – Henri Nouwen
The Places That Scare You – Pema Chodron
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
The Cancer Journals – Audre Lorde
Sister, Outsider – Audre Lorde
Anything You Love Can Be Saved – Alice Walker
Jean Vanier: Essential Writings – Chris Brown
November 2009 (H):
Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart – Mark Epstein
Escaping the Self - Roy Baumeister
Meadowlands – Louise Gluck
Ararat - Louise Gluck
The Black Unicorn – Audre Lorde
Radical Acceptance – Tara Brach
Trauma and Recovery – Judith Herman
October 2009 (H):
Listening to Prozac – Peter Kramer – I saw him speak a couple times at Brown, and it’s refreshing to hear someone speak about mood problems without the bullshit romanticism with which painul realities are obscured. A well-written and scary look at the neurobiology and psychology of various emotional and affective difficulties.
How Doctors Think – Jerome Groopman – An interesting look at how innate biases in human thinking lead to (poor) medical decision making, and some suggestions about how to counteract these tendencies. A more focused guide of cognitive bases and strategies to counteract them would be a good follow-up.
The Sickness unto Death – Soren Kierkegaard
Be Here Now - Richard Alpert – beautiful!
Twilight of the Idols – Friedrich Nietzsche
Running With Scissors – Augusten Burroughs
September 2009 (H):
I, etcetera – Susan Sontag
Fear and Trembling – Soren Kierkegaard
Loving-Kindness – Sharon Salzberg – A book on Buddhist ideas and practices of love, with an emphasis on metta (loving-kindness) and self-healing.
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion – Rereading this account, a couple things strike me: the cognitive retardation that grief can cause, and how literary she is. Lines from books and poems go through her head incessantly, as they sometimes do in mine. It’s an excellent account, though still, nothing gets up there with A Grief Observed. But why pick?
August 2009 (H):
New and Selected Poems – Mary Oliver
The Cinnamon Peeler -Michale Ondaatje
Good Poems – Garrison Keillor
20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair – Pablo Neruda
July 2009 (H):
Appetites: Why Women Want – Caroline Knapp
Seeing the Crab – Christina Middlebrook (reread) – One of my all-time favorites. Go get yourself a copy.
June 2009 (H):
The Problem of Pain – C.S. Lewis
Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini – stomach turning, worth the read, quiet desperation, an American (but maybe it’s simple modern) inability to feel, love, be intimate. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this book is the main character’s simultaneous desire for and repulsion towards the love object. (omg, do I seriously talk like that? WTF?)
The Four Loves – C. S. Lewis – Well-worth the read, but if you’re looking to meet Jack for the first time, start with A Grief Observed or The Problem of Pain.
Fear of Flying – Erica Jong – 1970′s novel about a woman struggling with her simultaneous and contradictory desires and beliefs: freedom and safety, security and commitment and intimacy and the zipless fuck and endless sex. Or, most basically, the fierce conflict between selfhood and marriage.
Mere Christianity – C. S. Lewis – Not as stunningly written as the aforemention books by Jack, but not much the less a rigorous, intellectual, and practical look at Christianity. (Also: was Jack a kinkster? In this book he talks about what’s wrong with S/M, but in later books he defends it… What were you and H up to, dear?)
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse – Boring for the first 2/3 but the last 1/3 makes it well worth the read.
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July/August 2009 (I):
Very Far Away from Anywhere Else – Ursula K. Le Guin – will it ever be possible to hear the name “Ursula” and not think of the sea witch? Anyway. I’m curious to read The Dispossessed, but this novella is a very sincere and honest way to kill two hours with thoughts of first love.
Carnet de Voyage – Craig Thompson – it’s Craig Thompson’s travel journal from when he did a book-signing tour of Europe and stopped in Morocco to research his next graphic novel. His sense of beauty and his own neuroses is something I love. You should probably read Blankets.
100 Years Of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – someone gave me a copy of this book my senior year of high school, seven years ago. I started reading it last year. I’m down to the last 60 pages so I’m assuming it will be done by August’s end. It’s beautiful, makes me write fables.
Sept. – Nov. 2009 (I)
Copenhagen – Michael Frayn – At Hope’s suggestion. At first I thought the presentational speech was, well… pretentious. But it becomes vital as the story progresses. But it’s 3 people talking for 2 hours, how in the hell did someone decide to make a movie out of it?
Down And Out In Paris And London – George Orwell – Orwell spent some time being completely broke in Paris before coming back to London and being a tramp until some money came in. As can be expected from Orwell, after giving long views through a window into poverty, he’ll sum everything by pointing out how there’s really no reason for this particular lifestyle to exist, and offers solutions to the problems.
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue – Samuel R. Delany – I only read Times Square Blue, which is about porn theaters in New York City before the gentrification of that neighborhood. Times Square Red was… really goddamn academic (impenetrable and pretentious). Blue was wonderful, though.
December/January 2009-10 (I)
A Framework For Understanding Poverty – Ruby K. Payne – Borrowed from the Children’s Museum. Very entry-level but it’s an excellent breakdown of the things most middle-class people don’t understand, not only about poverty but about themselves and about wealth. One of the reasons it’s so hard to move from poverty up into the middle class is because what is “common knowledge” in poverty is useless in middle class life, and vice versa. Moving up is incredibly difficult, but so is moving down. People use different thinking patterns, different language patterns, have different familial structures in all three classes.
Physics For Entertainment, vol. 2 – Yakov Perelman – Blagged here. ‘Nuff said.
Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts – Susan Hayward – If you ever think “I just really want to read 4 pages of critical theory about Blaxploitation movies,” this is the answer. Second edition revised every entry with more feminist theory, new third edition does the same for queer theory. The cineaste’s Harry Potter: pure brain candy.
Spring 2010
Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH – Robert C. O’Brien – Went on a young-adult reading kick.
Hatchet – Gary Paulsen – See above.
The Beach – Alex Garland – A reread of a book I liked a lot in high school. Deep in my job at AmeriCorps, I didn’t have space in my brain for anything more complex than children’s books and books I’d read before.
Summer 2010
The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City – Margaret Morton – A large coffee-table book with many photos and interviews with the Freedom Tunnel community. Homeless men and women who lived in an abandoned stretch of Amtrak tunnel in New York City, one of the few spots of subterranean homelessness where true community emerged.
The Mole People: Life In The Tunnels Beneath New York City – Jennifer Toth – The same, but much thicker, and covering the entire underground population instead of just the Freedom Tunnel. Hard to tell if Toth is more pessimistic than Morton or if Morton idealized her tunnel too much; this book is far bleaker than The Tunnel.
The Botany Of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View Of The World – Michael Pollan – Studying the way plants have coevolved with humans, similar to how they’ve coevolved with bees. As a conduit, Pollan studies the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato.
Sandman – Neil Gaiman – Been meaning to read Sandman for a while, but it seemed such a huge undertaking. Starting leafing through someone’s copy of it during the 48-Hour Film Project (there was a lot of down-time for me, being the editor), and ended up reading two entire volumes. It’s the story of Dream, one of the Endless, who are manifestations of forces in life (the whole family is Death, Dream, Desire, Destruction, Delirium, Despair, and Destiny). Broadly it’s about a man thousands of years set in his ways who learns he needs to change or die.
Fall 2010 (I)
Bonk: The Curious Intersection Of Science And Sex – Mary Roach – You don’t really know how much you don’t know about sex until you read it’s scientific history. Then you know how ignorant all of humanity is on the subject. This (very funny) book will at least tell you what we do know and let you know where the glaring gaps are. It will also tell you the average distance ejaculated semen flies (for 75% of men, no remarkable distance at all; it’s nice to know that, in some areas, I’m in at least the 76 percentile).
A Saucer Of Loneliness: The Complete Stories Of Theodore Sturgeon Vol. VII – Theodore Sturgeon – I’ve been meaning to read Sturgeon for a very long time. The more I read, the more I know that his stories are more impactful as you digest more of his body of work. He was a very clear and honest and humane storyteller, and all his stories about spacemen were rarely about spacemen.
1984: Selected Letters – Samuel R. Delany – A collection of letters (most at least 10 pages in length, and the type is small) that Delany wrote during (and a few preceding and following) 1984, the year I was born, incidentally. The text is has about the same care put into it as his memoir(s). Interesting note so far: AIDS first came to prominence in late ’83. It precedes me, and my whole life I’ve been aware of the danger of STD’s. It’s somewhat staggering to read about the effect that it was having on New York during the first outbreak, as told by a sexually voracious gay man.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat – Oliver Sacks – It’s due back at the library and between the other books I haven’t gotten further than the first three stories. I can already tell I’ll be checking it out again.
Outliers: The Story of Success – Malcolm Gladwell – Probably a book I should have read a while ago. Trying to de-emphasize the importance of individuals; being a success has to do with innate talent, probably more to do with dedication (it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a genius), a hefty chunk to do with creativity (not just intelligence), and absolutely the most to do with opportunity (read: luck). Fortunately, in today’s global culture, I think it’s easier to manufacture opportunity.
For future consumption (I):
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Fun Home – Alison Bechdel
The Beak Of The Finch: A Story Of Evolution In Our Time – Jonathan Weiner
Unequal Childhoods: Race, Class, and Family Life – Annette Lareau
