I keep a running list of the books that I read all the way through–as opposed to read selectively in, which is how I approach most works of academic history, critical theory, and theology. For a few years I posted this list to my blog with commentary on some of the books. I fell away from that for awhile but am now getting back to it. I will be posting a list of all of the books I read over the last decade in the next week or so as well.
In 2019 I a read a bit in French because I was in France for awhile. I hope to read a bit of Spanish and French for pleasure in 2020 as well–though a month into the year I haven’t really gotten to either of them. My French reading level isn’t great and while I read a good portion of Pascale Tournier’s book “Le vieux monde est de retour, Enquête sur les nouveaux conservateurs,” I didn’t complete it. I did read several volumes of the delightful early French readers series Quelle Historie. They’re almost exactly at the level of French I can read without a dictionary.
In terms of books in English, the best novel I read was a translation of Soseki Natsume’s “I Am A Cat.” It is an early twentieth-century classic about the life of a cat who lives in the house of a somewhat eccentric minor Japanese scholar. The cat is witty and absurd and various passages find him doing such things as “worshipping my honored Great Tail Gracious Deity” and meditating on the ways cats “trod the clouds” because “[c]at’s paws are as if they do not exist.
Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” is an important work about the rise of dictator in the 1930s United States and the eventually successful efforts to overturn his rule. It isn’t great literature but its heroes are a Unitarian and a Universalist and it has some useful insights into the possibilities and limitations of liberal religious resistance to fascism.
Like Lewis’s book, much of what I read was for my Minns lectures. Daniel Walker Howe’s “The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861” and Juan Floyd-Thomas’s “The Origins of Black Humanism in America: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Harlem Unitarian Church” deserve special mention for their important work on Unitarian intellectual history. If you have heard me preach in the last twelve months these two works have been lurking somewhere in the background.
I didn’t read anything particularly bad in the 2019 but, as I discuss at length in my third Minns lecture, I was pretty disturbed by Timothy Synder’s complete elision of the US’s history of white supremacy in his “On Tyranny” and his attacks on anarchists and antifascists in “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.” For indigenous nations and many people of color the United States has been a totalitarian society since its inception. To pretend otherwise, as Synder does in his widely read “On Tyranny,” is exceptionally dangerous at a moment when some white people are waking up to the reality that they may soon be living in a totalitarian society. If we–and the we I am writing as here are what I might call white people of good hearts–are going to resist the rise of totalitarianism then we had better make allies with indigenous nations and people of color. They have, in many cases, successfully resisted this country’s totalitarianism for generations. We will be more powerful together and we–again writing for the plural white people of good heart–have much to learn from other resistance movements.
Synder’s scorn for antifascism and anarchism is ahistorical nonsense–his passages drawing equivalences between anarchism and fascism are particularly problematic. Here’s what I said on the subject in my Minns lectures:
Such equivalences marginalize the rich critical resources these traditions offer—[Hannah] Arendt herself was enamored with the anarchist celebration of “the council system” and critique of bureaucracy as a form “tyranny without a tyrant.” And they forget, as events in Charlottesville should remind us, anarchists and other antifascists have have played crucial, though often overlooked, roles in trying to contain various forms of totalitarianism. It was the anarchists in Spain who initiated the fight against the fascist coup to overthrow the Republican government. It was a Spanish anarchist tank division, serving the French Foreign Legion, which first entered Paris to liberate it from the Nazis. And today, anarchists in Rojava, the historically Kurdish area of Syria, have played a critical role in the defeat of the Islamic State.
That aside, when Synder isn’t attacking anarchists or fetishizing the state (as he does in a number of passages in both books) his work offers insight into the nature of totalitarianism, the machinery of death, and how both might be resisted. I certainly learned a great deal about the Holocaust from him and the parallels he draws between 1930s Germany and our present moment are important. However, Hannah Arendt remains by far the most useful critic of totalitarianism and fascism. And if you really want to understand the antecedents to our historical moment I suggest you read her “The Origins of Totalitarianism” instead (reading it alongside W. E. B. DuBois’s “The Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880” and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s “The Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States” will really give you a complete sense of how the United States has gotten to the point it has).
So, after all of that, here’s my list for 2019:
Books Read in 2019
It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami
An Illustrated Guide to Japanese Cooking and Annual Events, Hattori Yukio
How to Talk to Girls at Parties, Neil Gaiman
The Professor’s Daughter, Joann Sfar
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains, Neil Gaiman
Paper Girls Deluxe Edition Volume 1, Brian Vaughan
Hope without Optimism, Terry Eagleton
I Am A Cat, Soseki Natsume
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
Anxious Church, Anxious People: How to Lead Change in an Age of Anxiety, Jack Shitama
Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World, Otis Moss III
The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861, Daniel Walker Howe
The Origins of Black Humanism in America: Reverend Ethelred Brown and the Harlem Unitarian Church, Juan Floyd-Thomas
Proverbs
The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation, Benjamin Moffit
Elite: Uncovering Classism in Unitarian Universalist History, Mark Harris
Catstronauts: Mission Moon, Drew Brockington
The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians, Anthony Wallace
English Traits, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511-1553, Roland Bainton
Power in the Pulpit: How America’s Most Effective Black Preachers Prepare Their Sermons, ed. Cleophus LaRue
John Calhoun and the Price of Union, John Niven
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Margaret Fuller
Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, Hannah Arendt
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Timothy Snyder
The Complete K Chronicles, Keith Knight
On Tyranny, Timothy Synder
F Minus, Tony Carrillo
Assembly, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
The Stainless Steel Rat for President, Harry Harrison
Job
The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie
Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin
Quelle Historie: Angela Davis
Quelle Historie: Voltaire
No Name in the Street, James Baldwin
Quelle Historie: Histoire de France
Quelle Historie: La Socrellerie
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, Naomi Klein
Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies, ed. Quincy Saul
Ruth
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, George R. R. Martin
More Power in the Pulpit, ed. Cleophus LaRue
Lamentations
Quelle Historie: Anne de Bretagne
Deathworld I, Harry Harrison
Ecclesiastes
Esther
The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, updated edition, Martha Nussbaum
Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, trans. Steven Carter
The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava, Thomas Schmidinger
Daniel
The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas
The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, Linda Gordon
Soft Science, Franny Choi
Deathworld II, Harry Harrison
Ezra
The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich
Disoriental, Negar Djavadi
Black Rights/White Wrongs, Charles Mills
American Prophets: Seven Religious Radicals & Their Struggle for Social and Political Justice, Albert Raboteau
Nehemiah
Fall or Dodge in Hell, Neal Stephenson
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
