Last year I managed 60 books, a slight increase from last year. I am slowly clawing my way back to my pre-pandemic levels of reading but I am still not quite there yet. As I reflected last year, recovering from the pandemic and rebuilding daily routines is a longterm project. It has only been within the last eighteen months that the kids in my house have really started to live the lives of “normal” high school students and go out and socialize with their friends, go on sleepovers, or generally do the sorts of things that teenagers have historically done.
As is always the case, much of my reading was driven by work. Some of it was related to the “Lives of the Spirit” and “Future Visions, Future Selves” programs we did at First Unitarian Universalist. Other reading was connected to my books on populism. Both should finally be forthcoming in the next eighteen months. One is a slight revision of my 2019 Minns lectures American Populism and Unitarian Universalism. The other is titled The Political Theologies of Populism: the Religious Worlds of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Finishing up both required a bit of reading on fascism and dipping into the fascism debate that’s been going on about Trump and his allies for the last several years. After reading Roger Griffin I remain convinced that labeling what is happening in the United States as fascism is unhelpful. Fascism is best understood as a particular historical phenomena rather than a universal style. To label it a style evacuates both it and the given set of actors being labelled as fascist of their very specific content. I continue to believe, as I argued in my third Minns lecture, that the current Republican Party is better understood as a Neo-Confederate entity than as a fascist one. I’ll save the nuances of my argument and why this is important for my two forthcoming books.
I didn’t read anything particularly terrible. Barbara Brown Taylor’s Always a Guest: Speaking of Faith from Home was sort of flat and reeked of unexamined class privilege and Whiteness. Given the revelations of Neil Gaiman’s sexual predation Norse Mythology is the last work of his that I will be reading. On a more positive note, I greatly enjoyed the Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante, and Louise Erdrich novels I read. Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red is an amazingly complex work that probes questions about the nature of literature, art, and memory. It won him a Noble Prize and surely qualifies as one of the world’s great works of literature. I wouldn’t be surprised if I return to it sometime.
Anyway, here’s my list:
Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, Noam Chomsky
Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative, Alasdair McIntyre
The Miracle of Mindfulness, trans. Mobi Ho, Thich Nhat Hanh
Nubes Negras: Una historia del pistolerismo en la Barcelona de 1920, Antonio Raya Rosas
The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante
The Boys, Omnibus Vol. 4, Garth Ennis
The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, ed. Maegan Parker Brooks and David Houck
Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, Katie Clifford Larson
Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism, Tracey E. Hucks
The Letter of Paul to the Ephesians
Lakota Woman, Mary Crow Bird
Fascism, A Very Short Introduction, Kevin Passmore
The Letter of Paul to the Philippians
The Hurting Kind, Ada Limón
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley
The Letter of Paul to the Colossians
The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, Grace Lee Boggs with Scott Kurashige
Facing Reality, C. L. R. James and Grace C. Lee (Grace Lee Boggs)
The First Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx
Love & Death: My Journey Through the Valley of the Shadow, Forrest Church
The Second Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians
Norse Mythology, Neil Gaiman
Baudolino, Umberto Eco
The English Presbyterians: From Elizabethan Puritanism to Modern Unitarianism, C. Gordon Bolam, Jeremy Goring, H. L. Short, Roger Thomas
My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk
The Days of Abandonment, Elena Ferrante,
Fascism: A Quick Immersion, Roger Griffin
Labor in America: A History, Ninth Edition, Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin
The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson
The First Letter of Paul to Timothy
A World After Liberalism: Five Thinkers Who Inspired the Radical Right, Matthew Rose
The Second Letter of Paul to Timothy
The Netanyuhus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, Joshua Cohen
Muscle Memory, Jenny Liou
Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive-Era Philadelphia, Peter Cole
Saga, Vol. 11, Brian Vaughan
Always a Guest: Speaking of Faith from Home, Barbara Brown Taylor
The Letter of Paul to Titus
The Letter of Paul to Philemon
The Boys, Omnibus, Vol. 5, Garth Ennis
The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow
Jean Jaurès
The Boys, Omnibus, Vol. 6, Garth Ennis
A Letter to Hebrews
Intermezzo, Sally Rooney
Between Earth and Empire: from the Necrocene to the Beloved Community, John Clark
A Letter of James
Survival Takes a Wild Imagination: Poems, Fariha Róisín
When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religions, Laura E. Anderson
The First Letter of Peter
i put a Spell on you: the autobiography of Nina Simone, Nina Simone with Stephen Cleary
The Night Before Christmas, Clement Clarke Moore
Father Christmas, Raymond Briggs
Father Christmas Goes on Holiday, Raymond Briggs
Montress: The Possessed, Vol. 9, Marjorie Liu
talking to the dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory Among Gullah/Geechee Women, LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant
Orbital: A Novel, Samantha Harvey
Among Us Cats, W. E. Hill
My favorite thing about FUU is to have such a committed senior minister. I perceive you as committed to social justice, social change and committed to learning and sharing what you have learned. Thank you.
Ps. The title has a typo. It has the wrong year.
Thanks for the kind words and for pointing out the typo! I have corrected it.