Books I read for school
Spring 2018
- Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory, by Edward J. Larson
It was okay. Honestly, the more I read about the history of evolution the weirder it feels that it took until the 19th century for it to get properly established, and even then it had a bunch of extra questions that only got answered in the 20th. It’s basically if natural variation of traits, and if reproduction furthers the presence of traits, and if sample biases, then… trait accumulation in populations. To quote Thomas Henry Huxley, “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that”. - A History of Geology, by Gabriel Gohau
I really liked this book. Like, around the time the final was coming up, I started reading to study it, and I just sat there for like four hours reading it. - Epistemic Injustice, by Miranda Fricker
I like this book, but it also bothers me, and now I want to research epistemic injustice. - The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1, by Alan Moore
I liked Watchmen more. This is kind of overrated. - X-MEN LEGACY- Volume 1: Prodigal (Marvel Now), by Simon Spurrier
Same here. Feels overrated. I rarely say the TV show is better, and I don’t think a TV adaptation of this that was more loyal to the source material would be better, but I think the TV show was more enjoyable for me because it was so far away from it. - Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris
Crime and psychological thrillers are not super my thing, but… it’s kind of a classic for a reason. - Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, by Neil Gaiman,
I love this one. Probably one of the best Batman comics I’ve ever read, and definitely better than The Killing Joke. I’m starting to think the reason I liked Watchmen so much was the age at which I read it, every bit of Moore’s work I read now feels kind of… stale. I’ll have to re-read it. - The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
This is fun! It gets kind of tired after a while, though. I liked the premise more than the execution. - The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, by David Glover & Scott McCracken
I actually like this book of essays, which was kind of a surprise.
Summer 2018
I am counting these as books because of their length, though they were actually theses. Also they were just really huge.
- “Piecing the parts: An analysis of narrative strategies and textual elements in microserialized webcomics”, by Gabriel Romaguera
MA thesis, from the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus, 2010 - “To start, continue, and conclude: Foregrounding narrative production in serial fiction publishing”, by Gabriel Romaguera
Dissertation, from the University of Rhode Island, 2017. - “Rethinking Webcomics: Webcomics as a Screen Based Medium.” by Dennis Kogel
MA thesis, from the University of Jyväskylä, 2013. - Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
What more is there to say? Seminal work of comic analysis, basically kickstarted comic research in any meaningful way… I like it.
Fall 2018
- Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, by Hastie and Dawes
This is a very clear book. “We, the authors, have a set of very specific opinions, and will bring them up a lot”. - Digital Mosaic: Media, Power, and Identity in Canada by David Taras
This book starts in a very Old Man Yells At Cloud kind of way, and it slowly morphs into Elderly Citizen Spots Coming Storm. - Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, by Blake Snyder
A little simplistic but also okay? - Screenplay: Writing the Picture, by Rubin U. Russin and William Missouri Downs
It was okay? - Framed by Erin Tolley
This book pissed me off a lot more the second time I read it. I think between this and Why I’m Not Talking To White People About Race, I’ve kind of gotten grumpier about academic understanding or failures of understanding racism.
Total: 18
Books I read for fun
Fiction
Comics included.
- Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, by Jonathan L. Howard.
It’s pretty great. I like it. - The Hero’s Guide To Saving Your Kingdom, by Christopher Healy
I love this book. - The Hero’s Guide to Storming The Castle, by Christopher Healy
I seriously love this book. - The Hero’s Guide to Being An Outlaw, by Christopher Healy
I was so excited when I found out there was a third book! I love this a ton. - We, by Zamyatin
This book kicks ass. - El Hombre Que Calculaba
This book is basically a self-insert fic for children who are both autistic and mathematically talented. I like it, kind of. - Uprooted, by Naomi Novik
I love it. This is a book about a totally-not-special girl who turns out to be the most special ever, and a repressed asshole who is still rational and careful and brilliant, in a world where lots of people in power are unnecessarily spiteful and full of shit, fighting a mysterious villain with power the dark lord knows not–I mean with the magic of friendship–I mean by training dragons instead of killing them–you get the gist. It is the most Fantasy YA to ever Fantasy YA, starring a character who is only not-a-Mary-Sue because everyone thinks she’s a moron. It even has incredibly problematic sexual politics, as explained by Foz Meadows in a way that is… true. It is the case that this is a problem with the book, though one I had a very easy time ignoring, because #Privilege. Still, I read this book in one day, and it lifted my spirits. It is amazing and insane. - Nancy Clancy: Super Sleuth, by Jane O’Connor.
I was shocked that I didn’t hate it nearly as much as I expected to. So I’m gonna count it. You might have noticed that some of these I’ve been reading to a six-year-old at night. - The Refrigerator Monologues, by Catherynne M. Valente
This is so good! I love it! I love the tone, I love the characters, I love the worldbuilding. I love how Valente puts words together, I love how everyone has a clear analogue but also their own particularities. If there is any problem with it, I would say it is that it gets a wee bit White-Feminism-ish sometimes. BUT IT IS STILL SO GOOD! - The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua
YAS. YAS. YAAAAS. I love this with a passion. I put it here because it’s fictionalized but honestly with the amount of footnotes it has it should be counted as one half history book. - Superman: American Alien, by Max Landis
I was sold on this as Superman but More-Immigrant-ish. It was good, but it was also… not that? It was more like a different angle on Smallville. Which… was nice, I guess? It was pretty underwhelming. - Three Worlds Collide, by Eliezer Yudkowsky
So, I’ve been re-reading this guy’s stuff, and… it holds up much better than I thought it would. Yes, I still have my many many problems with Yudkowsky, but… credit where credit is due. - Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? by Alan Moore
So remember when I said Alan Moore was overrated? He still might be but I think this was actually kind of neat. - Doomsday Clock (2017) by Geoff Johns
Black Rorschach was weird at first but I wound up loving him. The Mime and Marionette are fucking awesome. Everyone else sucks and I hate it. - Superman Annual #11: “For the Man Who Has Everything” by Alan Moore
Okay so, maybe I just really really like Moore, but only when he’s writing Superman or Watchmen? - The Age of Consent, by Peter Morris
This is a weird play. I liked it.
Non-Fiction
- Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah
Finally got around to reading this. It does everything I thought it would and more. Which is to say it’s an interesting example of “history from below” while also being really really funny. - My Gender Workbook, by Kate Bornstein
If this taught me anything at all, is that the more I research today’s “gender” stuff, the less I get it. It’s all this internalist phenomenological crap about your experience. Like, how the fuck do I know? “You just know”. Gee, thanks buddy, that’s super helpful!/s. I don’t know who I feel myself to be. This book is also very androcentric. I get that the writer is AMAB, but I could answer every question as a transphobic cisgender woman, and I would get somewhere between “gender novice” and “gender outlaw”. I feel like this book is more concerned with toxic masculinity than any other aspect of gender. It really disappointed me. - How To Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
This book is the spiritual precursor to neuromarketing. “N things you can do to prey on people’s shitty internal biases in order to get what you want from them!”. It reads as though Malcolm Gladwell read a bunch of basic psychology research, realized it probably wouldn’t fly today, and so went back in time to the 30s and published it under a pseudonym. It made me reevaluate everything I think about relationships. So, I mean, it made for surprisingly deep philosophical experiences given that it’s a marketing book for relationships… - The Six-Figure Woman and How to Be One, by Lois Wyse
I love this book. It is at the same time charmingly outdated (it’s from 1984 and it occasionally reads like it’s from 1964) and weirdly timeless. It says a lot of the same things as Carnegie’s book (and was almost certainly inspired by it in some fashion) but at the same time it has a strange warmth to it. It doesn’t feel nearly as ethically tainted as Carnegie’s. I think part of it is that it is much less focused on personal stuff. Carnegie has a whole section that is supposed to be marriage counselling (???) and others wherein he’s basically telling you to be the most convenient version of yourself for everyone else’s sake. Wyse is a lot more direct and a lot more clear about the division between private life and the great, wonderful path with which you too can go from capitalist cog to capitalist clockmaker! I found it incredibly pleasant to read. - Better than Human: The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves, by Allen Buchanan
I feel like a grownup, because I read this book all on my own, not for any classes, but because it seemed interesting and HOLY FUCK WHAT HAS PHILOSOPHY DONE TO ME?!… Anyway, it’s a pretty interesting angle on a bunch of things I’ve been thinking about, though some of its arguments kind of fall flat, and it kind of fails at doing that thing good popular philosophy books do where knowing philosophy enriches instead of hurting the experience. I recommend it to anyone who isn’t a philosophy major but thinks “hey, some of that stuff sounds kind of interesting…”. - Be Your Own Fairy Tale: Working with Storytelling for Positive Life Change, by Alison Davies
Finally, someone who uses narrativism for self-help books without appealing to fascists in the process! It’s kind of frustrating and annoying, but in that exact way that every single thing that prioritizes agency with “n Easy Steps!” when really the steps are nothing, you just have a switch in your brain that refuses to be flipped and any easy steps would probably work if that switch got flipped… is. But it’s fine. And it doesn’t put you on the path to becoming a member of the Alt-Right, which is nice! People should read Alison Davies instead of Jordan Peterson, is my point. - The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz
SEE? SEE?! I’m not crazy! Agonizing over every single choice ever is perfectly normal and not at all indicative of like, five different mental health problems. This book makes me feel kind of vindicated. It also kind of helps. - The Mathematics of Love, by Hannah Fry
I actually kinda love this book. It’s really funny. - The Exploding Metropolis, by The Editors of Fortune,
This book is amazing. It’s like reading about a coming apocalypse long after it came. The fear in this book, the horror at things we now consider just… part of urban life, is fantastic. I am well aware that my enjoyment of this book is super contingent on my specific circumstances as an urban person, but… still. I love this book way more than I think is reasonable. Seriously, I have not had a deeper existential crisis about what it means for the world to end than I had when reading this book. - Reinventing Comics, by Scott McCloud
It’s the book that launched a thousand rebuttals. I spent a lot of time reading a lot of papers for an independent study on Webcomics, and let me tell you, the only thing these people seem to agree on is that McCloud was wrong about something. - Making Comics, by Scott McCloud
Honestly I kind of expected more? Anyway, it was okay. - The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice
You know you’re a nerd when you read Routledge Handbooks without being made to. - Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge
Overhyped. I mean, it’s okay. I just… Iunno. Felt very overhyped. Iunno. Like, it’s not bad.
TOTAL: 29
Fanfics
These are all long enough to count as books, so I’m putting them in the pile.
- The Arithmancer
Putting aside the weird repeating pattern of Hermione having religious crises, I thought this was fantastic. - Lady Archimedes
I thought this was less fantastic, but also very very good. - Tea with the Hatter (TGIF)
THEORYTALE IS WRITING AGAIN! EVERYONE!! EVERYONE HEAR THE GOOD NEWS! THEORYTALE IS WRITING AGAIN!!! YES!! - Goldstein
Fascinating. I really like it. Kinda sad it’s not done.
Essays (that stuck with me).
- Theory of Change, by Aaron Swartz
- The Harm That Good Men Do, by Bertrand Russell
- When Tables Speak, by Talia Mae Bettcher
- The Liberty Scam, by Stephen Metcalf
- Stop asking me ‘what about men?’, by Jessica Eaton
TOTAL
BOOKS FOR SCHOOL: 18
OTHER BOOKS: 29
FANFICS THAT ARE LONG ENOUGH TO COUNT AS BOOKS: 4
TOTAL: 51
So… YES. I FINALLY DID IT. FIFTY BOOKS IN ONE YEAR!!!!
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
MAY THE NEXT FIFTY BOOKS BE GREAT!
