Reading list

Spring/Summer 2025

Actual books, in between all of the other short-form online and offline distractions. The stack keeps growing. Slowly adding some fiction back in after a long time away. Resetting for Spring/Summer 2025.  Previous seasons appear below On Deck and On the Stack.

Open

• Sarah Kendzior, The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir
• Renee DiResta, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants
• Leanne Betasomosake Simpson, Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead
• Michael Lewis, ed., Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service
• Jennifer Hack, Service Dog Training Guide
• Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor, Solidarity: The Past, Present and Future of a World-Changing Idea
• Lara A. Jacobs, Indigenous Critical Reflections on Traditional Ecological Knowledge
• Roger Sanjek, Gray Panthers
• Charles Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created
• Mario Vargas Llosa, Conversation in the Cathedral
• Antonio Gramsci (David Forgacs, ed.), The Antonio Gramsci Reader
• Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History
• Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus
• Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming, Tai Chi Chuan: Classical Yang Style, The Complete Long Form and Qigong

On deck

• Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues for Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age
• Steven Mithen, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000 – 5000 BC
  
• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
• Kirsten Downey, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins–Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and the Minimum Wage
• Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1928-1941
• Martin Meredith, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavor
• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

On the ever-growing stack

• Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind
• Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart
• Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail
• Bill McKibben, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
• Bill McKibben, Eaath: Making A Life on a Tough New Planet
• Cain Blythe and Paul Jepson, Rewilding: The Radical New Science of Ecological Recovery
• George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea
• Zora Neale Hurston, You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays
• Lee Staples, Roots to Power: A Manual for Grassroots Organizing
• Teri Kanefield and Pat Dorian, A Firehose of Falsehood: A Story of Disinformation
• John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas
• William D. Phillips, Jr and Carla Rahn Phillips, A Concise History of Spain
• Eric Hobsbawm, Viva La Revolución: Eric Hobsbawm on Latin America
• Charles F. Walker, Tupac Amaru Rebellion
• John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents
• Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958
• Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
• Tim Wise, Dispatches from the Race War
• Ludo De Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
• Barack Obama, A Promised Land
• Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders
• Gregory Rodriguez, Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America
• Ed Morales, LatinX: The New Force in American Politics and Culture
• Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
• W.E.B. Dubois, Black Reconstruction
• Chancellor Williams, Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.
• Philip Dray, There Is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America
• Claudia Goldin & Lawrence F. Katz, The Race Between Education and Technology
• John King Fairbank, China: A New History
• Paul Strathern, The Medici
• Stephen Cope, Yoga and the Quest for the True Self
• Matthew Sockolov, Practicing Mindfulness: 75 Essential Meditations
• Cesar Vallejo, Selected Writings
• Federico García Llorca, The Complete Poems
• Pablo Neruda, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda
• Octavio Paz, The Poems of Octavio Paz
• Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog
• Mario Vargas Llosa, Death in the Andes
• William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
• Hernan  Diaz, Trust
• John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
• Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (restarting)
• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (restarting)
• Toni Morrison, Beloved
• Don DeLillo, Underworld (restarting)
• Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
• Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

Fall/Winter 2024

1. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
2. José María Arguedas, Deep Rivers
3. Helen Czerski, The Blue Machine: How the Oceans Works
4. Jake Bittle, The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
5. Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet
6. Orin Starn, Miguel La Serna, Shining Path: Love, Madness and Revolution in the Andes
7. Shou-Yu Liang and Wen-Ching Wu, Simplified Tai Chi Chuan
8. Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization
9. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
10. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
11. Sarah Kendzior, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keep America Complacent
12. Heather Cox Richardson, Democracy Awakening
13. Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
14. Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba, Harsha Walia, and Maya Schenwar, Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care
15. Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America
16. Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation
17. Mark Engler and Paul Engler, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century

Spring/Summer 2024

1. Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
2. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
3. Christine Koth, Tight Hip Twisted Core: The Key to Unresolved Pain
4. Edward Said, Orientalism
5. John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

Fall/Winter 2023

1. José María Arguedas, Yawar Fiesta
2. Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
3. Dan Buettner, Blue Zones: Secrets for Living Longer
4. Julio Noriega, ed., Pichka Harawikuna: Five Quechua Poets
5. Paul Robert Magosci, With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus’ and Carpatho-Rusyns
6. Paul Robert Magosci, Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and Their Descendants in North America
7. Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
8. Steven M. Berezney, Sugarhouse Pete: An American Family Story
9. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals
10. Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
11. Cesar Vallejo, The Complete Poetry
12. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
13. Zadie Smith, White Teeth
14. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
15. Richard Wright, Native Son

Spring/Summer 2023

1. Chris Napier, The Science of Running
2. Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
3. Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America
4. Alison Mariella Désir, Running While Black: Finding Freedom in a Sport that Wasn’t Built for Us
5. Jay Dicharry, Anatomy for Runners
6. Dave Goulson, Silent Earth: Averting the Insect Apocalypse
7. Kara Goucher, The Longest Race: Inside the Secret World of Abuse, Doping, and Deception on Nike’s Elite Running Team
8. Orin Starn, Carlos Iván Degregori, Robin Kirk, editors, The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics
9. Alberto Flores Galindo, In Search of an Inca: Identity and Utopia in the Andes

Fall/Winter 2022

1. Michael J. Sandel, Justice
2. Beth M. Howard, World Piece: A Pie Baker’s Global Quest for Peace, Love, and Understanding
3. Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies
4. Miriam Paweł, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography
5. Perhat Tursun, The Backstreets: A Novel from Xinjiang
6. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
7. Jillian Peterson and James Densley, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic
8. Christopher McDougall and Eric Orton, Born to Run 2: The Ultimate Training Guide
9. Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
10. Joshua Bloom, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
11. Hua Hsu, Stay True
12. Richard Powers, The Overstory
13. Shane Benzie, The Lost Art of Running: A Journey to Rediscover the Forgotten Essence of Human Movement
14. Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

Spring/Summer 2022

1. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
2. Jay Dicharry, Running Rewired: Reinvent Your Run for Stability, Strength and Speed
3. Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
4. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
5. David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
6. Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times
7. Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
8. Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them
9. Elizabeth Williamson, Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
10. Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
11. Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
12. Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
13. Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun 
14. Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928
15. Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe
16. Louis Klarevas, Rampage Nation: Securing America Against Mass Shootings
17. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
18. T.J. Newman, Falling

Fall/Winter 2021

1. Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
   
2. Peter Kalmus, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution
3. Mark Bray, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook
4. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
5. Dan Rather, What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism
6. George Herbert, Dune
7. James Welch, Winter in the Blood
8. Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
9. Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
10. Les Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
11. Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
    
12. Mary Robinson, Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future
13. Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

  Spring/Summer 2021

1. Stephen Shames and Bobby Seale, Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers
2. Anne Case, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism
3. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class
4. Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
5. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice
6. Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness
7. Tom Wicker, A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt
8. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Children of the Land
9. Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
10. Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
11. Charles M. Blow, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto
12. Steven Greenhouse, Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present and Future of American Labor
13. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
14. Michael E. Mann, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet
15. David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
16. John Lee Anderson, Che Guevera: A Revolutionary Life
17. Elias Rodriques, All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running
18. Nick Sousanis, Unflattening
19. Andy Slavitt, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response
20. Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma
21. Andy Puddicombe, The Headspace Guide to Meditation & Mindfulness
22. Shannon Mattern, A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences

  Fall/Winter 2020

1. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
2. Gene Sperling, Economic Dignity
3. Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction
4. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists
5. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
6. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
7. Luc Sante, The Other Paris 
8. Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them
9. Hope Jahren, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here
10. Noe Alvarez, Spirit Run: A 6,000 Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Lands
11. Chad Robertson, Tartine Bread
12. Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
13. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
14. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
15. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
16. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self Regard
17. Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents
18. Toni Morrison, The Origin of Others
19. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
20. Murray Shanahan, The Technological Singularity
21. Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
22. Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
23. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
24. Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
25. Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
26. Talia Lavin, Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
27. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
28. S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches
29. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
30. Elizabeth Rush, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore
31. Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered A Black Panther
32. Adam Jentleson, Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy