Reading list

 Fall/Winter 2022

Actual books, in between all of the other short-form online and offline distractions. The stack keeps growing, so undoubtedly this will carry over into next year. Slowly adding some fiction back in after a long time away. Resetting for Fall Winter 2022.  Previous seasons appear below.

Open

  • Michael J. Sandel, Justice
  • Beth M. Howard, World Piece: A Pie Baker’s Global Quest for Peace, Love, and Understanding
  • Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies
  • Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis
  • Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
  • Miriam Paweł, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography

On the stack

  • Steven Mithin, After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000 – 5000 BC
  • Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1928-1941
  • Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
  • Joshua Bloom, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
  • Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
  • Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
  • 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
  • Thomas Bartlett, Ireland: A History
  • Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
  • Edward Said, Orientalism
  • Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders
  • Charles Mann, 1493
  • Martin Meredith, The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavor
  • Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
  • 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
  • Richard Wright, Native Son
  • James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
  • Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography
  • 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
  • Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus
  • Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals
  • 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
  • Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (restarting)
  • Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (restarting)
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved
  • Don DeLillo, Underworld (restarting)
  • Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
  • Zadie Smith, White Teeth
  • Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
  • Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
  • Richard Powers, The Overstory

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 Democrac