“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
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2012

Books of 2012


Here's my list of all the books I read this year, with my favorites starred. I read more books total than I ever have before, a full 60!

December 29, 2012

  • Wrenching out a shitty first draft, looking over my theory notes.
  • This reminds me of when Half Price Books in the dirt mall used to sell their fiction paperbacks literally for 1/2 the cover price. I got a bunch of copies of really old editions of some James Baldwin works for half the cost, something like 1/2 of 60 cents. And I've still got em, those copies where the pages seem to crispen, with black covers and green fore edges.
  • Also started The Golden Compass during an intense hyper-way-after-bedtime bout.

December 28, 2012

  • Re-reading Gender Trouble, which doesn't get my 2012 book count up to where I want it (with just one book to go!):
    "Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for 'plain speaking' or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life?" (1999 Preface, xx)

December 27, 2012

  • Some Barthes, Foucault and Butler. Still working on finishing up the semester.
  • A surprisingly interesting interview with a baseball player, way more intriguing than I would have predicted (I tend to glaze over when the topic of sports comes up).
  • I am no longer struggling financially like I have in the past, but I am still in debt (from school), and damn, if I received one of these notices in the mail, I think that relief might be the most relieving kind of relief that could be given. More info here.

December 19, 2012

  • More of Ten Little Indians

December 18, 2012

  • Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish re-reads on the train, deciding on who to choose to focus on for the final.

December 13, 2012

  • Started Edward Said's Out of Place over breakfast.

December 12, 2012

  • Read Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman and felt pretty conflicted about many aspects of it. After having just re-read Matilda, it felt reminiscent.

December 10, 2012

The last homework of the semester:

  • Part of Ien Ang's "Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture"
  • Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
  • Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding"
  • This interview with Janice Radway: "I remember thinking, "This is a job, you can actually aspire to this as a job. You might think of yourself as a teacher, as a professor even." It sounds silly and naïve, but that really was the moment when I thought about a different future."

December 5, 2012

  • Started Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians:
    "In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest, Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. This huge number of books confirmed how much magic she'd been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks." (5)

December 3-4, 2012

  • Lots of Baudrillard's work, but mostly Simulacra and Simulation:
    “Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view." (10)

December 1-2, 2012

  • Too many deadlines, I listened to program #479 from This American Life, which happened to be about Minnesota, which happens to be where I was born.

November 28, 2012

  • Started Kaja Silverman's The Subject of Semiotics on the train, but stuck in between stations on the 5 I started to feel a bit overwhelmed.

November 27, 2012

  • Baudrillard and Didion.
    From The Year of Magical Thinking:
    “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it..."

November 26, 2012

  • Read a bit more of Didion over breakfast (leftover pie) because the rest of today will be a non-stop Baudrillard fest.

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Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric



Alycia's favorite books »

Daily Reading Log

May 12, 2013

  • Lots of reading, amidst the cracks of life as it goes, changes. Halfway through E. Biella Coleman's Coding Freedom, started David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and wanted to start, but probably have to wait until after the thesis, bell hooks' Where We Stand: Class Matters.

April 24, 2013

  • A piece in the New Yorker about Noah Baumbach, a person whose work I have a lot of sympathy for somehow, but in this piece he sounds like he wants to be a vampire sucking the energy off of his girlfriend's ideas. Is that a great way to have a relationship, or a terrible way?
  • I've also been reading Living Anarchy on the train, while very tired lately.

April 23, 2013

  • Zines from the Brooklyn Zine Fest: Alex #4 and #5, Deafula #5, and Indulgence #11.

April 22, 2013

  • Jeppesen, Sandra. "Becoming Anarchist: The Function of Anarchist Literature." Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2011.2
  • Imhorst, Christian. "Anarchy and Source Code - What does the Free Software Movement have to do with Anarchism?"

April 19, 2013

  • Going to try to finish In Praise of Copying today. This book has pleasantly surprised me in many ways and I'm greatly enjoying it. Highly recommended if you would like to think more deeply about copying (and its mimetic, ever-present nature) on a philosophical level.
    Many of the books about intellectual property I've looked at recently discuss the absurdities of various IP situations, or examine IP clashes via specific (often outrageous) legal cases. This book, on the other hand, talks more about the practices and traditions of copying, collaging or appropriating through many different perspectives, going back to the work of philosophers who are long dead but also looking for the mimetic in religious practices, theory, art, and even inside the human body. Totally fascinating.
  • Also this article on drone, also by Boon.

April 11, 2013

  • More Moonwalking with Einstein, enjoying the history of the book (as related to memory) section.

April 10, 2013

  • Inching my way through Moonwalking with Einstein, which I've only read over BC lunches in the office.
  • Insomnia had me reading Fosterhood in NYC

April 9, 2013

  • About half of In Praise of Copying by Boon, which I am enjoying.

April 8, 2013

  • Read the introduction to Common as Air by Hyde.
  • Last week watched the documentary, Kind Hearted Woman. Among many powerful scenes, was struck by those where Robin took family to go walking through the U of M, and how looking at the university and thinking about what it offered was a powerful activity for them.

April 1, 2013

  • While fighting some kind of bug finished Please Kill Me and ripping through Cometbus Omnibus and Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change

March 23, 2013

  • Been reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Not sure if it will help the thesis, but it's a good pick up/put down at random book.
  • Also still moving very slowly through Moonwalking with Einstein, my official over-lunch-at-work book of the moment.

March 13, 2013

  • Still finishing up Getting Things Done
  • Thesis reading: Living Anarchy by Jeff Shantz
  • Democracy Now! and WBAI, who could sincerely use your help.

March 9, 2013

  • Been reading Getting Things Done and trying to get things done.

March 6, 2013

  • Broke open Getting Things Done on the train. Still in the intro parts where there's talk about overwhelming obligations and the ever-increasing nature of the amount of things that are related to work these days. Tell me about it.

March 5, 2013

  • I started See Now Then because I saw that Jamaica Kincaid was going to be doing a reading that I could actually attend. I went tonight and she was fantastic. I didn't have a question afterward, because what I really wanted to say was that reading A Small Place and the surrounding discussion in high school was huge working class awakening and a moment I still think about. And that's not really a question.
    Here's one of many great portions of See Now Then:
    "Mrs. Sweet was a knitter and mender of socks, and she did that because while doing so she could delineate and dissect and then examine the world as she knew it, as she understood it, as she imagined it, as it came to her through her everyday existence."(38)
  • This feels like a p.s., but I'm also trying (and failing) to read Getting Things Done. Ha.
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