Reading List 2009

Another year, another list of what I have read over the course of the last twelve months!  Per usual, books are divided into the categories of fiction and non-fiction (with a poetry add-on), are listed in date order (the earlier the reading date, the nearer the top of the list), and in instances in which I wrote a review or made comments over at GoodReads, I’ve included the link.

Looking back at the list, it’s interesting for me to see patterns that emerge.  Nearly all of the non-fiction is foundation texts for my continuing thesis work.  (Notice any themes?  I notice lots of titles with colons in them -- a sure sign of fancy academic writing.)  And for the most part, items on the fiction list were my momentary retreats from the chaos of daily life, so of course there is a ton of YA lit and graphic novels, including a handful of rereads. 

Fiction

• 1.  Breaking Dawn (Twilight #4) by Stephenie Meyer
• 2.  Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (graphic novel)
• 3.  The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games #1) by Suzanne Collins
• 4.  Blankets by Craig Thompson (semi-autobiographical graphic novel)
• 5.  Midnight Sun (unpublished Twilight #1.5) by Stephenie Meyer
• 6.  Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
• 7.  Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn
• 8.  Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story by Frederik Peeters (graphic novel)
• 9.  Ghost World by Daniel Clowes (graphic novel)
• 10.  The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• 11.  Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
• 12.  Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (graphic novel)
• 13.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter #1) by J.K. Rowling (reread)
• 14.  Mexican WhiteBoy by Matt de la Pena
• 15.  Boy Meets Boy by David Levithan
• 16.  Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter #2) by J.K. Rowling (reread)
• 17.  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter #3) by J.K. Rowling (reread)
• 18.  Lamb:  The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
• 19.  American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (graphic novel)
• 20.  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter #4) by J.K. Rowling (reread)
• 21.  The Gold Compass (His Dark Materials #1) by Philip Pullman

Non-fiction

• 1.  Pregnant Bodies, Fertile Minds: Gender, Race, and the Schooling of Pregnant Teens by Wendy Luttrell
• 2.  Being White: Stories of Race and Racism by Karyn McKinney
• 3.  White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son by Tim Wise
• 4.  Where We Stand: Class Matters by bell hooks
• 5.  White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness by Ruth Frankenberg
• 6.  The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism by Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin
• 7.  Everyday Acts Against Racism: Raising Children in a Multicultural World edited by Reddy Maureen
• 8.  Invisible Privilege by Paula Rothenberg
• 9.  Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
• 10.  Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line in Classrooms and Communities by Amanda E. Lewis
• 11.  Speed Bumps: A Student Friendly Guide to Qualitative Research by Lois Weis and Michelle Fine
• 12.  Anti-Bias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children by Louise Derman-Sparks and the ABC Taskforce
• 13.  The Active Interview by James A. Holstein
• 14.  Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie by Rachel Corrie
• 15.  Racing Research, Researching Race: Methodological Dilemmas in Critical Race Studies edited by France Winddance Twine and Jonathan W. Warren
• 16.  Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi (memoir, graphic novel)
• 17.  Pedro and Me by Judd Winick (graphic novel)
• 18.  White Lives: The Interplay of 'Race,' Class and Gender in Everyday Life by Bridget Byrne
• 19.  Waking Up American: Coming of Age Biculturally edited by Angela Jane Fountas
• 20.  Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class edited by Michelle Tea
• 21.  The Girl with the Brown Crayon: How Children Use Stories to Shape Their Lives by Vivian Gussin Paley (reread)
• 22.  Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data by Irene Rubin

Poetry

• 1.  Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein (poetry) (reread)

(2012.06.15)

Wordle-ing my thesis...

I'm feeling stressed today.

In my procrastination efforts I wandered over to Wordle. (Have you been there? It's fun.) On the Wordle home page it explains that:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Wordle is the brain child of Jonathan Feinberg, a software engineer at IBM Research, and I can't figure out how old the site/software is. But, I've been seeing these 'word clouds' reappearing throughout different venues of my life lately -- blog signatures, school event advertisements, wedding invitations -- and I realized by accident that they were all being created here.

So, I thought I'd give it a whirl myself and see what came of it. I inserted the text from the most current four page summary of my thesis work. Then I limited the word-count to 50 (rather than the standard 150), removed all author names, and changed my colors to black and white (my research is about ideologies of race after all). And after a bit of fiddlin', voilà!

In all reality, I'm finding it helpful to have this visual tool. It's helping me see the language I am using most frequently and how those words correlate with themes and my areas of interest. I was surprised, for example, that 'social' is my most frequently used word. I would have thought it might have been 'race,' or 'white,' or 'privilege,' but it's helpful for me to see how really these are all relational terms in a social world. I could go on, but you get the point. What a helpful (and intellectually and aesthetically pleasing) software.

And now back to work...

Video Spotlight: 12 Days of Christmas

This post's goin' up because we all need a little light-hearted fabulousness once in a while. (Also, it's 12 days before Christmas.)

In case you didn't know, I have a warm fuzzy place in my heart for men's a capella groups. (Seriously, you have no idea.) These guys, Straight No Chaser, got their start at Indiana University back in 1996, took a 10 year hiatus after graduation, and then reached near immediate success when video from performances 10 years prior hit YouTube in 2006. Huge viral success. And then a major label record deal (with Atlantic). Kinda crazy. (Actually, a version of the song in this video is what caught the ears of the world.) Also, you may have heard them recently singing a holiday special/membership drive on PBS.


And if I'm gonna promo a capella, let's do it right. First, three of my favorite a capella groups: King's Singers, The Manhattan Transfer, and Toxic Audio. Second, (and this is for all you lovely Bostonians) check out Emerson's WERS 88.9FM program All A Capella every Saturday and Sunday afternoon from 2-5pm. (How many afternoons did BLP and I listen to that show while doin' crap around the house?... Many.)

(Plus, for "A Little Christmas Music" (quite literally) bonus, listen to/watch the King's Singers, Julie Andrews and John Denver together.)