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“Novel” Reading in 2015
Following my practice last year, I have listed my “novel” reading for 2015. This is a way of documenting what I get through in a year’s worth of reading on the commute to work, in the evenings after work, and while travelling on those airplane journeys from/to Sydney outside of my “normal” academic reading.
My use of the term “novel” reading is loosely adopted, as you will see from the list. The year started in the Blue Mountains with my reading of Greg Grandin’s book on Henry Ford’s imperial adventure in Brazil to construct Fordlândia—or Fordville—an outstanding piece of historical research. It was followed by a reading of The Qu’ran. The former is clearly not a work of fiction. I will let readers of this blog post decide on the fictional status of the latter.
The remainder of the year witnessed me weave in and out of reading books directly from the literature shelf as well as some wider reading on landscape writing; university restructuring; the political economy of the drugs war in Mexico and Latin America; and architecture. I feel more reading was completed this year compared to last; a result perhaps of not having an equivalent like Thomas Piketty to preoccupy me in the evenings.
It was around September and October—with the uptick in teaching and administrative pressures—that the reading began to slow and my ambitions waned. Come November and December a burst of energy returned, especially after the completion of teaching, and there was a bit of a spurt to re-read some Cormac McCarthy, among other things.
Let’s see what 2016 has in store! I would like to tackle James Ellroy’s “Underworld” trilogy and more Roberto Bolaño. I have read his The Savage Detectives [Los detectives salvajes] and would like to read 2666 but feel I need to re-read the former to get the best out of the latter; a serious undertaking. There is also a new Cormac McCarthy novel planned for publication in 2016. Anyway, here is the list for 2015 in the order the books have been read:
- Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Picador, 2010).
- The Qur’an, trans. Tarif Khalidi (Penguin, 2009).
- Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form (Picador, 2006).
- Cormac McCarthy, The Gardener’s Son (Picador, 1996).
- Victor Serge, Conquered City, trans. Richard Greeman (New York Review of Books, 2011) [a re-read].
- Roberto Bolaño, Amulet [Amuleto, 1999] (Picador, 2009).
- Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper (Vintage, 1965).
- Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark (Picador, 1968).
- Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review of Books, 2004) [a re-read].
- Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border (Faber and Faber, 2015).
- Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude [El laberinto de la soledad, 1950] (Penguin Books, 1990) [a re-read].
- Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz [La muerte de Artemio Cruz, 1962] (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991) [a re-read].
- Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (Hamish Hamilton, 2015).
- Ian Angus, Love the Questions: University Education and Enlightenment (Arbeiter Ring, 2009).
- Don Winslow, The Power of the Dog (Random House, 2005).
- Don Winslow, The Cartel (Random House, 2015).
- Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, 2014).
- Jon Stack and Adam Shapiro, La Lucha: The Story of Lucha Castro and Human Rights in Mexico (Verso, 2015).
- E. L. Doctorow, Welcome to Hard Times (Random House, 1960).
- Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (Zer0 Books, 2008).
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (Picador, 1985) [a re-read].
- Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (Picador, 2005).
- John Sepich, Notes on Blood Meridian (University of Texas Press, 2008).
- Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, edited by Łukasz Stanek (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Recent Political Economy Books
This is just a note to relay the monograph outputs from members of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, across 2014 and 2015.
Congratulations to all the authors listed below for this outstanding level of achievement in such a short period of time!
- Damien Cahill, The End of Laissez-Faire? On the Durability of Embedded Neoliberalism (Edward Elgar, 2014).
- Bill Dunn, The Political Economy of Global Capitalism and Crisis (Routledge, 2014).
- Stuart Rosewarne, James Goodman and Rebecca Pearse, Climate Action Upsurge: The Ethnography of Climate Movement Politics (Routledge, 2014).
- Bill Dunn, Neither Free Trade Nor Protection: A Critical Political Economy of Trade Theory and Practice (Edward Elgar, 2015).
- Tim Anderson, Land and Livelihoods in Papua New Guinea (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015).
- Martijn Konings, The Emotional Logic of Capitalism: What Progressives Have Missed (Stanford University Press, 2015).
- Susan Schroeder, Public Credit Rating Agencies: Increasing Capital Investment and Lending Stability in Volatile Markets (Palgrave, 2015).
- Michael Beggs, Inflation and the Making of Australian Macroeconomic Policy, 1945-85 (Palgrave, 2015).
- Joseph Halevi, G. C. Harcourt, Peter Kreisler, and J. W. Nevile, Post-Keynesian Essays from Down Under, Four Volumes (Palgrave, 2015):
- Volume 1: Essays on Keynes, Harrod, and Kalecki – Theory and Policy in an Historical Context
- Volume 2: Essays on Policy and Applied Economics – Theory and Policy in an Historical Context
- Volume 3: Essays on Ethics, Social Justice and Economics – Theory and Policy in an Historical Context
- Volume 4: Essays on Theory – Theory and Policy in an Historical Context