My world on the web
formless and incoherent grab bag of titles that come to mind at this moment that, for one reason or another, I have loved over the years. I think I got carried away. I think there are fifty — in no particular order.
Source: Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #101 – Would you consider compiling a list of 40 books you love? by Nick Cave
Another list of books to consider when struggling with what to read next.
- LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS BY URSULA K. LE GUIN (1969)
- NEUROMANCER BY WILLIAM GIBSON (1984)
- A WRINKLE IN TIME BY MADELEINE L’ENGLE (1962)
- SOLARIS BY STANISŁAW LEM (1961)
- FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS BY MARY SHELLEY (1818)
- PARABLE OF THE SOWER BY OCTAVIA E. BUTLER (1993)
- HYPERION BY DAN SIMMONS (1989)
- THE THREE BODY PROBLEM BY CIXIN LIU (2008)
- THE MARTIAN BY ANDY WEIR (2011)
- RINGWORLD BY LARRY NIVEN (1970)
- THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY BY DOUGLAS ADAMS (1979-1992)
- DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP BY PHILIP K. DICK (1968)
- FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST BY HIROMU ARAKAWA (2002-2010)
- BINTI BY NNEDI OKORAFOR (2015-2018)
- THE TIME MACHINE BY H.G. WELLS (1895)
- AKIRA BY KATSUHIRO OTOMO (1982-1990)
- GHOST IN THE SHELL BY MASAMUNE SHIROW (1989-1997)DARK MATTER: A CENTURY OF SPECULATIVE FICTION FROM THE AFRICAN DIASPORA EDITED BY SHEREE RENÉE THOMAS (2000)
- THE BROKEN EARTH TRILOGY BY N. K. JEMISIN (2015-2017)
- IRON WIDOW BY XIRAN JAY ZHAO (2021)
Here are my top ten books for consolidating your understanding of the science behind the Learning Power Approach.
The purpose of these reading and discussion groups are to strive to understand the history of pervasive structural and systemic racism in America, and how this impacts the present, the future, and ourselves. We intend to create safe, brave spaces to facilitate discussions as we co-investigate anti-racist texts and their role in our individual and collective contexts. You can participate with the groups even if you don’t want to collaborate and co-investigate. We’d like to leave the door open for those that just need the extra push to read these books and question themselves.
It has been my pleasure to have taught thousands of such students for almost forty years, and my conviction that I have stumbled over the past fifteen upon a way of offering them something closer to what I once experienced and have learned that they too hunger for.
I am writing this piece in the hope that our experience might be of interest to other university teachers in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and natural sciences and even be seen as a template for a form of undergraduate teaching that others might think worth a try.
The subject introduces students to the history of politics in “the West” from the outbreak of the First World War to the present day. Students attend a three hour seminar each week. They are expected to read either a book or an interlinked set of articles in preparation for the weekly seminar.
The topics and authors covered are, in turn, the breakdown of European society from the beginning of the First to the end of the Second World War (Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes) ; the fate of the Russian Revolution by the 1930s (Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon) ; the Holocaust (Primo Levi’s If This is a Man); Left and Right in the 1930s and 1940s (selected essays of George Orwell); the Cold War (essays from George Kennan); second wave feminism (Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, bell hooks); the recognition of racism (Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate all the Brutes”); the rise of neo-liberalism (Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom); the collapse of communism (Vaclav Havel’s “The Power of the Powerless”); post-Cold War (Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington ); contemporary social democracy post-GFC ( Wilkinson and Pickett; Joseph Stiglitz; Tony Judt; Paul Krugman); environmentalism and climate change (Rachel Carson; Garrett Hardin; Al Gore).
Each week, in addition, the students watch and discuss a film loosely associated with the readings: for the First World War (All Quiet on the Western Front, Milestone, 1930); the British reaction to the rise of Nazism (The Lady Vanishes, Hitchcock, 1938); the Holocaust (Korczak, Wajda, 1990); the Cold War (Dr Strangelove, Kubrick, 1964); the recognition of racism (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Kramer, 1967); second wave feminism (Mad Men, series one); neo-liberalism (The Fountainhead, King Vidor, 1949); the collapse of communism (The Lives of Others, von Donnersmarck, 2006); post Cold War-Iraq invasion (Turtles Can Fly, Ghobadi, 2004); the case for social democracy (Wall Street, Stone, 1988); climate change (An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore, 2006).