- Autobiography of Malcolm X
- Women, Race, and Class - Angela Y Davis
- The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon
- The Racial Contract - Charles W Mills
- Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition - Cedric Robinson
- Racism: A Short History - George Fredrickson
In addition to these, I have one last book I plan to read as a part of this project (which is not to say that I won't read more black and race literature — I certainly will): Rethinking Racial Justice, by Andrew Valls. And yes, the caucasity of letting two white dudes have the last words on race theory is not lost on me. See my previous reading update for my assessment of black/race studies.
To break that project up a little, I also started my long overdue course on socialism and leftism, including finally reading Marx (the hate-read of the Communist Manifesto I did during the Randian haze of my freshman year of university doesn't really count, I think). Not a big total, but the Marx book was huge, and I consider Davis, Fanon, and Robinson from above to be part of this project as well.
- Karl Marx: Selected Writings - David McLellan (ed.)
- Marxism and Freedom - Raya Dunayevskaya
And I'm about 10% into the massive Main Currents of Marxism, by Leszek Kolakowski. My thoughts on Marxism so far are mostly that Marx got a lot wrong, and he really didn't deserve the world-historical level of influence he attained. That said, the humanistic elements of Marxian thought — as discussed in the Dunayevskaya — are interesting and valuable. I tend to think that liberalism needs to be socialized (in that the social context is insufficiently attended to in a lot of liberal theory), socialism could do itself massive favors by adopting suitably altered liberal institutions, and that there is an attractive no man's land between the blurry frontiers of liberalism and (democratic) socialism.
The rest of my nonfiction reading for the year didn't conform to a theme. I finally read the Captured Economy, by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, an excellent, timely book about the reforms we should be making to our political economy. And I read A Turn to Empire, by Jennifer Pitts. Pitts reviews the patterns of liberal thought on imperialism from the late 18th century through the 19th century, showing how the later thinkers in this period rejected an earlier liberal anti-imperialism. My yearly fix of Nussbaum was her Therapy of Desire. I had expected to like it more than the Fragility of Goodness, as the books have similar themes, but the former involves an explicit comparison of her Aristotelian ethics with other Hellenistic approaches, but Fragility managed to be less tedious, more engaging. That said, Therapy had some very interesting discussions on diverse topics. Finally, Dear Ijeawelle, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, was a delightful little feminist manifesto, highly recommended especially as a jargon-free introduction to feminism.
I read more fiction than I reckoned I would. Two Star Wars books, one pretty good and one horrendous. Revan was an utter violation of the promise and philosophical sophistication of the Knights of the Old Republic games. I read one Black Panther graphic novel when I was hyped up about the film. I read the Wheel of Time prequel, which I'm certain I'd read many years ago, but I'd forgotten all the details. And the greatest new find was the Expanse series, the first book of which was wildly entertaining.
- Revan - Drew Karpyshyn
- Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves
- Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey
- New Spring - Robert Jordan
- Black Panther, Book 1 - Ta-Nehisi Coates
