Year in Review, Books

[ziasudra]

This edition of year-in-review focuses on books. A "Books I've Read" list would be too long (and tedious), so I'm going with a general book rec list. Most of these are from my list of textbooks, so naturally I have more memory from this semester’s stuff than from last school year’s. Red diamond books are my favorites.


Books I’ve enjoyed reading in 2005:


Comics
♦ Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
♦ Persepolis 2, by Marjane Satrapi

Fiction
♦ The Adventures of Captain Underpants, by Dav Pilkey
♦ Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer (didn’t finish the whole book, but it’s a good one)
♦ Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
♦ Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling (no surprises here)
♦ The Messenger, by Lois Lowry (third in her Giver trilogy)
♦ Santa Evita, by Tomas Eloy Martinez (this book is a magical realism, so it's a very factual, journalistic even, fiction)
♦ Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, by Chris Crutcher

Non-Fiction
♦ All the Pasha’s Men, by Khalid Fahmy
♦ The Book of Jerry Falwell, by Susan Friend Harding
♦ Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition, eds. James Turner and John Kelsay
♦ Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, by Talal Asad
♦ God of the Rodeo, by Daniel Bergner
♦ Homo Sacer, by Giorgio Agamben
♦ Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal, and Political Dilemmas, by J.L. Holzgrefe and Robert Keohane
♦ Islam and War: A Study in Comparative Ethics, by John Kelsay
♦ Milestones, by Sayyid Qutb (warning: this is a polemic)
♦ Number Our Days, by Barbara Myerhoff
♦ The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco, by Susan Slyomovics
♦ Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves, by Kamran Asdar Ali
♦ The Wretched of the Earth, by Franz Fanon

Non-Fiction Articles
♦ “In a Time of Torture: the assault of justice in Egypt’s crackdown on homosexual conduct,” Human Rights Watch (This is written very much within the human rights discourse, definitely a blatant cry for intervention. Best to read in conjunction with Massad’s article.)
♦ “Reorienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14, 2 (2002):361-385, by Joseph Massad
♦ “Three Sufi Trials” and “Sufism, the Law, and the Question of Heresy,” Words of Ecstasy in Sufism, by Carl W. Ernst


And of course, I can’t not squee after such a close game between the Miami Heat and the Detroit Pistons. A very close game throughout, many ties, until maybe the last minute of the game, when Chauncey Billups put in a 2-pointer and Rasheed Wallace a 3-point shot. Final score: 106-101, Pistons wins its ninth game in a row.

Comments

[lynkemma.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting list! I'll refer to it when I begin my planned non-fiction-reading project :-)

And I'm deeply impressed you've been able to pick up Artemis Fowl and not read it through to the end in one great gulp... Are you planning to finish it?

[ziasudra.livejournal.com]

Boy Cousin has all (I think) of the Artemis Fowl books, so I know where to go should I decide to continue reading. I first picked up the books when I was trying to pass time during some of the calmer moments with my kiddies. Over the course of weeks I managed to read a couple of chapter (even during calm times, I kept getting interrupted!), which may be why I didn't find the book as engaging as most people did. I liked what I read.

I do plan to read the series in the future. Maybe once I'm done with school and have nothing better to do than read really good YA books.