matt Matt(){Matt()}
CrufftReadingWork + ActivismWriting

Reading

Books: on balance, I'm for them. These are most of the ones I've read since 2007 or so. The star ratings correspond more closely to "how worth my time this felt" than "how good this is."
Years | Authors | Titles
2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007

Race, Class, and Politics in the Cappuccino City
Derek S. Hyra

This is a thoughtful and important look at gentrification and neighborhood transformation in DC. It suffers badly from trying to pose as ethnography when it is actually more like an anthology of editorial essays. It also suffers from Hyra's insistence on coining phrases like "Cappuccino City" and "living the wire" that aren't, or don't appear to be, well connected to his research and his repeated claims to be advancing whole fields of academic research, such as intersectionality, in short chapters. That being said I would have gladly read an edition of this urgently needed book that was twice as long - especially if the extra page count were filled by quotes from the actual residents he spoke with.

Made me think about:
- Black in Place

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780226449531

11 Apr 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia
Piers Vitebsky

Amazing anthropological/ethnographic writing and a great read in combination with Donna Haraway's When Species Meet.

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780618773572

06 Apr 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

In Our Time
Ernest Hemingway

worldcat | bookshop | isbn

10 Feb 2019
✪ ✪ 

Imago (Xenogenesis, #3)
Octavia E. Butler

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780446603638

29 Jan 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ 

Architect or Bee?: The Human/Technology Relationship
Mike Cooley, David F. Noble

This book fundamentally changed how I view the historical position of design relative to movements for social change. Definitely to be read as polemic rather than an academic study!

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780896081314

21 Jan 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization
Richard Sennett

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780393313918

13 Jan 2019
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The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths
Mariana Mazzucato

worldcat | bookshop | isbn

03 Jan 2019
✪ ✪ 

Tour de France: The Complete History of the World's Greatest Cycle Race
Marguerite Lazell

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781780974897

03 Jan 2019
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They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Hanif Abdurraqib

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781937512651

02 Jan 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
Christopher McDougall

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780307266309

11 Dec 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ 

The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers 1804 - 1999
Misha Glenny

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780140233773

08 Dec 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Mist from the Geyser (The Flamingo Diamond Series)
Marc Pearson

worldcat | bookshop | isbn

02 Dec 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

The Claw: The Terrible, Beautiful Claw (Flamingo Diamond Sseries #2)
Marc Pearson

worldcat | bookshop | isbn

02 Dec 2019
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The Flamingo Diamond
Marc Pearson

worldcat | bookshop | isbn

02 Dec 2019
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How Music Works
David Byrne

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781936365531

30 Nov 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest
Hanif Abdurraqib

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781477316481

17 Oct 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Vattu: The Name & the Mark
Evan Dahm

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 2055528900000

23 Sep 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

And Then the World Blew Up
Mr. Fish

Made me think about:
- Trump Sky Alpha

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781683960423

02 Sep 2019
✪ ✪ 

The Beauty, Vol. 1
Jeremy Haun, Jason A. Hurley, John Rauch, Fonografiks

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781632155504

02 Sep 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

A Savage Order: How the World's Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security
Rachel Kleinfeld

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781978643215

26 Aug 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Electoral Politics in Africa Since 1990: Continuity in Change
Jaimie Bleck, Nicolas Van de Walle

Well researched, well written, and well argued!

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781107162082

15 Aug 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

My Struggle: Book Three
Karl Ove Knausgård, Don Barlett

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781935744863

03 Aug 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
John Perkins

The problem at the core of this book is trust. Do dynamics and even overt American foreign policy strategies like the ones he describes exist? Sure. Do I believe that literal "economic hit men" under the command of the NSA exist, and that Perkins was personally the key player in the economic colonization of half a dozen countries around the world? I am very dubious. And if that is poetic license, what else is?

Perkins might have done well to take the advice he says he got from one publisher, and edited this as fiction in the spirit of John Grisham - this is actually pretty good writing and it would have been more honest.

Oh, and he is super weird about women.

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780452287082

20 Jul 2019
✪ ✪ 

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein

This is an outstanding work of legal and historical scholarship that calls bullshit on complacent progressivism at a rate of approximately once per sentence for three hundred straight pages. But it's not personal, it's just a precondition for change. Read this in a single sitting.

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781631492853

10 Jul 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
Adrienne Maree Brown

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781849352604

05 Jul 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
James Gleick

Ironically, the main reason to read this book is not because it is incredibly informative but because it is astoundingly well written.

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780375423727

14 Jun 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

The Globalizing Cities Reader
Roger Keil, Xuefei Ren, Neil Brenner

This is a comprehensive and thoughtful survey of the scholarship and debate on the topics of the "world city," "global city," and later variants and interventions. These ideas seek to understand cities less as places and more as nodes in global economic (and other) systems and to understand local growth, politics, and inequities in that frame.

I slogged straight through but this book is well-organized and will serve as a handy reference manual going forward!

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781138923690

11 Jun 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Stray Bullets, Vol. 2: Somewhere Out West
David Lapham

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780972714570

08 Jun 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Stray Bullets: Sunshine & Roses, Vol. 1
David Lapham

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781534307995

07 Jun 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Trump Sky Alpha
Mark Doten

Made me think about:
- And Then the World Blew Up

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781555978280

21 May 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide From New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School
Alexander Steele, Gotham Writers' Workshop

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781582343303

12 May 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

State-Building in Kosovo: Democracy, Corruption and the EU in the Balkans
Andrea Lorenzo Capussela

A fascinating and genteelly polemical insider's account of the EU and UN missions to build a modern democracy in Kosovo. I found this really useful as a window into the worlds of diplomacy and international affairs at their most stilted. I'm sure I missed a lot of nuance and maybe some pot shots but.. neat.

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781780769158

05 May 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors
David George Haskell

This is a beautifully written book that is worth reading for its aesthetics alone. Haskell deploys words and imagery in a candidly poetic way that most contemporary fiction writers (maybe outside of Latin America?) don't allow themselves to do. I also appreciate his refusal to treat science, culture, and ethics as separate concerns. I was frustrated often by the attendant lack of focus: is this book about trees? Anthropology? Philosophy? Ecology? In the end this book is a very long and beautiful tone poem.. and a bit of a mess.

Made me think about:
- Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780525427520

28 Apr 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ 

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past #1)
Liu Cixin, Ken Liu

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780765377067

06 Apr 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Goodnight Punpun Omnibus, Vol. 1
Inio Asano

Good, sweet, and true!

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781421586205

19 Mar 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Intersectionality
Patricia Hill Collins, Sirma Bilge

A good overview that also presents some of the areas of emergence and contestation in the field. I was a bit disappointed by the lack of specificity about the *how* of intersectional praxis.

Made me think about:
- When Species Meet
- Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict, and Memory in Everyday Life
- The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political
- Necropolitics

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780745684499

16 Mar 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
David Sax

What a frustratingly bad book on such an interesting and important topic. Entire chapters are given over to marketers from companies like Moleskine talking about how "there's just something special the feel of paper" etc, on repeated but unsupported arguments that digital technology is inherently alienating, and on a strongly implied but unexplored (e.g. in the title) assertion that some kind of groundswell of analog technology is happening as a result. He also spends approximately one sentence defining his terms: what exactly is meant by analog and by digital? In the end he drives away from his childhood summer camp in the warm glow of nostalgia, opting for a Neil Young song on the radio in preference to streaming "digital" music, his windows down to let in the summer breeze. The irony is that the broadcast equipment, the radio in his car, and probably the car itself are all largely digital equipment. Oh and no, IDEO did not invent human centered design. Ugh.

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781610395717

12 Mar 2019
✪ 

When Species Meet
Donna J. Haraway

Did I secretly read this book to give me air cover to watch animal odd-couple videos? Maybe. Did it reconfigure my model of self in the process? Yes.

Made me think about:
- Intersectionality
- How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780816650460

09 Mar 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs

This book fundamentally changed how I look at both cities and power. Wow.

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780375508738

01 Mar 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Why Not Eat Insects?
Vincent M. Holt

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780946014125

14 Feb 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
Geoffrey B. West

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9781594205583

12 Feb 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ 

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
Peter Morville, Louis Rosenfeld

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780596527341

12 Feb 2019

Adulthood Rites (Xenogenesis, #2)
Octavia E. Butler

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780446603782

19 Jan 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Dawn (Xenogenesis, #1)
Octavia E. Butler

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780446603775

19 Jan 2019
✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ 

Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders

worldcat | bookshop | isbn 9780812995343

03 Jan 2019
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2019 total: 45
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