2000s Books
For many of these, the dates I read them are approximate.
| Title | Author | Date Finished | Rating | Publisher | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Blade Itself (The First Law, #1) | Joe Abercrombie | 2009/12/25 | 4 | Gollancz, 2007 | |
| Bayou, Vol. 1 | Jeremy Love | 2009/10/29 | 5 | Zuda, 2009 | “Lee Wagstaff is the daughter of a sharecropper who enters a magical world called ““The Bayou”” in order to save her father from being lynched. Along the way, she meets a wide variety of mysterious, fantastical, and horrifying characters who help and hinder her quest. ““Bayou”” is a fable set in the Jim Crow South, using the history of American racism as a kind of symbolic dictionary, and ends up being equal parts sweet and horrifying.Beautiful art and amazing storytelling–highly recommended!” |
| A History of Capitalism, 1500-2000 | Michel Beaud | 2009/09/03 | 3 | Monthly Review Press, 2002 | |
| Cryptonomicon | Neal Stephenson | 2009/06/30 | 3 | Avon, 2002 | |
| The History of Geographic Information Systems: Perspectives from the Pioneers (Prentice Hall Series in Geographic Information Science) | Timothy Foresman | 2009/04/28 | 4 | Prentice Hall, 1997 | |
| Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems | John Pickles | 2009/02/10 | 4 | The Guilford Press, 1994 | Read My Notes |
| Soon I Will Be Invincible | Austin Grossman | 2009/01/16 | 2 | Pantheon Books, 2007 | “The first few chapters were excellent, but the ending was totally un-satisfying, given the build-up. Alanna and I figured out two other endings that would have been way better in the 10 minutes that we talked about it. The book tells the story of an ““evil genius”” type supervillain named Dr. Impossible as he breaks out of prison and plots his next scheme. But what the book initially does very well is provide a wonderful sub-text to the Super-villain idea, talking about his motives, his objectives, and why it is that super-villains (and heroes for that matter) always talk in declaratives (i.e. the title). I guess, in the final analysis, it was good, but could have been SOOOOO much better. " |
| Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut | Paul R. Mullins | 2009/01/10 | 5 | University Press of Florida, 2008 | Read My Notes |
| Powers, Vol. 1: Who Killed Retro Girl? | Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Avon Oeming | 2009/01/01 | 4 | Image Comics, 2006 | |
| The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1) | Patrick Rothfuss | 2009/01/01 | 4 | Penguin Group DAW, 2007 | |
| Marx’s Das Kapital: A Biography | Francis Wheen | 2009/01/01 | 5 | Atlantic Books, 2006 | Great short introduction to a difficult and rewarding book. It gives lots of context on Marx’s life as he was trying to write, and includes lots of primary sources describing London, and Marx’s relationships with friends, family, and publishers. It also presents a good summary of the arguments in Capital, as well as the influence that the book had after Marx’s death, and the ways in which it was used and misused to a variety of different political and social ends. |
| Locke & Key, Vol. 1: Welcome to Lovecraft | Joe Hill, Robert Crais, Joe Hill | 2009/01/01 | 4 | IDW Publishing, 2013 | |
| Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama | Tim Wise | 2009/01/01 | 4 | City Lights Publishers, 2009 | |
| H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life | Michel Houellebecq, Dorna Khazeni, Stephen King | 2008/11/30 | 3 | McSweeney’s, Believer Books, 2005 | Read My Notes |
| The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class | David R. Roediger, Kathleen Cleaver | 2008/11/09 | 4 | Verso, 2007 | |
| The Archaeology of Collective Action | DEAN J. SAITTA | 2008/07/29 | 5 | University Press of Florida, 2007 | Read My Notes |
| The Horror in the Museum & Other Revisions | H.P. Lovecraft, S.T. Joshi, August Derleth | 2008/07/07 | 2 | Arkham House Publishers, Inc., 1989 | |
| I Am America (And So Can You!) | Stephen Colbert | 2008/07/07 | 2 | Grand Central Publishing, 2007 | |
| Autobiography of an Ex-White Man: Learning a New Master Narrative for America | Robert Paul Wolff | 2008/06/01 | 4 | University of Rochester Press, 2005 | Read My Notes |
| The Man in My Basement | Walter Mosley | 2008/04/20 | 4 | Back Bay Books, 2005 | Haunting and complex, despite its short length, and clear writing style. I want to read it again–I feel like I devoured it, and didn’t let it provoke me as much as it should have. It’s a nuanced discussion of race, power, capitalism, and, if I understood it correctly, presents a pretty bleak view of who we become when we’re given power, and how it changes us irrevocably. |
| The Sandman: The Dream Hunters | Neil Gaiman, Yoshitaka Amano | 2008/01/25 | 5 | DC Comics Vertigo, 2000 | |
| Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage | William L. Rathje, Cullen Murphy | 2008/01/01 | 4 | University of Arizona Press, 2001 | |
| “Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ““Race”” in New England, 1780-1860” | Joanne Pope Melish | 2008/01/01 | 4 | Cornell University Press, 1998 | |
| The Filth | Grant Morrison | 2008/01/01 | 3 | Vertigo, 2004 | |
| Those who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History) | Hal S. Barron | 2008/01/01 | 3 | Cambridge University Press, 1988 | |
| Field Methods in Archaeology | Thomas R. Hester, Kenneth L. Feder | 2007/01/01 | 4 | McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages, 1997 | |
| In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire | Mike Davis | 2007/01/01 | 5 | Haymarket Books, 2007 | |
| City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles | Mike Davis | 2007/01/01 | 5 | Vintage, 1992 | “A controversial social history of Los Angeles that basically predicated the L.A. riots. Has powerful and insightful chapters on L.A.’s war on the poor, gang culture, the ““imagination industry””, and even manages to make housing code policy into an interesting subject. You’ll never look at L.A. the same way again….” |
| What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America | Thomas Frank | 2007/01/01 | 5 | Picador, 2005 | The best book about modern politics I’ve read to date. All kinds of shit about elections, campaigning, and media started to make sense once I thought about it in light of this book. |
| The Battle for Christmas | Stephen Nissenbaum | 2007/01/01 | 5 | Vintage, 1997 | “A cultural analysis of Christmas, written in a clear and engaging style. Why do we give presents to children? Why does santa claus smoke ““the stub of a pipe””? Why, 300 years ago, did the Puritans ban Christmas for several decades? I re-read it every holiday. " |
| The Country and the City in the Modern Novel | Raymond Williams | 2007/01/01 | 5 | Oxford University Press, 1975 | Everything that great scholarship should be. The first chapter involves an escalator, and is worth the price alone, and while some of the succeeding sections can be a little dry (I had a hard time caring about pastoral poetry), Williams always manages to make powerful points and keep the reader reading. The book makes a powerful case that the Urban-Rural spatial-relationship actively structures our lives in ways we don’t often recognize, let alone comprehend. Call it a literary history of space. |
| Spaces of Hope | David Harvey | 2007/01/01 | 3 | University of California Press, 2000 | What is globalization? What is the body? How are they interlinked in modern consciousness? How might an equitable future be constructed, given the rise of these terms, and their salience in both progressive and conservative thought? Harvey addresses all of these questions, though I did find some of his narrative signposts a little random. |
| The Wake (The Sandman, #10) | Neil Gaiman, Michael Zulli, Jon J. Muth, Charles Vess, Mikal Gilmore | 2006/05/30 | 5 | Vertigo, 1997 | |
| Worlds' End (The Sandman, #8) | Neil Gaiman, Mike Allred, Gary Amaro, Mark Buckingham, Dick Giordano, Tony Harris, Steve Leialoha, Vince Locke, Shea Anton Pensa, Alec Stevens, Bryan Talbot, John Watkiss, Michael Zulli, Stephen King | 2006/05/30 | 5 | Vertigo, 1995 | |
| A Game of You (The Sandman, #5) | Neil Gaiman, Shawn McManus, Colleen Doran, Bryan Talbot, George Pratt, Stan Woch, Dick Giordano, Samuel R. Delany | 2006/05/30 | 4 | Vertigo, 1993 | |
| Fables & Reflections (The Sandman, #6) | Neil Gaiman, Bryan Talbot, Stan Woch, P. Craig Russell, Shawn McManus, John Watkiss, Jill Thompson, Duncan Eagleson, Kent Williams, Gene Wolfe, Mark Buckingham, Vince Locke, Dick Giordano | 2006/05/30 | 4 | Vertigo, 1994 | |
| Dead Cities: And Other Tales | Mike Davis | 2006/01/01 | 5 | New Press, The, 2003 | |
| Against Cultural Property: Archaeology,Heritage and Ownership (Debates in Archaeology) | John Carman, Richard Hodges | 2006/01/01 | 4 | Bristol Classical Press, 2005 | |
| Selections from the Prison Notebooks | Antonio Gramsci, Quintin Hoare, Geoffrey Nowell Smith | 2006/01/01 | 4 | International Publishers Co, 1971 | |
| An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States | Charles A. Beard | 2005/01/01 | 5 | Dover Publications, 2004 | “I think of this book anytime that anyone uses the phrase “”…the way the founders intended””. Beard makes clear that the founders intended to create a merchant/industrial capitalist paradise, free from royal meddling, and to re-write the laws of the land to implement it. Everything else in the constitution was just gravy. " |
| The Hipster Handbook | Robert Lanham, Jeff Bechtel, Bret Nicely | 2005/01/01 | 3 | Anchor, 2003 | |
| Marxism and Literature | Raymond Williams | 2005/01/01 | 4 | Oxford University Press, 1978 | |
| History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics | György Lukács, Rodney Livingstone | 2004/01/01 | 3 | The MIT Press, 1972 | |
| Armed Madhouse: Who’s Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats, Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal ‘08, No Child’s Behind Left, and Other Dispatches from the FrontLines of the Class W | Greg Palast | 2004/01/01 | 4 | Dutton, 2006 | “Not as good as ““The Best Democracy Money can Buy””, but really insightful reporting by a courageous journalist. The best sections regard the two plans for rebuilding Iraq, and voter suppression tactics across the US (coming to you in 2008!)” |
| The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 | Eric J. Hobsbawm | 2004/01/01 | 4 | Abacus, 1997 | |
| The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change | David Harvey | 2004/01/01 | 5 | Wiley-Blackwell, 1992 | “I read this book, and went ““Holy Shit! The last 25 years finally make some sense!”” Plus, it’s got a killer analysis of ““Blade Runner””. If you can wade through (or have a mind for) the economics, you’ll love it. " |
| Kings of Infinite Space | James Hynes | 2004/01/01 | 5 | Picador USA, 2005 | Worth every penny… everything that great off-kilter fiction should be. Strange, funny, quite scary at times. I’m not even sure how to classify it in terms of genre. Plus, it has one of the best last pages of any book I’ve ever read. |
| Europe and the People Without History | Eric R. Wolf | 2004/01/01 | 5 | University of California Press, 1982 | |
| Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley | Peter Guralnick | 2004/01/01 | 4 | Back Bay Books, 1995 | |
| Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 | Karl Marx, Ben Fowkes, Ernest Mandel | 2004/01/01 | 5 | Penguin Classics, 1992 | |
| Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West | Dee Brown | 2003/01/01 | 4 | Holt, Rinehart & Winston , 1970 | |
| The Best Democracy Money Can Buy | Greg Palast, Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo | 2003/01/01 | 5 | Plume Books, 2004 | |
| The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch | Philip K. Dick | 2003/01/01 | 3 | Gollancz, 2010 | |
| Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic | Jim DeRogatis | 2002/09/01 | 4 | Crown, 2000 | |
| Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain | Charles R. Cross | 2002/06/01 | 4 | Hyperion, 2001 | |
| A People’s History of the United States | Howard Zinn | 2002/01/01 | 5 | Harper Perennial, 2005 | |
| Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art | Scott McCloud | 2002/01/01 | 5 | William Morrow Paperbacks, 1993 | |
| Subculture: The Meaning of Style | Dick Hebdige | 2002/01/01 | 5 | Routledge, 1981 | |
| A History of Archaeological Thought | Bruce G. Trigger | 2002/01/01 | 3 | Cambridge University Press (Cambridge et al.), 1990 | |
| Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader | Lester Bangs, John Morthland, Rebecca Aidlin | 2002/01/01 | 5 | Anchor, 2003 | Read My Notes |
| Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity | David Hurst Thomas | 2002/01/01 | 5 | Basic Books, 2001 | Probably one of the best books ever written on the on-going relationship between archaeologists and Native people in the U.S. Penetrating analysis, long-view social history, and political activism are all wound up in this tale of the battle over skulls. The edition I had was published before the announcement of the Kennewick Man/Ancient One decision, but I suspect that future editions will include that, and new controversies as they spring up. |
| American Gods | Neil Gaiman | 2001/01/01 | 4 | Harper Perennial, 2003 | |
| Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung | Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus | 2001/01/01 | 5 | Anchor, 1988 | |
| Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice (New Studies in Archaeology) | Michael Shanks, Christopher Tilley | 2001/01/01 | 3 | Cambridge University Press, 1987 | |
| Preacher, Volume 5: Dixie Fried | Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon | 2000/01/01 | 5 | Vertigo, 1998 | |
| Preacher, Volume 9: Alamo | Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon | 2000/01/01 | 5 | Vertigo, 2001 | |
| Preacher, Volume 6: War in the Sun | Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, Peter Snejbjerg | 2000/01/01 | 5 | Vertigo, 1999 | |
| Preacher, Volume 8: All Hell’s a-Coming | Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, John McCrea | 2000/01/01 | 5 | Vertigo, 2000 | |
| Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk | Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain | 2000/01/01 | 5 | Grove Press, 1996 | One of the best cultural histories I’ve ever read. Everyone who was anyone in punk rock between 1968 and 1980-something is in this book. And there is NO accompanying text. It’s only the words of those who lived it, strung together. |
| Season of Mists (The Sandman, #4) | Neil Gaiman, Kelley Jones, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, Matt Wagner, Dick Giordano, George Pratt, P. Craig Russell, Harlan Ellison | 2000/01/01 | 5 | Vertigo, 1992 | |
| Dream Country (The Sandman, #3) | Neil Gaiman, Kelley Jones, Charles Vess, Colleen Doran, Malcolm Jones III, Steve Erickson | 2000/01/01 | 5 | Vertigo, 1995 | |
| The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones (The Sandman, #9) | Neil Gaiman, Mark Hempel, Richard Case, D’Israeli, Teddy Kristiansen, Glyn Dillon, Charles Vess, Dean Ormston, Keven Nowlan, Frank McConnell | 2000/01/01 | 4 | Vertigo, 1996 | |
| World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War | Max Brooks | 2008/01/01 | 4 | Crown, 2006 | |
| The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2) | Dan Brown | 2006/01/01 | 0 | Anchor, 2006 | |
| Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora | Sheree Renée Thomas, W.E.B. Du Bois, Kalamu ya Salaam, Samuel R. Delany, Nalo Hopkinson, Akua Lezli Hope, Charles W. Chesnutt, Octavia E. Butler, Linda Addison, Charles R. Saunders, Nisi Shawl, Steven Barnes, Jewelle L. Gómez, Henry Dumas, Tony Medina, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Robert Fleming, Derrick A. Bell, Darryl A. Smith, Ama Patterson, Walter Mosley, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Paul D. Miller, Evie Shockley, Leone Ross, Tananarive Due, Amiri Baraka | 2004/01/01 | 4 | Aspect, 2001 | |
| The New Oxford Book of Carols | Hugh Keyte, Andrew Parrott, Clifford Bartlett | 2001/12/25 | 5 | Oxford University Press, USA, 1998 | |
| Dream Brother: The Lives and Music of Jeff and Tim Buckley | David Browne | 2001/06/01 | 3 | It Books, 2002 |
