To Do: Reading List

Nonfiction

1. Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority (Grewal)

2. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (Ransby)

3. Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver (Heinerth)

4. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (Criado Perez)

5. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Scott)

6. China and the Islamic World: How the New Silk Road is Transforming Global Politics (Bianchi)

7. History of Architectural Theory from Vitruvius to the Present (Kruft)

8. Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine (Aptowicz)

9. The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (Hsu)

10. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (WEB DuBois Center @UMass)

11. I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life (Yong)

12. Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco (Kamiya)

13. Engaging Classrooms and Communities through Art: The Guide to Designing and Implementing Community-Based Art Education (Krensky, Steffen)

14. Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (Maçães)

15. Knowledge Is Beautiful: Impossible Ideas, Invisible Patterns, Hidden Connections--Visualized (McCandless)

16. Unflattening (Sousanis)

17. The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge (Lima, Schneiderman)

18. Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists' Books and the Natural World (Fairman)

19. The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law (Burney)

20. The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them-And They Shape Us (Fisman, Sullivan)

21. Paper: Paging Through History (Kurlansky)

22. Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to Al-Qaeda (Wallace, Melton)

23. What Is Gender Nihilism? A Reader

24. China in Ten Words (Hua)

25. The Art of Tinkering: Meet 150+ Makers Working at the Intersection of Art, Science & Technology (Wilkinson, Petrich)

26. Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom (Martinez & Stager)

Fiction

1. The Push Man and other stories (Tatsumi, Oniki)

2. The Epicure’s Lament (Christensen)

3. The Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America (Kracht)

4. The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider’s House (Bowles)

5. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (North)

6. The Wanting Seed (Burgess)

7. The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst)

8. False Knees: An Illustrated Guide to Animal Behavior (Barkman)

9. The Fat Years (Chan)

10. Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi (Jamal)

Read & Annotated, Working on Chapter Summaries

1. Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer (Collins)

2. The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (Wrangham)

3. The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (Economy)

Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece

Feminist Media Criticism, George R.R. Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire, And That Sady Doyle Piece by Alyssa Rosenberg A much more level-headed response to criticism of GRRM’s approach to women that asks us to take a more objective view of storytelling, and refuses to equate the story with the writer or the reader.

My friends and I have remarked how GRRM’s mothers (those without grown children: Cersei Lannister, Catelyn Stark, Tanda Stokeworth, Lysa Arryn, etc.) are characterized as having “mother’s madness”. Their attempts to protect their children seem ill-advised, and at times harm their other offspring (Rickon, Myrcella). We had a hard time naming sane mothers who behaved rationally, other than the Queen of Thorns (Olenna Redwyne). Daenerys, the ultimate Mother, also fears the madness of her house’s blood, and my friends and I have yet to decide what this exception might mean for the series’ future and GRRM’s stance on mothers. All the same, it would do our minds a disservice if we reacted to this question with nothing but all-caps outrage and exceptionalism. I’m not saying Sady Doyle doesn’t make some good points about orientalism, etc., but Alyssa Rosenberg points out some telling flaws in her arguments that, I feel, often characterize the more embarassing portions of New Wave Feminism.