Reading Diary: Jan. 16-31, 2021 (Patreon)

Will try to cover articles and essays as well as books in these from now on. It'll help to get other people's work out there and let me keep track of what I've been reading. I'm also going to write these posts more like streams of consciousness rather than straight-up lists. That way you have something to read from me while I work on Mirkwood.

Most importantly, the pieces I've written for The Stony Brook Press, my university's lovely student-run culture magazine, are now available. Turning Point USA's takeover of my campus was a less fun subject to write about than The Matrix Resurrections, but I feel good about having bylines, and I'm proud of my work. 

Onto books. I'm still working through Cryptonomicon, The Black Jacobins, and Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness, the latter of which has prompted a Christian activism and prayer reading kick. The best new book I've started these past few weeks is easily Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, a contemplative masterpiece that doubles as a polemical Christo-feminist tract. I've also started working through Gustavo Gutiérrez's classic A Liberation of Theology, one of the vital ecumenical Christian texts of the 20th century and yet immensely readable. 

Recently I watched The Young Pope again (last time I stopped after Episode 4 because the show was triggering me a bit). That show's mastery of the Vatican's camp, deceptively populist strangeness prompted me to learn Roman Curia politics, so I've begun reading The Pontiff in Winter, John Cornwell's well-researched and engaging biography of John Paul II. John Paul, or Cardinal Wojtyla in another stage of his life, was a deceptively ruthless politician: profoundly charismatic, but capable of becoming a backstabbing motherfucker. Cornwell book gives you a good idea of how fucked the Vatican is; Humanae vitae wouldn't be the text it is without that little pervert Johnny Paul.

This morning I started reading Julieann Campbell's On Bloody Sunday, a new oral history of the Bloody Sunday massacre whose 50th anniversary was yesterday. Haven't gotten too far, but I expect it's good stuff.

There's been some good journalism and general nonfiction this month. My old comrade Aaron Fernando is doing great on-the-ground coverage of Haiti's poverty and exploitation by the U.S., while Truthout has a strong piece on how Puerto Rico's debt crisis is devastating the island. The great Kim Kelly recently talked to striking coal miners in Alabama, as Ari Berman covered racist Repubican gerrymandering. The Real News ran an interesting piece on the decline of American journalism. I could have sworn I remembered reading this Scientific American piece on the first trans clinic, but it's paywalled. Sigh. So much for reading.