The challenge, read 50 books in one year. I am a notoriously distracted reader, jumping from one to another and not always returning to those I start. So this is my attempt to make sure I finish some of them.
10) God's Pocket--Pete Dexter (1983, Penguin reprint 1995)
This is Dexter's first novel written when he was 40 (after 15 years as a journalist) and while he was recovering from a savage beating by an angry crowd. As the biography goes, he was a hard-drinking, brawling, old-school reporter who did a piece on a young murdered South Philadelphia drug dealer. The family was angered over his public exposure of the youth's background and called him up and physically threatened him. Naturally being a hard-headed individual he took the physical threats as a personal challenge and headed directly to the local bar where the brothers of the murder victim grew up. He received and survived the beating of a lifetime and during the recovery a novelist was born. The novel is a powerful, dark, brooding portrayal of the hard bitter achievements and desperate pains of a small insular neighborhood. This is the type of story that last year's Mystic River (a good film, but oh so flawed) could have been...
9) Blue Eyes--Jerome Charyn (1974; reprinted in the Four Walls, Eight Windows 2002 collection The Isaac Quartet)
Blue Eyes is one of the best hard-boiled detective novels I have ever read. Charyn doesn't just tell this story, he grabs you by the scruff of the neck and sticks your nose into the brutal environment of low-level detectives and gangsters on the make. Detective Manfred Coen, the mysterious shadow figure Isaac, the deformed snitch Spanish Arnold, Chino the pint-sized macho-criminal, the bizarre Peruvian Guzman crime family, baby Jeronimo and crazy Sheb, the lustrous Odile and the dyke bouncers of the nightclub The Dwarf, are just some of the crazy, colorful and most importantly, carefully created, believable characters. Charyn even manages to make Ping-Pong cool and exciting as pool in the movie The Hustler. This book is a must for all fans of powerful literature--do not let the genre trappings fool you, this is a masterful writer at the top of his form. Whatever you do, avoid most reviews until you have read the novel because there is a major plot secret that most reviewers give away--in fact do not read the intro to the Isaac Quartet until you have read the first volume as Charyn himself gives it away. I heard that the next three novels in the Quartet venture into even more experimental forms... luckily they are all in this handy volume. I'm going to be on the hunt for more books by Jerome Charyn (I think he has 36 books published).
8) A Case of Conscience--James Blish (1958; Del Rey reprint 2000)
A book of ideas set in the future. Deals with human fears/misunderstandings of the Other/difference, the struggles of religious conscience, the limitations of technocratic knowledge, and the rebellion of the young. It was written in 1958 and has the pulpish trappings of late 50s science fiction, but it still speaks to the concerns of 2004. The book certainly will appeal more to those that have dealt with internal struggles of faith and knowledge (the main character struggles with the contradictions of being both a scientist and a priest). I liked it so much that I hunted down a collectible hardback copy of his novel Dr. Mirabilis (1964).
7) The Social Mind—James Paul Gee (1992)
I reread this book for the second time so that I could discuss a smaller reading from the book with my students. It is also on my PhD comprehensive exam lists.
6) The Deep—John Crowley (1975)
I kept seeing raves about Crowley's books so I read his first book The Deep. On the surface it is about a mysterious stranger that has amnesia while wandering around a feudalistic environment. The society which is divided into two constantly shifting, warring factions thrives upon pageantry and intrigue. The book touches upon the mysteries of beginnings and endings, game theory, and our deeper dark passions (of course all in an otherworldly fantasy).
5) Critical Thinking and Everyday Life—Ira Shor (South End Press, 1980)
I read this book because it is on my PhD Comprehensive exams list. It is somewhat outdated, but still is worth the read because of Shor’s historical analysis of the development of an open college system in the U.S. and his pedagogical experiments.
4) Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era—Patrick Slattery (Garland Publishing, 1995)
Good ideas for rethinking how we can redesign the classes we teach simply by paying more attention to the development of innovative curriculums.
3) Times Square Red, Times Square Blue—Samuel R. Delany (New York University Press, 1999)
2) Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past—Eviatar Zerubavel (University of Chicago Press, 2003)
1) A Friend of the Earth—T.C. Boyle (Penguin, 2001)
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