October Reading List

Here’s my October reading list. You can see last month’s list here and follow it back from there.

Professional Reading:

1. Elie Mystal, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws that Are Ruining America (The New Press, 2025). Mystal, who is the law writer for The Nation, writes an iconoclastic book where he focuses on specific bad laws that hurt Americans, as opposed to, say, talking about the Constitution’s problems. He does so with no shortage of swearing and jokes and being really pissed off at a lot of people, including Ted Kennedy, who was behind several of these laws as part of his ambition to become president. Some of the laws include the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 (Carter signing it is pictured above), Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005, the Hyde Amendment, and the parts of the Immigration and Naturalization Act that criminalize re-entry of undocumented migrants. It’s an interesting approach and certainly has the ability to engage readers about the law in ways that boring writing that seeks to be “respectable” does not. And if anyone has no interest in traditionally notions of respectability, it’s me, so I liked it.
2. Arlie Russell Hochschild, Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right (The New Press, 2024). Hochschild’s work is well known as a sociologist exploring the rise of the right in rural America. Focusing on eastern Kentucky, she went deep into what motivates the rise of the far right and rightfully I think comes up with the loss of pride. This does tie a lot together–pride in work (manly work particularly), pride in a certain vision of America, pride in being a breadwinner, pride in a community that is functional. Whatever you want to say about the rise of the far right, the loss of pride is real enough and it is largely centered among poor whites who are just furiously angry, and it is very heavily focused on economics. This is where the mix of economic and cultural analysis is critically necessary. Yes, these people are racist and misogynist and homophobic. But at the core of their resentments is a belief that others are doing better than them and if you are the son of a Kentucky coal miner who has nothing but fetanayl, you might indeed be a fuckup, but if you see the existence of affirmative action, you can easily imagine some kind of conspiracy against you. In short, the best way to fight this is to center good jobs in working class communities. Democrats totally failed at this once they started focusing on market efficiency under Carter as the core reason to organize social programs and of course all Republicans offer is the racism and homophobia and misogyny as outlets. But hey, at least it’s something for them. This is probably a book everyone should read, even if you don’t agree with my analysis of the whole issue.
3. Katrinell M. Davis, Tainted Tap: Flint’s Journey from Crisis to Recovery (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). A very strong sociologist’s look at the Flint water crisis, including its structural issues going back to the 1960s, the indifference of Republicans to what was going on there, and the complex reactions of various community members on what to do about it all.
4. Marie Arana, Latinoland: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Arana provides a broad history and current event overview that demonstrates the complexity of the Latino community and explores that even really means. She covers a lot of ground, which means that anyone is going to wish for more of this and that. I wanted a lot more on labor; other than the United Farm Workers, there isn’t much on the long history of Latino labor organizing that ranges from Cuban cigar workers in Florida to Mexican farmworkers making alliances with Japanese farmworkers in early twentieth century California. But still, it’s a good overview for a broad audience. Note: right at the beginning she takes on the stupidity of the Latinx foolishness, which she quotes people ranging from Latina lesbians to Junot Diaz on how this term is another example of outsiders imposing language on a community. As I’ve stated many times, ally culture turns white liberals into the dumbest version of themselves and this is a prime example.
5. George J. Sánchez, Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood became the Future of American Democracy (University of California Press, 2021). Sanchez is a long time respected historian of the Latino experience. Here, he examines the transformations in the working class Boyle Heights neighborhood, its cross-ethnic and racial alliances, its changing demographics, and how much of LA and American history intersect in the area.
6. Daudi Abe, Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle (University of Washington Press, 2020). OK, Seattle has never been a hip-hop mecca, but there’s Sir Mix a Lot and Mackelmore and one of the guys from Digable Planets. In any case, lots of cities have hip hop scenes and histories of them may not in fact have changed hip hop but they are useful ways to understand urban history, race, and transformations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and that’s as true of Seattle and St. Louis as of Atlanta and New York, even if the overall number of rappers who hit it big wasn’t as high.
7. Nick Juravich and Steve Striffler, eds., The Pandemic and the Working Class: How U.S. Labor Navigated Covid-19. (University of Illinois Press, 2025). A very useful edited volume on working class responses to the pandemic that cover a wide swath of different issues, from inflation and the Great Resignation to care work and psychologists and nurses and education.

Fiction/Literary Non-Fiction

1. Ivan Doig, The Bartender’s Tale. I love This House of Sky, one of the best books about the West ever written. But Doig’s fiction has always struck me as pretty flat and uninteresting and The Bartender’s Tale, one of his later books, from 2012, doesn’t really change my opinion. The story of a 12 year old boy whose father is a famous bartender and the summer where everything changes for him is an alright book. One problem though is that it’s really hard for an old man like Doig was when he wrote this to accurately portray a 12 year old boy. It’s a hard age to nail down, that border year between being a kid and a teen. Some bits ring true, others seem pretty off. There’s some adventures, a folklorist, lots of discussions of rural Montana and the world created there after the New Deal, family drama, a flood, and a bunch of stuff that is breezily gone through without too much tension. It’s fine enough compared to the average book. There was some attempt to market this as a YA novel and I’m not sure it quite pulls that off either, though I don’t know these books that well.
2. John Le Carré, Call for the Dead. I’d read Le Carré’s debut 1961 novel before and it still retains its power as a piece about the utter shit that was spy work and that’s what I’ve always loved about him, as so many do. No James Bond nonsense here. It all sucks. Except for the novel. That doesn’t suck.
3. Halle Butler, Banal Nightmare. I mentioned this 2024 book recently because it is so wonderfully scabrous about liberal talking points and about small college towns and about the self-serving bullshit of contemporary academia, all while actually providing something of a redemption narrative for an extraordinarily flawed main character. Funny on top of it all unless you are really digging on the idea that NPR and the cult of Ruth Bader Ginsburg are pillars of serious liberalism. And I don’t recommend that.
4. Benjamin Labatut, The MANIAC. This is the 2023 follow up on the Chilean writer’s earlier book When We Cease to Understand the World, which was a series of short stories on how modern theoretical science is basically madness personified. In this book, Labatut tells a longer story based around John Von Neumann and the people who knew him. The connects between science and madness remains very strong here, moving toward advanced computing and especially AI, which is a monster growing every day. The last third of the book focuses on AI defeating Go experts in Japan and what that means for the future. I liked the Von Neumann part a good bit, but the Go bit isn’t really as compelling.
5. V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas. Naipaul’s 4th novel is this 1961 masterpiece, which I read every five years or so. Some people avoid Naipaul because he was a pretty bad human and could be quite racist toward the Black people of the areas he wrote about. And this novel about an Indian man in Trinidad and the crazy but downwardly mobile family he married into basically doesn’t discuss Black people on the island at all except in passing and without character development. I won’t question any of that, except to say that it’s sad to avoid problematic authors when the novel itself is not particularly problematic. This is an amazing book about a man’s search for place and identity and I will always recommend this to everyone.

This is your monthly book thread.