May Reading List
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Here’s my reading list for May. This is last month’s list and you can follow it back from there. Went up late because of the fundraiser. If you all had donated what you should, that wouldn’t have happened.
Professional Reading:
- Alan Taylor, American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873 (Norton, 2024). Taylor is a major historian who has written a lot of great books. This book won the Pulitzer. But….you know, this is not Taylor’s best book. It’s a perfectly good overview of the Civil War and I would totally recommend it for this. You should read it. The bit is that he also brings Canada and Mexico into the story to make it about North America broady. But the truth is that Canada especially is just not central to the narrative and really feels like an add-on where you are like, oh right Canada just appeared for the first time in 80 pages. Mexico has a bit of this too, though the desires of southerners to expand slavery South and the French invasion mitigates this some. But if you are going to write a continental history, I do think it needs to be more balanced than this. Really, read Manisha Sinha’s book for the best recent overview of the period, which I think is slightly more successful, though again, Taylor’s book is just fine and covers more of the pre-war period.
- Brendan A. Shanahan, Disparate Regimes: Nativist Politics, Alienage Law, and Citizenship Rights in the United States, 1865-1895 (Oxford, 2025). A very important book looking at the centrality of the states in determining the rights of immigrants. States traditionally have had a ton of leeway here, sometimes, say, allowing non-citizens to vote in state elections, often pushing for even greater restrictions than the feds. An important book of legal history on a subject that could not be more vital.
- Matthew J. Tuiniga, The Wars of the Lord: The Puritan Conquest of America’s First People (Oxford, 2025). I don’t read a ton of colonial American history, but I am glad I read this book. With a pretty readable narrative, Tuiniga explores how the Puritans moved from simply discriminating over issues of faith to Indian hatred and genocide. I think he slightly overstates how tolerant Puritans could be; these are people involved in the conquest of Ireland after all and it wasn’t only faith driving them here, but it is a very fine book that will lay out the core issues of Puritans and Native Americans from 1620 to the aftermath of King Philip’s War in 1676.
- Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2000). I don’t often have real reason to explore older books in depth at this point, but I did have reason to go back to McGirr’s foundational book on the history of conservatism. Sure, a quarter century has expanded her insights, but for an intro text, this is still crazy valuable, looking at just what happened in Orange County in the 50s and 60s to build up to the rise of the modern right.
- Genevieve Guenther, The Language of Climate Politics: Fossil-Fuel Propaganda and How to Fight It (Oxford, 2024). This was a depressingly weird book to read, not because there’s anything wrong with it. In fact, Guenther does a great job describing the lies about climate change and how to refute them to the dishonest hacks making them. The problem is that no one cares about climate change anymore, even though it’s only the biggest crisis in the history of humanity. We are even told that liberals should stop trying! Great times! Useful book in a better world.
- Tami Parr, Goats in America: A Cultural History (Oregon State, 2025). Goats and humans have a long history and this little history does a perfectly fine job exploring the topic in the U.S., especially as the hippies embraced goats and all that meant to changes in American food culture. I hate hippies, but at least we have goat cheese. Doesn’t make up for carob though, not that carob is goat-related.
- Catharine Melin-Moser, When Montana Outraced the East: The Reign of Western Thoroughbreds, 1886-1900 (Oklahoma, 2025). There could be an interesting story here about how rich Montanans became major breeders of Kentucky Derby winning horses in the late 19th century. But this book is only concerned with the horses and if you don’t care about race horse history–and I do not–it has not much to offer.
- Donald C. Jackson, The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy: San Francisco’s Fight for a Yosemite Water Supply (Oklahoma, 2025). The literature on the Hetch Hetchy Dam focuses heavily on John Muir and the fight to stop the government from damming Yosemite National Park to provide San Francisco water after the 1906 earthquake. That makes sense, but Jackson changes the view to focus on the engineer who built the dam and all the machinations that went into it. It’s not as exciting as reading about environmental activism, but it’s certainly a worthy topic and a correction in a small but important corner of the literature.
- Brendan Rensink, ed.,The North American West in the Twenty-First Century (Nebraska, 2022). This is a good book with an odd premise. The premise is shock that the American people did not take the New Western History of the 80s and 90s seriously, particularly Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest, a book that was important in its impact but perhaps overrated in its content. But why would any historian be shocked that Americans do not in fact listen to historians and that elite media coverage of historians has absolutely nothing to do with how the general public perceives the past? No shit, no one cares about us and no one ever will. So that was weird. But then the essays themselves, minus the gratuitous homages to Limerick, are a really solid set of works that place serious issues of the 21st century West in historical context, from land use to historical memory to Native rights. So I’d recommend it.
Fiction/Literary Non-Fiction:
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The General in His Labyrinth. I don’t think GGM’s Simon Bolivar book, p is anyone’s favorite, especially when compared to A Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera. But it is an important text in his obsession over 19th century Colombia and as a story demonstrating why South America is going to be such a political nightmare, it explains its importance itself. His Bolivar is noble and vainglorious, a physical mess and a man with unbelievable pride and dignity, no matter what happens. What the book lacks is any discussion of his final chamber pot, which I have seen on display in Colombia and which made me very happy. Maybe not quite as happy as Trotsky’s chamber pot in Mexico City but a touch above the Chinese porcelain toilet in Martin Van Buren’s house in Kinderhook. I see no better way to evaluate literature than this.
- George Orwell, 1984. I am just going to say it–I think all the emphasis on Orwell in the Trump era to be totally offbase. 1984 is a story of the socialist disappointed. It is akin of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in the sense that midcentury intellectuals were really concerned about the decline of the individual, including under capitalism (which was the point of Fordism after all). The idea that Trumpism could be anything like what Orwell imagines in his Stalinist dystopia is absurd, largely because Stalin was competent and Trump is not. Miller and Hegesth and Patel can’t even dream of doing this. The book itself is important for its time, though a dreadful read because it is so depressing. It’s worth reading once. I read it 25 years ago. Reading it again, I wondered why and what I thought I was going to get from it. I doubt I will again. That says nothing about its quality or its importance at its time of publication, but thinking this has anything to say in 2026 is doomscrolling your fiction and why would you do that? If I want to explore betrayed, disappointed socialists, I have lots of ways to do so. Note: this is not a shot at Orwell. I think Homage to Catalonia is a superb book.
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun. The second of Ishiguro’s very human sci-fi books. Here he describes a dystopia where there are AI-friends for kids that could even replace them in a world where parents are taking their “special” kids and giving them genetic boosters to improve their standing in an unequal society risks their lives. Meanwhile, tech has thrown millions if not billions of people out of work and they are responding not through learning to whittle or becoming expert harmonica makers like those lefty post-work theorists imagine, but embracing race-based tribalism through violence. Boy, I’m sure glad Ishiguro made up this world! But, I don’t think this works as well as the gloriously brilliant Never Let Me Go, perhaps because the protagonist actually is the robot and therefore is written to not quite express the emotion it feels. But for me, it just never connected.
- David Mamet & Shel Silverstein, Things Change. I don’t know where I picked up the screenplay for this minor film, but it was at least 25 years ago. I picked it up again. My main takeaway, other than how tame it is for either one of those lunatics, is that it’s hard for me to read a screenplay as literature because I’m not used to slowing down like you need to consider the staging and everything else. So it was a useful exercise as such that I should do more, though perhaps with a more successful film. Although who can complain about work for Don Ameche and Joe Mantegna?
- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire. Abbey was an asshole, a sexist, a crank, an anti-immigrant asshole, a man who was a huge hypocrite in that he wrote about the beauty of the desert while bemoaning the tourism that his book then helped turbocharge. And yet, this is one of the best books ever written about the American West, a book of great beauty about what the remote desert West means to a lot of people, what exploration really means (or meant), about a moment just before everything was about to get a lot worse with the rise of paved roads into Arches and the building of the Glen Canyon Dam.
- Tyler Mahan Coe, Cocaine and Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Cocaine and Rhinestones is quite literally the only podcast I want to hear. Podcasts are so fucking boring. Blah blah blah blah and I can process all this info far faster by reading. Plus every second one flushes down the toilet of their life listening to bad podcasts is one second they could be listening to music that makes life worth living. So what makes C&R so great. It’s that Tyler Mahan Coe, son of David Allan and an autodidact in all the best ways, is as crazy as George and Tammy, and I say this with great love. The first season was all different country stories (minus the double episode on Buck Owens). It was fantastic. The second, on George and Tammy, on pinball and medieval jousts, on western wear and defending the Nashville Sound, on Catherine de Medici and Pig Robbins, is a mere 25 hours of pure outrageous deep dive glory. The book is the accessible version. It doesn’t all quite hold together, just like the pod doesn’t. Who cares when you are entering a mind like Coe’s with an obsessive research agenda like his as well. He makes many great points, including that not only is “He Stopped Loving Her Today” not the best country song of all time, it’s not the best country song on the album on which it appears, because that is “I’ve Aged Twenty Years in Five,” which is much more honest about George than the former and which George sings better. He also convinced me that “The Grand Tour,” which probably is George’s best song, is not about a divorce but about a dead wife and baby. But in the end, George and Tammy weren’t just flawed people. They were sad, sad people and the end of the pod/book almost makes you want to cry. I can’t wait for Season 3.
This is your monthly book thread.
And if you still haven’t donated to end this damn fundraiser once and for all–and really? you haven’t? after all this?–do so below: