“Novel” Reading in 2019

Following my annual practice, I have listed here my “novel” reading for 2019. This is a way of documenting what I get through in a year’s worth of reading on the commute to work, in the evenings after work, and while travelling on those airplane journeys from/to Sydney outside of my “normal”  academic reading. My use of the term “novel” reading is loosely adopted, as you will see from the list.

I have read so many outstanding books this year that stretch across the racialised violence of borders, frontiers, landscapes and geographies. From Claire Coleman to Greg Grandin, from Jorge Amado to Cormac McCarthy, from Valeria Luiselli to Monica Muñoz Martinez it has been a bumper year of reading. Looking forward to 2020 already!

1. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; Or The Evening Redness in the West [1985], intro. Philipp Meyer (Picador, 2015) [a re-read].
2. Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso [1320], trans. ed. and intro. Robin Kirkpatrick. (Penguin, 2012).
3. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Or The Modern Prometheus [1818] (Penguin, 2018).
4. Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).
5. James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land [2008] (Black Inc., 2018).
6. Samuel Chamberlain, My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue, intro. and postscript Roger Butterfield (Harper & Brothers, 1956).
7. Raewyn Connell, The Good University: what universities actually do and why it’s time for radical change (Zed Books, 2019).
8. Don Winslow, The Border (Harper Collins, 2019).
9. Juan Pablo Villalobos, I’ll Sell You a Dog [Te vendo un perro], trans. Rosalind Harvey (And Other Stories, 2016).
10. Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (Metropolitan Books, 2019).
11. Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths (Penguin, 2018).
12. Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2018).
13. Mike Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (Verso, 2018).
14. Philipp Meyer, The Son (Simon & Schuster, 2013).
15. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (University of California Press, 2003).
16. Hernán Diaz, In the Distance (Daunt Books, 2017).
17. J. Frank Dobie, Tales of Old Time Texas [1928] (University of Texas Press, 2011).
18. Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth [La historia de mis dientes, 2013], trans. Christina MacSweeny (Granta, 2015).
19. Chloe Aridjis, Sea Monsters (Chatto & Windus, 2019).
20. Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive (4th Estate, 2019).
21. Claire G. Coleman, The Old Lie (Hachette, 2019).
22. Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose (Penguin, 1971).
23. Tim Winton, The Shepherd’s Hut (Penguin, 2018).
24. Tim Winton, Island Home: A Landscape Memoir (Penguin, 2015).
25. Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America [1995] (University of Texas Press, 2018).
26. Heather Goodall and Allison Cadzow, Rivers of Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney’s George’s River (UNSW Press, 2009).
27. Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas (Harvard University Press, 2018).
28. Jorge Amado, The Violent Land [Terras do sem-fim, 1943], trans. Samuel Putnam, intro. Alfred Mac Adam (Penguin, 2013).