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Literature @beehaw.org alyaza [they/she] @beehaw.org

the now-finalized Alyaza read list of 2023

newest to oldest

  • White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America’s Heartland
  • The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible
  • I'm Glad My Mom Died
  • Depart, Depart!
  • The World As We Knew It: Dispatches From a Changing Climate
  • The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War
  • The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
  • Radicalism in the Mountain West, 1890-1920: Socialists, Populists, Miners, and Wobblies
  • The Red Corner: The Rise and Fall of Communism in Northeastern Montana
  • Zapatista Spring: Anatomy of a Rebel Water Project & the Lessons of International Solidarity
  • The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet
  • Fire, Storm Flood: The Violence of Climate Change
  • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
  • The Sphinx: Franklin Roosevelt, the Isolationists, and the Road to World War II
  • Sea of Tranquility
  • The Revivalists
  • The Fated Sky
  • The New Wilderness
  • Project Hail Mary
  • The Greatest Polar Expedition of All Time: The Arctic Mission to the Epicenter of Climate Change
  • I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
  • Denial (by Jon Raymond)
  • America City
  • The 2084 Report: An Oral History of the Great Warming
  • The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science
  • The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
  • Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
  • Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame
  • Modern Sudanese Poetry: An Anthology
  • Columbine (by Dave Cullen)
  • The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation
  • California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What It Means for America's Power Grid
  • I Hate You-Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality
  • The Man Who Caught the Storm: The Life of Legendary Tornado Chaser Tim Samaras
  • Sandy Hook (by Elizabeth Williamson)
  • Roll Red Roll: Rape, Power, and Football in the American Heartland
  • Fire and Flood (by Eugene Linden)
  • Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
  • The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration
  • Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution
  • Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History
  • The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption
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18 comments

  • Are you ok? Because I wouldn't be mainlining that much doom.

  • commentary for a few of these: I'll Be Gone in the Dark

    i... very much do not like I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, and i feel like i only need this particular passage to illustrate why. what i can appreciate about it is really limited to keeping this serial killer from recessing into history and getting away with his crimes. as an actual book, and as actual text on page, i have a lot of issues with this one! i don't really like how it's written so casually; i dislike how it's presented and the jumbled order of things; i really did not appreciate[^1] the gratuitous detail of how many of the Golden State Killer's rapes were committed, leading to such just. unbelievable paragraphs as:

    Common sense, and any cop, will tell you that the no-pants rapist is an unsophisticated teenage peeper who just graduated from misdemeanor to crudely conceived felony. The punk doing the no-pants dance suffers from poor impulse control and will be arrested swiftly.

    i think in general, the book reads like a jumble of blogs—and that would be fine if not for the fact that it's a book and not a jumble of blogs. it's a book that has been edited, and if this is what they salvaged in editing it, then... yeah. probably should have been kept in drafts overall. this solidified my general dislike of true crime

    [^1]: for reasons both publicly decent and personal

  • You have a stronger will than I, being able to read all that and (presumably) not go insane in the process. Was there anything in particular that you learned that stuck out to you?

      • climate change projections are really a CYOA depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you want to be, and there is zero agreement on what remedies should be undertaken as a part of resolving it
      • virtually all of the reporting you've probably ever heard about Columbine is polluted by some degree of mistruth, miscommunication, or lies from the media, the police, or relevant parties with their own agendas
      • if there's any justice in the world, Pacific Gas & Electric executives will all be sent to the 9th circle of hell
      • socialists got pretty wacky when they were allowed to take power throughout the mountain West during the heyday of the Socialist Party of America, and communists even moreso during their brief period of relevance in the eastern corner of Montana
      • a lot of conservative Americans are very clearly best described as "stupid fascists", which is to say they are essentially fascist politically but so politically propaganized against that term, politically ignorant, or just plainly stupid that they don't realize they are essentially fascist. this is probably and currently saving us from an even more developed fascist movement than already exists, but how long it'll hold is not clear

      • Thanks for that! Now I don't have to read any of that. /s

        By CYOA did you mean cover your own ass or choose your own adventure?

      • Pacific Gas & Electric

        That sent me on a !!fun!! Wikipedia trip. My favorite was a sniper attack on a substation that DHS alleged might have been an inside job. Also that's a lot of fires.

  • commentary for a few of these: White Hot Hate

    even though it's functionally a true crime book,[^1] White Hot Hate: A True Story of Domestic Terrorism in America's Heartland is probably the book that sucked me in the most this year. the ultimate story being told here is effectively copaganda—almost definitionally it has to be, since it revolves around the FBI successfully navigating an infamous domestic terror plot from the past few years. but in between that story this book also really goes intimate into how such plots manifest and take form. you get a real sense of the sort of person who would follow through with white supremacist terrorism—and, perhaps indirectly, how many of these people are pushed to act (or hasten how willing they are to act) with the cajoling of the FBI. i'm not sure a book has ever felt like a peek behind the curtain for me without just actively being a political tract in the way this one was

    [^1]: and i very much dislike true crime as a genre—looking at you I'll Be Gone In The Dark

  • Shout-out for I'm Glad My Mom Died. It's incredible how McCurdy captured the feeling of constantly walking on eggshells around an NParent, not knowing what would set them off. Also, fuck Dan Schneider.

  • How was the Graeber? I loved Bullshit Jobs.

    • i managed to steamroll through it in about a day (combination of no computer + no television) which i don't recommend as it is a very voluminous book--it's one of the largest i have in physical form. basically guaranteed you'll get some value of out of it though if you've liked Graeber's previous work, either as a reference text or as a reading experience (it seems amenable to being used as both).

  • I read Sea of Tranquility in 2023 as well and loved it!

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