This is the first Book Pile, or Tsundoku, reading recap from 10/1/2023. It was inspired by the word Tsundoku. Wikipedia defines Tsundoku this way,

Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf. A stack of books found after cleaning a room.

Wikipedia

That is what this newsletter seeks to describe. My book piles.

Books/Audiobooks

Doppelganger

by Naomi Klein
2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

What a strange book. half memoir, half manifesto with a premise that sounds like a joke. Naomi Klein is often confused for Naomi Wolf, and that launches an exploration into the double in culture, latent fascism, and COVID-19 denialism.

I wrote a longer post about this book for From the Library and this site. Check it out here.

LINK

Freewaytopia

By Paul Haddad
2021, Santa Monica Press

A history of Los Angeles through our highway system! This book is amazing. I learned so much. During and after WWII, the government of California, through the Department of Transportation (Cal-Trans), built highways as possible to move tanks and jeeps to the Navy ports. In the 50s and 60s, white communities LA communities welcomed highway expansion and development, but Black and immigrant communities were frequently displaced and had their houses taken from them. By the 1970s, with expensive gas prices, terrible traffic congestion, lingering construction, and no more Federal funding, everything changed. Even white communities soured on freeways. By the 80s and 90s, they outright rejected them. Cal-Trans officials told the author they would never build another freeway in Los Angeles again. This great non-fiction book has so much to love, and I hope to read more histories that thoughtfully consider planning and urban development. If you’re interested in Los Angeles history, this is a must-read.

Villains of All Nations

by Marcus Rediker
2005, Beacon Press

A class-conscious exploration of pirates! Rediker argues that pirates were villains of all nations because they disrupted capital flows and colonialism. The Golden Age of Piracy coincides with the truces between Britain, Spain, and France. Pirates didn’t just pillage booty. They also burned British warships, freed slaves, and took revenge against Navy officers who wronged them. On British Navy ships, rations were small, and generals were abusive. When the Dutch, British, and French Navies pillaged Africa and sold slaves, they were not seen as pirates, and the sailors on the ship were paid a flat wage. Pirates offered an alternative. They flattened hierarchies. Every pirate got a share of the booty, even the injured ones, in an early form of social security insurance! Pirates even had their own pigeon argot for communicating with sailors at port. The author carefully considers how pirates might have been villains to nations and capital flow, but they were proletarian and a more egalitarian alternative way of living for soldiers of the eighteenth century. This book is amazing. If you like pirates and class-conscious history, you gotta read it.

Short Statement of Purpose

I always wanted to write a newsletter where I briefly write about the books I read that week and share my passion for what I’m reading with others. If that’s of interest to you, this is such a newsletter! I welcome you into my book piles. Hello.