Thursday, January 1, 2009

What were your favorite books of 2008

Not necessarily published in 2008...but what you read in 2008. I'm compiling a list.

6 comments:

Tobi Vail said...

ack maybe people don't read and write over the holidays! too much eggnog and pie!

saralibrarian said...

world's worst memory but these come to mind and i'm pretty sure i read them all in 2008...

the queen of the tambourine by jane gardam

half of a yellow sun by chimamanda ngozi adichie - current short story by her online at the guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/28/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-short-story

epileptic by david b.

working sex: sex workers write about a changing industry edited by annie oakley

students for a democratic society: a graphic history

the beautiful things that heaven bears by dinaw mengestu

saralibrarian said...

how could i forget?!...
the slaves of solitude by patrick hamilton
and
from timbuktu to katrina: readings in african-american history by dr. quintard taylor

kanako said...

Off the top of my head. xx kanako

Mycelium Running, How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World By Paul Staments

Sorry Out of Gas, Architecture's Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis

Design Like you Give a Damn, Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises

The Book of Movie Photography by David Cheshire

2666 by Roberto Bolano
(still working on it...)

For Lesbians Only
A Separatist Anthology Edited by Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Julia Penelope

The Collective Tarot, a magical collaboration. By Lori Lawrence, Jackie Davis, Clio Sady, Sacha Marini, and Annie Murphy.

This was a very limited run. I was lucky enough to get a hold of one. These womon bodied folks got together and changed the language normally associated with the tarot and evolved the messages around the cards to speak more to them, ie enlightened and radical. They also created a beautiful deck that reflects images of their local radical culture. Nomy Lamn making love, mud wrestling, the swifts in the church tower in pdx. I'm personally not into magic, but I'm so into this deck. Anyone want a tarot reading?

kanako said...

and of corse... My Guantanamo Diary..... der

whatwewantisfree said...

ii wrote this for my work so it's got more info than you want probably! but here you go

The Railway
Hamid Ismailov, Vintage, 13.95, paperback

The Railway is set in a fictional village on the Silk Road in Uzbekistan between the years 1900 and 1980. Gilas is at the intersection of many places at the edge of the Soviet Union. It’s a place where people are born but also where people are exiled or passing through. The Railway continually shifts between different registers: it’s a black comedy with undercurrents of poetry, where hidden Muslim rites and ancient Central Asian myths are concealed from and collide with the bureaucracy of the Soviet state.

New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg
Edited by Marshall Berman, $25.00, Reaktion, paperback

Put together by the Marxist scholar Berman, this collection of essays focuses on New York City as a memory, working as a tribute to a lost city and its poets, immigrants, deadbeats, criminals, punks, and B-boys. It contains pieces from renowned writers like Luc Sante, Richard Meltzer and Tom Robbins but (perhaps reflecting New York’s pre-Giulliani democratic essence) gives the same weight to downtown low-lifes and graffitti writers.

The Unmaking of the Middle East, A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands
Jeremy Salt, University of California Press, 29.95, Hardback

This elegantly written volume tackles the construction of the “west”- in fact the idea of civilization itself and how both of these viewpoints have shaped, transformed and devastated what we know as the Middle East. The book is built around critical episodes in the history of the Middle East, from the borders imposed by the French and the British that marked the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the disruption of the nomadic Arab routes; finally concluding with the quagmire of the “Axis of Evil.”

Living Archive 7: Ant Farm, Allegorical Time Warp: The Media Fallout of July 21, 1969
Felicity D. Scott, Actar, $54.95, paperback

This exhaustive and entertaining document covers the antics of Bay Area arch conceptualists Ant Farm. Their most notorious work is Cadillac Ranch, the now iconic strip of upended classic cars, part buried in the desert, which at this point has shifted from a critique of ‘Automerica’ to a symbol of total Americana. The book works like a collage, and includes a fascinating look at the Ant Farm’s own archives, with Underground newspaper clippings, scrapbook pages, photographs, first person accounts, ornate drawings, as well as excerpts from their various manuals and books.