Following my annual practice, I have listed here my “novel” reading for 2022. 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 outside of my “normal” academic reading. My use of the term “novel” reading is loosely adopted, as you will see from the list to include fiction and then really important non-fiction work I get excited to read in my spare time. As you will see, my novel reading shifted away from novels to much more academic reading in my “free time”. But that approach has been richly rewarding.
1) Dennis McCarthy, The Gospel According to Billy the Kid: A Novel (University of New Mexico Press, 2021).
2) Larry McMurtry, In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas [1968] (Liveright, 2018).
3) J. Frank Dobie, Tongues of the Monte [1935] (University of Texas Press, 1987).
4) Barcley Owens, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels (University of Arizona Press, 2000).
5) Vasily Grossman, Stalingrad [1952], trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler (NYRB Classics, 2019).
6) Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate [1960], trans. Robert Chandler (NYRB Classics, 2006) [re-read].
7) Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows [1955], trans. Robert Chandler (NYRB Classics, 2009).
8) C.L.R. James, State Capitalism and World Revolution [1950], with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee Boggs (Oakland, CA.: PM Press, 2013).
9) Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979) [re-read].
10) Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Vintage, 2010).
11) Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict (Pluto Press, 2018).
12) George Breitman (ed.) Leon Trotsky on Black Nationalism and Self-Determination (Pathfinder Press, 1978).
13) E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations [1939], preface Michael Cox (Palgrave, 2016) [re-read]
14) E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After, intro. Michael Cox [1945] (Palgrave, 2021) [re-read].
15) C.L.R. James, World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International [1937], ed. and intro. Christian Høgsbjerg (Duke University Press, 2017).
16) E.H. Carr, Conditions of Peace (Macmillan, 1942).
17) E.H. Carr, The New Society (Beacon Press, 1951) [re-read].
18) E.H. Carr, The Soviet Impact on the Western World (Macmillan, 1946).
19) C.L.R James, A History of Pan-African Revolt, intro. Robin D.G. Kelley (PM Press, 2012).
20) C.L.R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, intro. Leslie James (Duke University Press, 2022).
21) C.L.R. James, The Life of Captain Cipriani: An Account of British Government in the West Indies, intro. Bridget Brereton (Duke University Press, 2014).
22) Y. Sogomonov and P. Landesman, Nihilism Today, trans. David Skvirsky (Progress Publishers, 1977).
23) C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In [1953] (Dartmouth College Press, 2001).
24) Christian Høgsbjerg, C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (Duke University Press, 2014).
25) E.H. Carr, What is History? [1961] (Penguin Books, 1990).
26) C.L.R. James, Modern Politics [1960] (PM Press, 2013).
27) Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner, Heat 2 (Harper Collins, 2022).
28) Tristram Hunt, The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (Allen Lane, 2021).
29) Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England [1845] (Penguin, 2009).
30) John L. Williams, C.L.R. James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries (Constable, 2022).
31) Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissidence (Verso, 2019).
32) C.L.R. James, Minty Alley [1936] (Penguin Books, 2021).
