You're probably stuck at home. Here's what to read next.
Last year, in a pungent essay for Harper’s, Christian Lorentzen railed against the media’s obsession for bookish "Best Of" lists, which have in recent years “achieved a sort of mania": "What is the utility — to anyone — of an item like ‘Hot Books for Cold Days’?" He has a point. At their worst, such lists are little better than advertising puffery.
This list is better — more like a conversation among friends than a boosterish emanation of the publishing industry. As every scholar knows, it can become all too easy to cease learning about ideas outside of one’s own field. If you’re craving recommendations for recent reading across disciplines, these essays — for which we’ve asked 11 scholars to discuss "the best scholarly book" of the last decade — are for you.
Is this list definitive? Of course not. But it is rich, surprising, and idiosyncratic. You're probably stuck at home. Here's what to read next.
Revolting Prostitutes by Amia Srinivasan
a model of how to write about politics — or, indeed, anything. That it is written by two sex workers will, but shouldn’t, come as a surprise to many.
Covert Capital by Andrew Friedman
Covert Capital is part historiography, part geography, part travelogue, part sociology, part critical theory, and part urban studies. At times the prose is dense, but most readers won’t find it too demanding. Friedman has a wonderful eye for the particulars of suburban geography. The book is filled with anecdotes about D.C.-area landmarks and legendary figures of the Cold War. It’s hard to imagine that governments rose and fell based on poolside conversations at a country house in McLean, Va., owned by Eleanor Dulles (sister of John Foster and Allen), but Friedman illustrates exactly how it happened.
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
The New Jim Crow was not without its controversy. In scholarly circles, some questioned the work’s implication that the Jim Crow movement was an exclusively Southern affair, and others cautioned the conflation of the prison industrial complex, which is evil in and of itself, with the terrifying institution of slavery. Despite those critiques, The New Jim Crow has fortified the sentiments of marginalized black America and changed how mainstream America discusses law enforcement, criminal justice, and the penal system. For me, it is unquestionably the best book of the decade.
Our Aesthetic Categories
pulls its historical and formal arguments together with such precision and verve that the book seems suddenly to hold the whole world in its pages. These are "our" aesthetic categories not just because we all live under late capitalism. They are "ours" because Ngai gives us a language of feminist and materialist criticism to think and feel the contradictions of the present acutely. She cuts the pleasure we take from art with displeasure at the world we inhabit. She makes me look at wool socks and plush onesies with fresh appreciation and horror. One wonders if the categories will hold up — judgments of "cute" and "zany" already feel dated — but that’s even more reason to claim this as the best book of the last decade and wait for what categories she will bring to the next one.
What Is Islam
The impact of What Is Islam? has already been considerable. Beyond reviews and symposia, a new liberal-arts college in Pakistan based its first-year curriculum on a close study of the book. That is appropriate because the book is, among many other things, a timely plea to reject the dual hegemony of Orientalist scholarship on the one hand and Salafi writing on the other — traditions that agree, oddly, on the primacy of the shari’a in conceptualizing and defining Islam.
Every Twelve Seconds
When I told my colleague James Scott that, in beginning a new project on the history of humane warfare and its costs, I was exploring an analogy with the project of improving the slaughter of nonhuman animals, he asked me if I had read Every Twelve Seconds (Yale University Press, 2013), by his former student Timothy Pachirat.
Thinking and Being
In Thinking and Being, a book that was decades in the making, Kimhi returns to what was once acknowledged to be the most essential philosophical puzzle. This is the puzzle, surviving in fragment form in Parmenides’s poem On Nature, of how it is possible to think of what is not. The question of how we can think of the ways in which particular things are not — as when, in the dead of night, we wistfully think that it is a shame that it is not day — immediately implies another one: namely, the question of how we can think of things that are not as they were — that is, how we can think of things that change. This means that to ask how we are able to think what is not is to ask how we are able to think of the natural world — of the seasons that pass, of the tide that comes and goes, of the animals that live and die. If we do not understand how we can think of what is not, then, we do not understand how we can think about anything at all.
The Home Place
“I am a man in love with nature. I am an eco-addict." Thus begins J. Drew Lanham’s extraordinary memoir, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed, 2016). So far, good enough. The surprise, however, follows immediately after: Lanham is African American; he is an ornithologist and a lover of wild things in a world in which most readers expect nature-loving to be a white endeavor. Lanham explains how much he wishes there were other black scientists at the ornithology meetings he attends. He tells of being stalked by suspicious whites when he looks for birds in the American countryside, where blacks are not supposed to be. He explains his idea that reparations for slavery could be ecological, restoring the landscapes earned by African American sweat. Environmental integrity would reap major benefits not just in the moment but for our children, and their children.
Bachelor Japanists
Christopher Reed’s Bachelor Japanists (Columbia University Press, 2016) may not be the best scholarly book of the past decade — there have been many masterpieces of scholarship on topics of urgent importance — but it is the book that afforded me the greatest pleasure. I read it very slowly, so as to savor each detail and each precise, well-judged formulation. It is a book that took me out of my world — out of my anxiety about the present and the future — and transported me to three different, distant eras, reconstituting for me the aesthetic rapture and, sometimes, bad taste that defined the obsessive relation of certain Westerners to the culture of a Japan they didn’t quite understand.
Testo Junkie
What makes Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie (The Feminist Press, 2013) the standout book of the decade for me is that it is so singularly an original work in both form and content. It is Preciado just on the cusp of transition, in a liminal space between genders. There is writing here that has all the wonder and surprise of that passage into the unknown of one’s own body.
Replenishing the Earth
Replenishing the Earth realigns the geography of modern imperial history. Belich has a gift for developing large-scale comparisons which have gone under-recognized or even unnoticed, and for spotting surprising connections. He knocks down the wall between British and U.S. historiographies — though he doesn’t pay enough attention to the persecution and extermination of native peoples. A map of what he calls the "British West" suggestively plunks Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the middle of the Atlantic, between the previously populated realms of the British Isles and the North American Atlantic seaboard. Whether or not one buys Belich’s argument, it generates something of the same productively destabilizing effect as the memorable map in Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean, which inverts the north-south axis to demonstrate the dominance of Africa over the sea.