If October was a fun month, November was more of a …work month, as I was focused either on school projects (powerpoint presentation done tonight, final paper due Tuesday, yaaay) or tackling TBR titles. Presently, I need twelve more TBR titles down to hit my soft goal of 80 TBR books for the year, which is the majority of the pile: what remains is a solid foundation for next year’s Mount TBR to accumulate upon should be fairly easy to finish off in 2024. Last month I mentioned that I was thinking about sacking books I own, but have access to via libraries (obtaining grad school access to a university library has greatly expanded my options). I decided to go ahead and do that, and the titles are denoted with an asterisk.

Climbing Mount Doom:
The Outlaw Ocean, Ian Urbina
Hellfire, James Holland
Devil’s Pact, James Holland
The Moral Animal, Robert Wright
The Pilgrim’s Regress, C.S. Lewis
The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein
The Excluded Americans: Homelessness and Housing Policy, James Tucker
Asimov’s Inferno, Roger Allen. If I couldn’t get into this while spending 3 weeks recovering from a transplant, I ain’t gonna.
Asimov’s Paradise. Likewise.
*Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy, George Gilder
*Teaching as a Subversive Activity, Neil Postman. 
*Tucket’s Travels:  Francis Tucket’s Adventures in the West, Gary Paulsen
*The Sunne in Splendour, Sharon Kay Penman 
*The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks



The Unreviewed:
Uhtred’s Feast, Bernard Cornwell. This is largely a book of medieval-esque recipes, with three short stories involving Uhtred. The short stories were enjoyable, especially the one set during Uhtred’s youth before his family was killed and he captured by the Danes.

The Moral Animal, Robert Wright. This one will probably get a review, as it’s one of my favorite topics — evolutionary psychology. The problem is that I read this slowly and piecemeal and didn’t take notes, and I’ve read into evo-psych so often previously that there weren’t many new ideas for me to fixate on and dive into.

Feminism against Progress. Review for this one is pending: I’ve just been fixated on a big social media, activism, and democracy project the last few weeks that limited my TBR progress and reading in general.

anti-social media: how facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. I may give this one a full review, but coming on the heels of Chaos Machine and The People vs Tech, it was a bit redundant for me. (I read the three back to back instead of spread out because of a class project on social media and activism.) I had very high hopes going in because Siva Vaidhyanathan was mentored by NEIL POSTMAN, but Vaidyanathan had a tendency to go off on irrelevant political tangents — devoting most of a page to explaining a reference to ‘The Alamo’ to a history of it that sounds like it was written by the dictator Santa Anna’s Ministerio de Propaganda. I think I may try more of Vaidhyanathan, at least his Anarchist in the Library, which…er, sounds like me.

Coming up in December….
The final assault (for 2023) on Mount Doom will begin. Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our unread! Given that Advent starts Sunday, there may be a book or two on consumerism — something that started with Waste Away. I do like the fact that amid the superficial commercial whoring-out of Christmas there stands Advent in reproach.