Category: Reading List

I’ve been very excited for a long time to start this series. Heir to the Empire is the first Thrawn book. Part of the reason I enjoyed Tarkin and Plagueis so much is that they both focused on the philosophy of power and high-strategy. This topic is essentially the core principle of my life, education,… Continue reading Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn (Thrawn 1)

Alison Bechdel is a lesbian cartoonist who famously gave us the eponymous Bechdel Test. The Bechdel test, also known as the Bechdel–Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The… Continue reading Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

This book is very dense and very wonky. I wouldn’t recommend this to everyone. If you’re interested in power and politics, then this is a good book for you. The central thesis of the book is two-fold. Klein argues that polarization is different from sorting or categorization because of homophilies. If I know how you… Continue reading Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein

This is easily one of my favorite books. This was my first time reading it, and I found that I had to take breaks to reflect, and often reread chapters before moving on. Very excellent work by Gibson. I can see the way his thoughts moved in the direction of Neuromancer towards the end and… Continue reading Burning Chrome by William Gibson

In the 1970s, Michel Foucault was working on something unrelated and discovered an important memoir. Herculine Barbin had lived a short and noteworthy life as an intersex and transgender person in the mid-1800s. Foucault translated and published the memoir. It spread far and wide and impacted many people around the world. Jeffrey Eugenides was one… Continue reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

As a sociologist, this was an interesting read. This book explores the issue of systemic sexism from a philosophical perspective rather than a sociological perspective. It also articulates a normative ethical framework for considering the issue, and the implications for what duty we have in response. This is exactly the topic I most wanted to… Continue reading Down Girl by Kate Manne

Wikipedia gives the summary, “Stone Butch Blues is a novel written by the revolutionary communist Leslie Feinberg about life as a butch lesbian in 1970s America.” Generally with a book like this, I try to get the background and plot before I read it, so that I’m able to absorb it all. I started doing… Continue reading Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

This book was very interesting to read. Reading this book showed me how little the POC experience is represented in the curriculum. This is part of what inspired me to pursue Race and Resistance Studies at SFSU in my later educational career.This book is an autobiographical narrative. We go with the author through her own… Continue reading Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

Giovanni’s Room is not a true story, but it parallels the author’s life. It’s somewhere between a fictionalized autobiography and historical fiction. It’s a very sad story which I really related to. The story follows a young man in Paris who falls in love with another man, much to his own surprise. Everything goes horribly… Continue reading Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. This is a very strange and interesting story. Written almost 250 years ago, it takes place in two-dimensional space which makes it challenging to even consider at first. Once you get the idea, it explores many interesting sociological concepts from class mobility to gender. The two-dimensional nature of the… Continue reading Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott