This year, huh? Suffice it to say that I've had a lot of nervous energy with nowhere productive to put it, so I've finally decided to do something other than sit and refresh Twitter constantly.

It's a reading list, and it isn't much, but it includes books and articles that have helped me make sense of the world as it is rather than as I believe it to be. Some of these I have completed reading, and some of them are on my to-read list. I'll be updating it as I see fit. Bonus: it's totally free of Hillbilly Elegy.

All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein

Required reading for anyone interested in the how the biggest political scandal of the 20th century went down, and how a couple of kids in their late 20s (and a couple of newspaper editors and a bunch of government officials whose morals outweighed their loyalty to authority) took down a corrupt President. Skim the first hundred pages if you find your attention wandering: published in 1974, the book assumes you're already versed in some of the names, and the beginnings of the story aren't actually that consequential, except that they represented threads, that, when pulled, unraveled a vast conspiracy that went all the way to the top.

Takeaways: Nixon was reelected in 1972, and the book came out before he resigned. The Committee to Reelect the President, which had deep ties to the administration currently in power, was incredibly deeply embroiled in political subterfuge of just the most ridiculous sort, everything from burglary to sending pizzas to a political fundraising dinner to create chaos. Eventually, Nixon was undone by his own paranoia and hatred. We also still don't know what would happen if a President needed to be forcibly removed from office, because it has never happened.

The White Flight of Derek Black by Eli Saslow; article in Washington Post (20 minute read)

How the prodigal son of the white nationalist movement changed his mind. The answer? Weekly Shabbat dinners.

Matthew Stevenson had started hosting weekly Shabbat dinners at his campus apartment shortly after enrolling in New College in 2010. He was the only Orthodox Jew at a school with little Jewish infrastructure, so he began cooking for a small group of students at his apartment each Friday night. Matthew always drank from a kiddush cup and said the traditional prayers, but most of his guests were Christian, atheist, black or Hispanic — anyone open-minded enough to listen to a few blessings in Hebrew. Now, in the fall of 2011, Matthew invited Derek to join them.

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horowitz

A fascinating non-fiction account of travels through the former Confederate States of America, and some border states as well, Horowitz tries to figure out what the Civil War truly means in the American psyche. Money quote: "Down here, folks think it's half time."

Takeaways: Beyond that half time quote, there's a sense throughout the book that an image of a South that never was, a perfect Confederacy, was on the very verge of truly existing back in 1862ish and looms large in the imagination. Because it never quite existed, the Confederacy can be all things to all people: a government that never had to get down to the nitty gritty of actually governing, a way of life idealized in Gone With the Wind and other fictions, and a country that could have been truly great had it just been allowed to be anything at all.

One of the interesting passages dealt with the similarities the author saw between civil rights remembrances in Alabama and Civil War reenactments elsewhere: "The civil rights celebrants seemed caught in the same ghost dance as so many whites I'd met, conjuring spirits from an exalted past of heroic sacrifice, halo-crowned martyrs, and unfulfilled dreams."

Another interesting thing: this book was written in the mid-90s, and nearly everyone the author talks to either works at a museum or has a job in manufacturing. It's interesting to think how those jobs are mostly gone now, and to understand the argument that the economy isn't doing any better no matter what the data says, at least not for these folks.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann

Status: still reading. This was the first book I picked up after the election, mostly to assure myself that history is long, and that American empires have ended in the past. The traditional picture we've pained of a savage and uncivilized pre-European society is pretty much wrong in every way.

Poetry:

Good Bones, by Maggie Smith
The Tiger, by Nael, age 6

To read:

Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story by Robyn Doolittle
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Underground Airlines by Ben Winters (as recommended by Marie)
??????

Do you have recommendations for what I should be reading? Do you want to talk about any of these books or articles? The comments are open, and my twitter handle is @lexieroseme. Feel free to hit me up.