Tentative Notes toward an initial itinerary

Rabelais and His World -- Mikhail Bakhtin

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections -- Walter Benjamin

Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, and Autobiographical Writings -- Walter Benjamin

Ways of Seeing -- John Berger

Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary -- Samuel Delany

Longer Views: Extended Essays -- Samuel Delany

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison -- Michel Foucault (Reread)

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity -- Michel Foucault

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed -- Paulo Friere (Reread)

Selections from the Prison Notebooks -- Antonio Gramsci (Reread)

Empire -- Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri (Reread)

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire -- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center -- bell hooks

The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- Jane Jacobs

History and Class Consciousness -- Georg Lukacs

Theory of the Novel -- Georg Lukacs

The Image of the City -- Kevin Lynch

Culture and Imperialism -- Edward Said

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed -- James Scott

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces -- William H. Whyte

Basically, right now it's just a grab bag o' theory. If ya got suggestions, leave them in the comments.

Summer Reading: The Initial Foray

Goals: Expand my knowledge base in several areas deemed deficient, including contemporary Middle-Eastern literature, urban theory, Marxian anthropology, and US History. Also, I like science fiction.

Results: This summer, I read the following books:

Bodies of Work -- Kathy Acker 
The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States -- Paul Avrich
The Last Unicorn -- Peter Beagle
The Mafia of a Sicilian Village: 1860-1960 -- Anton Blok
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles -- Mike Davis
Neveryona -- Samuel Delany
Time Square Red, Time Square Blue -- Samuel Delany
Four Novels of the 1960s -- Philip K. Dick
Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che -- Max Elbaum

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 -- Eric Foner
Neverwhere -- Neil Gaiman
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller -- Carlo Ginzburg
The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist -- Emile Habiby
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression -- Robin D. G. Kelley
The Story of O -- Pauline Reage
Salvation Army -- Abdellah Taia

Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia -- Michael Taussig

Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century -- Eric Wolf

Evaluation: I read a lot of books. No huge revelations, but I feel much more informed about past attempts to create interracial left-wing political movements in the US, the social structure of peasant societies, and why certain cities are the way they are. I'm thinking about posting my thoughts on some of these books later on. If you have a request for a review of a particular book, holla at yer boy.