Tag: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

July 2025 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

I had some time off in July, so I put that time to good use getting caught up with my reading. Or rather, using reading as an escapist mechanism to avoid the fact that I still have at least a decade before I will be able to retire.

Acquisitions

Books acquired in the month of July 2025

  1. Banu Mushtaq (Deepa Bhasthi, translator), Heart Lamp: Selected Stories (And Other Stories) [2025.07.01]
  2. Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust [2025.07.09]
  3. Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris [2025.07.09]
  4. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States [2025.07.09]
  5. John Jennings, David Brame, Bill Campbell, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Damian Duffy, The Adventures of Lion Man (Rosarium Publishing) [2025.07.14]
  6. Quinn Slobodian, Hayek’s Bastards (Zone Books) [2025.07.21]
  7. Rosalind Belben, Dreaming of Dead People (And Other Stories) [2025.07.28]

Reading List

Books

Books I read in the month of July 2025.

  1. Steve Kowit (editor), The Maverick Poets: An Anthology (re-read) [2025.07.04] – Every few years I just need to re-read this book. This is one of those years.
  2. Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alfred Mac Adam (translator), Albina and the Dog Men [2025.07.04] – Entertaining but mid-range novel.
  3. Frantz Fanon (Richard Philcox, translator), The Wretched of the Earth [2025.07.07]
  4. Christine Schutt, Pure Hollywood (And Other Stories) [2025.07.08]
  5. Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust [2025.07.10]
  6. Carl de Souza (Jeffrey Zuckerman, translator), Kaya Days [2025.07.13]
  7. John Jennings, David Brame, Bill Campbell, Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, Damian Duffy, The Adventures of Lion Man [2025.07.20]

Short Prose

  1. Christine Schutt, “Pure Hollywood”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.06]
  2. Christine Schutt, “The Hedges”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.07]
  3. Christine Schutt, “Species of a Special Concern”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.07]
  4. Christine Schutt, “A Happy Rural Seat of Various View: Lucinda’s Garden”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  5. Christine Schutt, “The Duchess of Albany”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  6. Christine Schutt, “Family Man”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  7. Christine Schutt, “Where You Live? When You Need Me?”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  8. Christine Schutt, “Burst Pods, Gone-By, Tangled Aster”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  9. Christine Schutt, “The Dot Sisters”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  10. Christine Schutt, “Oh, the Obvious”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]
  11. Christine Schutt, “The Lady from Connecticut”, Pure Hollywood [2025.07.08]

March 2024 Books and Reading Notes

John Winkelman

After reading one gigantic book (Demons, Dostoevsky), and well over a dozen shorter books and journals, I have settled into a more sedate reading pace, with a few novels and nonfiction titles for this month. Feels like I have found my reading groove after a chaotic reading start to the reading year. Also, reading would be a good adjective modifier, like “fucking” or “smurfing.”

Acquisitions

Books acquired in March 2024.

  1. Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic [2024.03.13] – Purchased from Books and Mortar bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
  2. Jason McBride, Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker [2024.03.23] – Ordered and purchased from Books and Mortar bookstore.
  3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism [2024.03.23] – Ordered and purchased from Books and Mortar bookstore.
  4. Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator), The 1619 Project [2024.03.23] – Purchased at Harmony Brewing Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Books and Mortar had a popup sale of banned books in the bar, and this one caught my eye. It had been on my radar for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity to add it to the library.

Reading List

Book Read in March 2024

Books and Journals

  1. R.F. Kuang, Babel [2024.03.11]
  2. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment [2024.03.16]
  3. Kai Ashante Wilson, The Devil in America [2024.03.17]
  4. Jazmina Barrera (Christina MacSweeney, translator), Linea Nigra [2024.03.18]
  5. Bjørn Rasmussen (Martin Aitken, translator), The Skin is the Elastic Covering That Encases the Entire Body [2024.03.20]
  6. Herman Melville, Bartleby [2024.03.23]
  7. William Meikle, The Plasm [2024.03.24]
  8. Wolfgang Hilbig, The Females [2024.03.26]
  9. Jung Young Moon (Jung Yewon, translator), Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River [2024.03.29]

Short Prose

  1. Herman Melville, “Bartleby”, Bartleby [2024.03.23]
  2. Herman Melville, “The Lightning-Rod Man”, Bartleby [2024.03.23]
  3. Jim C. Hines, “In the Line of Duty”, Patreon post [2024.03.31]

Weekly Round-up, March 16, 2024

John Winkelman

Looking East across the Grand River at the Sixth Street Bridge Dam, at sunrise.

[The photo this week was taken from the fish ladder on the west side of the Sixth Street Bridge dam, facing east into the sunrise.]

This past Sunday, feeling exhausted and also nostalgic, I dusted off an old Lenovo ThinkPad 11e, fixed some issues it had with continually dropping its internet connection, and turned it into my retro gaming machine. I have scores of games purchased over the years from GOG.com, so I installed a few of them – Hammerwatch, Ultima IV, and others.

One of my favorite games from back in the 1980s was Telengard, a sort of graphic roguelike which I played A LOT on my Commodore 64. There are a few ports and remakes available now, but while I found a few that could be played online, I didn’t find any which I could successfully install on the ThinkPad. No big deal; there are ways to get around this, including porting the Commodore BASIC source code to Javascript and having it run in the browser. It wouldn’t take long; anything that could run on a C64 is miniscule compared to even the most rudimentary of games available now.

But my research turned up one interesting bit of trivia: Back in 2005 someone released an updated version of Telengard, which I had downloaded and played once upon a time. That person was Travis Baldree, who wrote the absolutely wonderful book Legends and Lattes. Baldree is one of the developers of Torchlight, also one of my favorite games, and one which I played A LOT back around 2012 – 2015.

Reading

Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. I picked this up in June 2018 at City Lights Bookstore, when my partner and I spent several days in San Francisco at the end of a two-week vacation that started with stops in Las Vegas and Phoenix.

Writing

Another week with little writing, though I do have a plan to start some deep worldbuilding for the rewrite of my 2022 NaNoWriMo project Cacophonous. Just too much noise in the world right now.

This Week’s Writing Prompt

Subject: Reincarnation, Fae
Setting: Frontier
Genre: Literary Fiction

Listening

John Zorn, Baphomet.

I’ve been a fan of John Zorn since I first heard his album The Gift while sitting in Common Ground Coffee House in the early 2000s. “Baphomet” is a single track and also an album, prog rock by way of avant-garde jazz, and a fantastic listen. I think the theme music for writing Cacophonous, when I finally get around to it, will be Zorn’s oeuvre, mixed and randomized and on heavy rotation.

Interesting Links