I never have as much time as I’d like to have for reading, but here’s a partial list of books that I’ve been reading lately (both fiction and non-fiction).

September-November 2018:

• Battling the Buddha of Love: A Cultural Biography of the Greatest Statue Never Built by Jessica Falcone
• Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora by Lalaie Ameeriar
• Spiritual Citizenship: Transnational Pathways from Black Power to Ifa in Trinidad by N. Fadeke Castor
• Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
• The Racial Contract by Charles Wade Mills
• Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard
• The Fifth Season and The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemison

August 2018:

• Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang
• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
• No Time to Spare by Ursula Le Guin

July 2018:

• Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble
• The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism by Bianca Williams
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

June 2018:

• The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
• Biblical Porn: Affect, Labor, and Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Evangelical Empire by Jessica Johnson

April 2018-May 2018:

• Bureaucratic Intimacies: Translating Human Rights in Turkey by Elif Babul
• Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston
• Traveling Heavy: A Memoir In Between Journeys by Ruth Behar
• The End of the Innocence: The 1964-1965 World’s Fair by Lawrence Samuel
• One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment by Mei Fong
• Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano
• The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

February 2018-March 2018:

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber
• Nation as Network: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship by Victoria Bernal
• Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman
• How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn
• A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne marie brown
• The Demands of Recognition: State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling by Townsend Middleton

November 2017-January 2018:

• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing
• Returned: Going and Coming in an Age of Deportation by Deborah Boehm
• Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite by Suki Kim
• I Love Learning, I Hate School: An Anthropology of College by Susan Blum
• China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford
• The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Himalayan Voices: An Introduction to Modern Nepali Literature edited by Michael Hutt

September-October 2017:

• Unsettling India: Affect, Temporality, Transnationality by Purnima Mankekar
• Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra
• Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Shmitz
• Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, by N.K. Jemisin
• From Dissertation to Book, by William Germano

May-August 2017:

• Far Out: Countercultural Seekers and the Tourist Encounter in Nepal by Mark Liechty
• Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait by Attiya Ahmad
• Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay
• Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Hochschild
• Last Scene Underground: An Ethnographic Novel of Iran by Roxanne Varzi
• A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka
• Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity by Qin Shao

April 2017:

• From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
• The Land of Open Graves by Jason de Leon
• Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh

March 2017:

• Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations at the World’s Deadliest Border by Maurizio Albahari
• River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh
• Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
• Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

February 2017:

• Exceptional States: Chinese Immigrants and Taiwanese Sovereignty by Sara L. Friedman
• The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power by Jeff Sharlet
• Gora by Rabindranath Tagore
• Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans by Sanjay K. Mishra
• Demoting Vishnu: Ritual, Politics, and the Unraveling of Nepal’s Hindu Monarchy by Anne Mocko

January 2017:

• The Other Side of Paradise by Staceyann Chin
• The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh
• Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher
• Lying on the Couch by Irvin Yalom
• The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
• Planning Families in Nepal: Global and Local Projects of Reproduction by Jan Brunson

December 2016:

• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
• This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
• Dirty, Sacred Rivers: Confronting South Asia’s Water Crisis by Cheryl Colopy
• The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

November 2016:

• My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student by Rebekah Nathan
• The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation by Nancy Abelmann
• Before We Visit the Goddess by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
• Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa al-Sanea
• Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism, and the Schooling of Muslim Youth by Reva Jaffe-Walter
• The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter

October 2016:

• The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work Across the India-Pakistan Divide by Ayesha Jalal
• The Citizen Factory: Schooling and Cultural Production in Bolivia by Aurolyn Luykx
• The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster by Jonathan Katz
• Voicing Subjects: Public Intimacy and Mediation in Kathmandu by Laura Kunreuther
• The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It by Valerie Young

September 2016:

• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
• Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov by Kirin Narayan 
• The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein

August 2016:

• The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh
• Modern Romance: An Investigation by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg
• Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More by Janet Mock
• Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin

July 2016:

• From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies that Everyone Can Read by Kristen Ghodsee
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
• Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School by Shamus Rahman Khan
• A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Post-Modernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility by Margery Wolf

June 2016:

• Euphoria by Lily King
• The Vegetarian by Han Kang
• Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas by Sondra Hausner

May 2016:

• Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village by Laura Nader
• Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India by Arvind Rajagopal
• Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics by Sahana Udupa

April 2016:

• The Political Biography of an Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India by Edward Simpson
• Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis by Joan Bolker
• Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State by Michael Herzfeld

March 2016:

• Shikhandi, and Other Tales They Don’t Tell You by Devdutt Patnaik
• Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay in the Geography of Anger by Arjun Appadurai
• The Anthropology of Religious Conversion by Andrew Buckser and Stephen D. Glazier

February 2016:

• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• Note: this is the month when I discovered the New Books Network and started listening to their great podcasts of interviews with authors about their new books. Fantastic way to catch up on new ideas while I’m walking the dog, doing the laundry, etc!

January 2016:

• Anthropology of Religion: The Basics by James Bielo
• Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse

December 2015:

• The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra
• The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies by Anthony Giddens
• A Life Less Ordinary: A Memoir by Baby Halder

June-November 2015:

• Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone by Eduardo Galeano
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
• Translated Woman by Ruth Behar
• Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars by Sonia Faleiro
• Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror by Mahmood Mamdani
• Remember How I Told You I Loved You? by Gillian Linden
• On Suicide Bombing by Talal Asad
• Being a Buddhist Nun: The Struggle for Enlightenment in the Himalayas by Kim Gutschow
• When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God by T. M. Luhrmann
• The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover

May 2015:

• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
• Making Chastity Sexy: The Rhetoric of Evangelical Abstinence Campaigns by Christine Gardner

April 2015:

• A Secular Age by Charles Taylor
• Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape by Jenna Miscavige Hill
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

March 2015:

• Fatalism and Development by Dor Bahadur Bista
• Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• Joothan: A Dalit’s Life by Omprakash Valmiki, translated by Arun Prabha Mukherjee

February 2015:

• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
• Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer
• While the Gods Were Sleeping: A Journey Through Love and Rebellion in Nepal by Elizabeth Enslin