Books scattered all over the place...

Ever since I began to focus on a more research-based practice, I've realized how instrumental the books around me have become to the creative process - so much so that I might actually argue that when I'm reading, I'm working on an idea, or at least starting points for ideas which later formulate. Initially that probably seems a flimsy argument, especially if I'm caught reading any of these books in a coffeeshop at lunchtime re: Leisure (or spending time blogging about them), but I'm sticking to it - as an old mentor once told me "I'm Working even when I'm not working", and I think this is really true for a lot of folks I know.

Unfortunately, on that note, I've been wanting to build new bookshelves for a couple of years, yet refused to prioritize the project. In the meantime, all the books I've accumulated in the past year have began to spill off the existing shelves and all over the floor of my room. I've been trying to embrace this mess and look at it as a positive indicator of self-education, which tricks me into ignoring the mess only about half the time that I acknowledge that it's increasing. I'm going to build those shelves this year, and I'm not going to read all of the books cascading from the current ones, but I'll at least try. What follows is a full list of all the shelf-less books as of this week, each of which has either been read, will probably be read soon, or was at least partially browsed recently in reference to some idea or another (a few of which I actually went so far as to write small reviews for on Goodreads if I finished them) and all of which are in small piles on my floor surrounding my desk and bed.

The London Hanged, Peter Linebaugh [review here]
The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, edited by Dan Berger
Dark Matter, Gregory Sholette [review here]
Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy, Gabriel Kuhn [review here]
The Tiger, John Vaillant
The South is Still Rising: Contemporary Radical and Anarchist Activism in Richmond, Virginia from 1994-2004, Mo Karnage
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Kevin Kenny [review here]
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
Villians of All Nations, Marcus Rediker [review here]
The Golden Compass, Phillip Pullman
Solomon's Builders: Freemasons, Founding Fathers, and the Secrets of Washington DC, Christopher Hodapp (currently reading)
Digger Tracts 1649-50, edited by Andrew Hapton (bootlegged zine-style)
The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Alfred W. McCoy
The Book of Genesis as illustrated by Robert Crumb
Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, Paul Stamets
Your Action World, David Byrne
Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne
The Black Panthers Speak, Philip S. Foner
Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist
Signal :01, Journal of International Political Culture and Graphics
1877: Year of Violence, Robert V. Bruce
Perspectives on Anarchist Theory v.12 #1 & #2
Filling the Void: Interviews about Quitting Drinking and Using, on Doris Press (zine)
Incite! Journal of Experimental Media and Radical Aesthetics #2
King Leopold's Ghost: Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild
Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West, Eric Baratay & Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier
Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now, Dara Greenwald & Josh MacPhee
Reader's Digest North American Wildlife
Exterminate All the Brutes, Sven Lindqvist
Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind, Henry Hobhouse
Undoing Gender, Judith Butler
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire
Radical Street Performance, Jan Cohen-Cruz
The Ganzfeld, #3
Island of the Blue Dolphins, Scott O'Dell
The Voice of the Coyote, J. Frank Dobie
Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman
Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Joshia W. Cotter
Secret Pockets, Mary Tremonte (Encyclopedia Destructica)
Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib