Going Postal by Terry Pratchett

This book is Pratchett at his finest. Moist von Lipvig is the consummate con-man--until he is caught. Then, after a convincing hanging, Lord Vetinari gives him a second chance, but only if he takes over the Postal Service (which has gone into decline with the advent of the clacks to send messages across long distances). As Moist cons his way around the post office, he learns that the clacks are being operated along a different kind of con--and he suddenly realizes, after a life of deceiving people, he must do the right thing--restore the post office and set the clacks to rights too. Full of humor and Discworld characters I came to love, Going Postal is satire with a warm heart.

Feeding the Ghosts by Fred D'Aguiar

This book is a historicization of the Zong disaster. While its perspective shifts among several of the participations, the most memorable character is Mintah, the woman who climbs back aboard the ship after being thrown over. The book explores what happens when we commodify the human body--the abuses and indignities that humans are willing to perpetrate on one another in the name of getting a good return on an investment. It also explores the role of literacy and the power it confers.

Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History by Ian Baucom

This monograph creates an archive out of absence, specifically the absence of a response to Granville Sharp's letter to the Lords Commissioners protesting the court decision to treat the events on the Zong (that is, the captain's decision to throw 133 slaves overboard in order to conserve water supplies) as an insurance case rather than murder. Baucom looks at the way the Zong case has echoed through history (in politics, art, literature, and philosophy), how it reflects the growth of a system of finance capital that not only treats people as objects, but as objects whose loss can always already be theoretically present insofar as they can be insured, and how it shows us the intersections between a trans-Atlantic slave economy and modern systems of capital. The book is theoretical and dense. It draws connections between Benjamin's Arcades project and Arrighi's models of cycles in addition to drawing on theorists as diverse as Adam Smith and Slavoj Zizek. The contents of Granville Sharp's letter (and indeed, a straightforward account of the Zong case) are delayed and secondary to meditations on the ethical implications of how we understand history and of the connections between the trans-Atlantic slave trade and finance capitalism. While there are parts of the book that seemed opaque to me, its overall argument was eloquent and persuasive.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America by Terence Whalen

This book investigates Poe's understanding of and relation to the interaction between capitalist market forces, political economy, and conditions of literary production in the antebellum United States. Whalen is not afraid of making a controversial argument or taking on years of scholarship: in two of his most remarkable assertions, he claims that the accounts of Poe's success at the Southern Literary Messenger are greatly exaggerated (and possibly by Poe himself) and that the controversial Paulding-Dreyton review published in the Southern Literary Messenger was actually the work of William and Mary professor Beverley Tucker, so Poe's racism was not virulent, but rather the "average racism" of the age. Indeed, Whalen contends that Poe was so interested in the potential of a national market for his work, that he worked very hard to create political neutral texts. I agreed with many of the arguments in this book, but I thought Whalen's tone was a touch aggressive and arrogant: he is the only scholar in a hundred and fifty years to make arguments like these and to look at the sources he does! There's also a very strong reading of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead

This book is set in a world much like ours, except, perhaps, that elevators loom larger than life in its mythology. While it first seems almost enchantingly quirky, we gradually discover that what's at stake is not just a guild election or a disagreement between two methods of elevator inspection (Empiricists look at the parts of an elevator to see problems whereas Intuitionists ride and meditate and know)--instead it's all about race and society but also about the roles of corporations in our government and social life. As Lila Mae Watson, the first black, female elevator inspector discovers, the question of passing becomes very important, not just to her ability to do what's seen as a white job, but to the theoretically underpinnings of elevator inspection itself. I found the book thought-provoking and beautifully written. It's definitely much better and more interesting than Sag Harbor or Zone One.