Em Talks Books

Sure! Why not!

In December, I put together a collection of poetry and submitted it to a university press. I went through the peer review process, but because of restructuring, I was told today that I will need to restart the process to submit through a different channel in order to be considered for publication -- but the press window closes in 2 weeks and does not open again for another year.

I'm choosing to take a year to work on this book, really giving it the love and care that it deserves, rather than rushing a brief revision and resubmission process. I already said this was my year of writing, starting this week, so I can integrate it into my writing process for the year and work on it in a way that matters.

Anyway, I'm sad that it is going to take another year+ to get this book off the ground, but happy to know that a press and multiple editors believe in it, want it, and are encouraging me to go through these channels to get it published.

We're almost 1/3 of the way through the year and I have been READING y'all! I've really enjoyed stepping out of my comfort zone and reading much more fiction this year, as well as some in-depth nonfiction outside of my specialties. So far this year I've read:

-1 book of poetry -8 novels -1 book on teaching [can you tell I'm burnt out!] -14 books of nonfiction

Rating: 5/5

Discussion: I'm not a fiction person. I rarely read novels, usually, and don't love short stories. I want the abstractions and emotive tugs of poetry, or I want the learning of nonfiction. But Stine's novel Trashlands needs to be read -- and read by you, and me, and often.

Set in a post-apocalyptic (ongoing apocalyptic?) Appalachia, after great floods and other climate emergencies have rendered twenty-first century luxuries like the Internet and the electric grid only a tale from old-timers, Trashlands presents a hopeful hopeless future for Appalachia in times of horrific need. Folks pick plastic out of rivers and creeks, and sell it for money; plastic is the only valuable currency, and it is abundant, everywhere, and useful.

Trashlands is the name of the place and also the strip club in this quasi-village. This book centers women's perspectives in ways that you rarely find in post-apocalyptic literature. What IS it like, to be a woman in a place without legal protections, to be a women somewhere that men rule with impunity? Stine takes these questions head on.

I mostly read nonfiction books, much more than any other genre. For popular nonfiction (that is, not academic books meant for a niche audience of scholars), there are three main things I look for in a "good" nonfiction book:

Clear purpose.

Research used toward this purpose.

Trusting the reader.

Many nonfiction books seem to want to bring knowledge to the reader, but without a greater understanding of the purpose of that knowledge carrying. What is your book meant to DO in the world, society, or in the mind and body of your reader? Learning for learning's sake is great, but if the only purpose of your book is teaching, you should be doing that quite well! Just info dumping on your reader without structures in place for retention in your text achieves next to nothing.

Research, whether personal or professional, fleshes out ideas in nonfiction. Some books use too much research without the context to hold it all together. Meanwhile, some books go pages and pages of the author's thoughts held together with not much, without showing what experiences, moments, or other thinkers have influenced their ideas. Many first-time writers will make this mistake -- they have so much to say and feel that their ideas are so important that they ramble for pages, without understanding that, at the end of the day, this is boring.

And finally, so many nonfiction books make the mistake of believing that the reader does not have the internet and will never read another book on the topic again. Thinking that your book needs to be the sole source of information on the topic waters down arguments and bloats the prose; instead of going deeply into your unique ideas, you're caught up in showing the history, defining terms, showing context for every actor and their actions, and generally acting like your reader will never again be interested in this topic. You have to trust that the reader will continue to explore threads on their own, or at least, can understand why you haven't gone down every rabbit hole in the book. The best nonfiction writers will gesture toward these rabbit holes and point the reader toward other authors to explore those topics as they continue on their way to their own goal.

Below are the 31 books I read in 2022! Taking a few months off of reading to deal with thing put a dent in my goals, but I'm still so glad I took the time to explore my interests and learn more. Happy reading!

General Nonfiction

Democracy in Chains by Nancy Maclean

Glass House by Brian Alexander

Dear White Women: Let’s Get (Un)Comfortable Talking About Racism by Misasha Suzuki Graham and Sara Blanchard

The Trouble With White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism by Kyla Schuler

Coming into the Country by John McPhee

To Write As if Already Dead by Kate Zambreno

The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy by Albert Murray

Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer

World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean

A Queer Dharma: Yoga and Meditation for Liberation by Jacoby Ballard

Complaint! by Sara Ahmed

Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (Revised Edition) by Susan Stryker

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe

Missoula by Jon Krakauer

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools by Monique W. Morris

The History of White People by Nell Irwin Painter

The Case Against Free Speech by P.E. Moskowitz

Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction by Todd May

Death in Mud Luck by Eric Eyre

Teaching and Education

Higher Education and Hope: Institutional, Pedagogical, and Personal Responsibilities, ed. by Paul Gibbs and Andrew Peterson

Critical Pedagogy: An Exploration of Contemporary Themes and Issues by Tomas Boronksi

Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom by Cyndi Kernahan

The Hidden Inequities of Labor-Based Contract Grading by Ellen C. Carillo

The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the End of History by Richard Hall

Fiction

Song Birds and Stray Dogs by Megan Lucas

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

I’m currently reading 3 books: The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter, The Hopeless University by Richard Hall, and The Promise of Happiness by Sarah Ahmed.

And by currently, I mean I’m 40-80% done reading all three of these books, which I rotate around each day in my reading practice.

I’m a writing instructor by trade, a former poet, and deeply curious about systems, power, emotion, and class. Looking back, this has always been my lane — intersections of these 4 things shaped my entire college experience and continue to drive my research interests. But because I have two degrees in English, my actual research interests weren’t large parts of my academic training. I took 3 Shakespeare courses and can ramble at length about Modernist poetry, but these topics don’t interest me over much.

Often, I find myself reading far outside my field and working toward a better understanding of systems of power and oppression. I am often confused when reading! References, traditions of discourse, and histories of fields are all things I need more time to digest.

But I think I need to read broadly in order to better understand the work I do want to do. There’s no way to discuss Appalachian identity and the scholarly study of Appalachia without discussing the history of whiteness, which is to say, to study how it has historically and currently been posited in popular and scholarly imaginations coupled with white supremacy, classism, xenophobia, and masculine anxieties of the Other. There’s no way to discuss teaching without talking about the hopeless university, in all its neoliberal and necrophilic political lurching toward our inevitable demise. And there’s no way to conceptualize work, queerness, and family without unpacking happiness as a driving force of American policy.

I teach writing for a living. I also do research, which requires me, at times, to speed-read dozens of articles and books on subjects which only tangentially interest me, or sometimes enrage me, or sometimes bore me literally to sleep, because I need to understand the history of a concept which I am saying is bad and stupid.

I read thousands of pages of student writing a semester. I read thousands of emails. I read and read and read.

Recently, I was stuck. I was reading a history book for my own interest which was not very interesting. I could muster maybe six pages at a time before the words blurred together. I set it down. I didn't pick it up. I did not finish reading a book for a month. And I DNF that book -- it is now living out its second life in the used bookstore, where I hope it will make someone very happy.

When I finally donated that book, I looked at the teetering tower of books on my desk, waiting for me to skim and pick apart for my upcoming conference presentation. I'm actually interested in this topic, but a lot of the material in these books, even the chapters I have pre-skimmed for content, do not relate to my work in any way. That stack of books will be a 9-hour slog, on the other side of which I may have gleaned 3 minutes of content for my conference presentation.

I instead read a novel. And I read that novel in 6 hours, flat. Then I picked up a nonfiction book which has been on the NYT bestseller list, and read it in less than two days as well.

Because so much of my time is taken up by reading and writing for my job, "reading for pleasure" becomes a blurry, difficult to catch thing. I genuinely enjoy reading about teaching theory, the history of the American university, and my students' work. But sometimes, I cannot, for the life of me, finish a book in the academic register. I need plot. Characters. Any acknowledgement that a human being might read this piece. Something to keep me turning the pages.

Hello! Happy new year, and change!

I don't have solid reading goals for this year, in part because I believe in leaving parts of ourselves fallow while other things grow. I can't predict the ebbs and flows of the next 12 months. But I do know that I want to keep reading books, and I want to occasionally muse aloud about them here.

So far this year, I have read 3 books, and I have a big TBR stack from the library and also Christmas waiting for me.

I think, for me, the biggest thing is to enjoy reading and talking about books, and to continue to push myself to seek joy, contentment, and peace without stress. I'm not interested in making this another obligation.

This section needs an introduction! I'm a university English instructor in the U.S., non-tenure-track. I have an MA and BA, and am a first-generation, working-class academic. I read 15 books on higher education and pedagogy in 2021, and here are my top 5!

1. Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World by Eli Meyerhoff: I reviewed this book earlier this year. In it, I pushed back on the organization of the book, as well as some of its arguments. However, I keep coming back to this book -- not only in my own personal emotional work of unpacking myself from my profession, but also when crafting proposals for conferences and articles. If higher education as a profession is smart at all (which... debatable!), this book will become a touchstone.

2. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez: MUST READ for creative writing faculty! I completely changed how I approached the creative writing workshop classroom thanks to Chavez's brilliant book. It's difficult to reconfigure your thinking away from what YOU experienced in a creative writing workshop (I was hazed! For years!), but the payoff is so worth it. I cannot say enough good things about this book.

3. Ungrading ed. by Susan Blum: Ungrading is an umbrella term for any non-normative grading scheme set forth by an instructor, whether that's contract grading, labor-based contract grading, or truly anarchic ungrading -- no grades, ever. Blum has curated a great resource for folks who are ungrading-curious, including from perspectives outside of the humanities and arts (where ungrading has long been the norm, whether we admit it or not, because would YOU tell an 18-year-old that their poem in Intro to Creative Writing was a B-? Probably not!) and into upper-level STEM classes. All the authors in this collection do a great job of unpacking both their theoretical under-pinnings and their on-the-ground pedagogy. If you're familiar with ungrading already, you'll probably skim some chapters, and others you'll come back to again and again.

4. Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto by Kevin Gannon: West Virginia University press at it AGAIN with this book, an excellent manifesto for teaching in higher education. Gannon says quiet parts out loud and articulates very well the issues with higher education, as well as the inherent tensions that we all carry in our complicity in upholding, by all accounts, a pretty fucked up system. This slim book packs a punch, and is perfect for an angsty weekend read.

5. Sustainable, Resilient, Free: The Future of Public Higher Education by John Warner: Warner's latest uses a lot of research to argue for free universal higher education for all. I personally support many of his points for moral reasons, but he does the math to convince even the most hardened politician that free higher education just makes SENSE. Warner's writing style is always well-organized and easy to follow, and I think this book is great for the skeptics of free (or MUCH more subsidized) higher ed among you.

This is nonfiction EXCLUDING books about higher education and teaching. Out of the 29 nonfiction books I read this year, here are my 5 favorite and why:

1. Work Won’t Love You Back by Sarah Jaffe: An absolute BANGER for anyone who considers themself a worker, and doubly so for those of us in "caring" professions. Jaffe, in easy-to-follow language, utilizing both interviews and theoretical lenses, shows the deeply diseased mindset of "loving what you do," and how that love is weaponized against mostly marginalized people to justify low/no wages and low/no prestige in some of the most important jobs in a society (care, teaching, feeding, etc.). This books should be mandatory reading for all teachers, IMHO, because it also cuts to the heart of some uncomfortable emotional truths about teaching that we all need to internalize. It's a HIGHLY recommend!

2. The Melancholia of Class by Cynthia Cruz: I just reviewed this book so I'm not going to rehash it all here BUT: if you're a working class academic it's a must-read.

3. Heroines by Kate Zambreno: Oof, this is a cheat, because I have read this book every single year since 2013. I'm sorry! It's just so good! Zambreno takes her own life, marries it to the lives and tribulations of famous Modernists' wives, throws in some literary and cultural theory, and comes out with this monstrous, genre-defying masterpiece of a book. When folks ask me my favorite book, this one often comes up. It's just that good -- just that well researched, important, and vital. As a note, though, this book and its subjects are all white, and that whiteness goes largely unexamined. Race and class are pretty coolly ignored for "the trials of womanhood" talk, and Zambreno doesn't do enough work to unpack her or her subjects' privileges, or her assumptions about the anatomy and role of "women" in society. I think she would probably write a different kind of book about wifedom today than she did in 2012, and I hope to read that book one day.

4. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote: A CLASSIC which I only just read this year! I can see why it defined a genre and created a new paradigm for journalism. It also was DEEPLY disturbing. I recommend for the grandfather of all true crime novels and podcasts if you are even tangentially interested in the genre.

5. Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi: Kendi's 2016 book, which received renewed interest during the unrest of Summer 2020, is, in my limited view, a great book for white people to read. Kendi breaks down multiple eras of American history and how each era was driven by racism and white supremacist sentiment and legislature. This book gives historical perspective and an overview to begin further reading about the white supremacy written into American law.

I've ranked the fiction books I read this year! Like a monster! So out of the 10 novels I read this year, here are my top 5 and why:

1. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward: Ward, who has deservedly won every fiction award and deserves to win all the rest of them too, is a brilliant novelist. This book came out in 2011, but I only read it in 2021. The characters are memorable, the place is ever-present and alive, and the voice is unmistakable. I highly recommend this book.

2. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton: Yes, a book that originally came out in 1990, 2 years before I was born, is in my top 5 books of 2021 list. Sue me. Here's the deal: This book is excellent. It's fast paced, fantastical, and easy to follow. I read it in less than 72 hours, including staying up late to finish it (something, I'm sorry to say, I very rarely do with nonfiction books, despite reading so many more of them). Dinosaurs! Capitalism! Extraction settler colonialism! Sassy mathematicians! I also only watched Jurassic Park the film for the first time in the last couple of years, so it was fresh in my mind -- and the book and film line up fairly well! The basic premise and flaws in the grand design are the same, but there are (as always) more twists and turns, and more characters, in the book. This is my kind of beach read.

3. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien: Wow, another 1990 release on here. So, I read this book for the first time when I was 18 years old, and then promptly never thought of it again until I saw it on my bookshelf after my spouse and I combined books. In some sort of reading rut this year, I thought why not. And wow. I really didn't appreciate this book when I was 18. I also think I only read the first few chapters then. The layers of complexity -- on top of the general "war is hell in ways that you cannot imagine" messaging -- stand out on this read. It's a classic!

4. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: Alright, speaking of classics... we have this 1878 Russian novel. I watched the Kierra Knightly film adaptation in 2020 and immediately realized that I was not doing the plot so much as representing the plot of the novel in imagistic form (basically the opposite of the Jurassic Park film), and wanted to read it eventually. I finally got the chance this year. And wow! So much intrigue! So easy to understand despite being almost 150 years old! Very entertaining and wonderful to pick up when I simply wanted to read something! This was the first Tolstoy I ever read (and somehow they gave me 2 degrees in literature, folks) and I enjoyed it.

5. The Martian by Andy Weir: This 2011 novel was so entertaining. I've never seen the film, but really enjoyed the tone and pacing throughout. I enjoy science fiction, apparently, a thing I definitely wouldn't have said about myself in 2020, and this book was highly technical in its space-talk. Love a space drama. This is also my definition of a beach read -- something light, easy to follow, and highly entertaining.