Beaver/Disney Land

Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America

Leila Philip, (2024, 2022)

On Time and Soccer

The Game at the End of the World: Villainous Referees, Communist Bakers, the Secret Women's World Cup, and a Goalkeeper's Last Stand

Juan Villoro (author), Francisco Cantú (translator), (2026)

2025: My year in books

Towards the end of the Fall 2024 semester, it was common for me to open my office door to find a plain package or two on my desk. They had been placed there by the department's administrative assistant, having been routed to there by University mail services, which received the package from the author of the book contained within. My point is that it takes a long time to send a physical thing to someone at my workplace, even inter-office mail, and I appreciate that. There's no streamlined process, no third-party ed tech app to save someone in upper admin a fraction of a second, no expectation that anyone act immediately.

I was receiving these gifts because a colleague asked me to judge submissions for the "academic book of the year" category for Texas Institute of Letters awards. I read them all within the first few months of the year, and every single one of the nominees offered insight into topics I knew very little about along with worth-my-time wordcraft. Most were history books, and as storytelling is a weighty part of their methodology, I maintain that historians tend to be good writers. My favorite of the lot, the eventual overall winner, was Houston and the Permanence of Segregation: An Afropessimist Approach to Urban History, by David Ponton III. Compelling scholarly argument that blended straightforward, quantitative analysis of public data, analyzed through a clear-eyed application of antiracist theories. It was timely not just in topic but in approach, as it made transparent how little the bad faith critics of critical theory actually understand of what they're complaining about.

An extracurricular project I started over the past year was to read all of William Shakespeare, a play a month. So far I've completed with six re-reads*: Antony and Cleopatra (1623), As You Like It (1623) The Comedy of Errors (1595), Julius Cesar* (1623), Love's Labour's Lost (1598), A Midsummer Night's Dream* (1596), Much Ado About Nothing* (1623), Romeo and Juliet* (1597), The Taming of the Shrew* (1592), Titus Andronicus* (1594), Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1602), and The Winter's Tale (1623). I included the dates on that list out of my adherence to formatting consistency, but the differences of the years don't mean as much to me as a reader in the twenty-first century. What's more, there is considerable variation between when Shakespeare is believed to have written each play, its first performance, its physical publication, and the experts' definitive date. I've never considered myself any good at reading drama, and the iambic pentameter would wash over me at times, forcing me to double back, but then I'd get pulled in by a phrase that is now part of the firmament but in reading I was reminded someone actually came up with this.

Finally, project-wise, at the urging of a friend, and having taken much longer than it should have, I completed my read of Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle series of autofiction tomes with Some Rain Must Fall (2016) and The End (2018). Over the course, I've read more words written by Knausgård than any other author: 1,371,255, to be exact. (For comparison, all of Shakespeare's plays total 884,421 words.) The sections I appreciated the most, across the series, were the switches from literary criticism to the narrative and back. I'm referring to the unstated shifts from one style to the other, moves that were *maybe* show-off-y but that snapped me to attention.

Favorite books I read in 2025:

• They Call Me Oil Can: Baseball, Drugs, and Life on the Edge, Dennis Boyd & Mike Shalin (2012)
• Nestwork: New Material Rhetorics for Precarious Species, Jennifer Clary-Lemon (2024)
• The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates (2024)
• Dominica, Angie Cruz (2019)
• One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad (2025) 
• James, Percival Everett (2024)
• Outside Providence, Peter Farrelly (1998)
• Something That May Shock and Discredit You, Daniel Mallory Lavery (2020)
• The Minotaur of Calle Lanza, Zito Madu (2024)
• A Children's Bible: A Novel, Lydia Millet (2021)
• The Whalers: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Mystique of New England's (Second) Greatest NHL Franchise, Patrick Pickens (2021)
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin (2022)

The rest of the books:

• Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin (1956)
• "We Want Better Education!" The 1960s Chicano Student Movement, School Walkouts, and the Quest for Educational Reform in South Texas, James B. Barrera (2024)
• Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, Max Brooks (2020)
• Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993)
• Fiestas in Laredo: Matachines, Quinceañeras, and George Washington's Birthday, Norma E. Cantú (2024)
• Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games, Alenda Y. Chang (2019)
• Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002)
• Six Constitutions Over Texas: Texas's Political Identity, 1830-1900, William J. Chriss (2024)
• Making the Unknown Known: Women in Early Texas Art, 1860s-1960s, Victoria Hennessy Cummins & Light Townsend Cummins (Eds.) (2024)
• No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai (A), Donald Keene (T) (1973) 
• The Paleontologist, Luke Dumas (2024)
• Effective Teaching of Technical Communication: Theory, Practice, and Application, Michael J. Klein (Ed.) (2021)
• Females, Andrea Long Chu (2019)
• Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany (1975)
• The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany, Graeme Gibson (2009)
• Texan Exodus: the Runaway Scrape and Its Enduring Legacy, Stephen L. Hardin (2024)
• America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, Elizabeth Hinton (2021)
• King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Adam Hochschild (1998)
• The Raven Scholar (Eternal Path Trilogy, 1), Antonia Hodgson (2025)
• Uncovering Dinosaur Behavior: What They Did and How We Know, David Hone (2024)
• Investing Ecosystems: The Rhetoric of Science in an Ecological Age, Madison Jones (2025)
• Routledge Handbook of Animal Welfare, Andrew Knight, Clive Phillips, Paula Sparks (Eds.) (2023)
• Luster, Raven Leilani (2020)
• The Fantasy Economy: Neoliberalism, Inequality, and the Education Reform Movement, Neil Kraus (2023)
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn (1962)
• The Streets of Laredo: Texas Modernity and its Discontents, José E. Limón (2024)
• Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link (2001)
• Palaeontology in Public: Popular science, lost creatures and deep time, Chris Manias (Ed.) (2025)
• How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason, Lee McIntyre (2021)
• Dinosaurs on Other Planets, Danielle McLaughlin (2016)
• Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science, Jeff Meldrum (2006)
• The Last Town on Earth, Thomas Mullen (2006)
• Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths, Darren Naish (2016)
• Palestine in a World on Fire, Katherine Natanel & Ilan Pappé (2024)
• Home Heat Money God: Texas and Modern Architecture, Kathryn E. O'Rourke (A) & Ben Koush (photos) (2024)
• Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, Nathaniel Philbrick (2006)
• The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America, Paul M. Renfro (2024)
• The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, Margaret Renkl (A), Billy Renkl (I) (2023)
• Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, Jeffery T. Roeagen (2008)
• Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Arundhati Roy (2014)
• The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson (2014)
• The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual, Jack Schneider & Jennifer Berkshire (2024)
• White Rural Rage, Thomas Schaller & Paul Waldman (2024)
• The Fight for Midnight, Dan Solomon (2023)
• Dog Logic, Tom Strelich (2017)
• Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship, Omar Valerio-Jiménez (2024)
• William Hanson and the Texas-Mexico Border: Violence, Corruption, and the Making of the Gatekeeper State, John Weber (2024)
• The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead (2019)
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson (2020)
• Decolonial Arts Praxis Transnational Pedagogies and Activism, Injeong Yoon-Ramirez & Alejandra I. Ramírez (Eds.) (2024)

2024: My year in books

This review is late coming, because of for no one but me. I'll start with the books I most enjoyed reading during the year 2024.

Until I am given a really good reason to expect otherwise, I will anticipate every new Hanif Abdurraqib book and read it as soon as I can. Last year, it was There's Always This Year (2024), which is about basketball in the same way that Go Ahead in the Rain was "about" A Tribe Called Quest (2019). That is, yes, it's absolutely about the thing that the book jacket says its about, but it's also an opportunity for Abdurraqib to reflect and critique across a range of socially-relevant subjects. I've always been a fan of the "talking about one thing as an entry point to talk about some other thing" genre, and sure, this metaphorical approach to essaying is not unique or even rare, but what remains exceptional is the care that Abdurraqib puts into his writing. The specifics are important to him, but that they are can be important to anyone.

• A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Becky Chambers (2021 & 2022)
• Washington Black, Esi Edugyan (2019) - An original, compelling, slightly magical realist (more on that below) bildungsroman.
• Whalefall, Daniel Kraus (2023) - The rare contextual road trip reading twofer.
• No One is Talking about This, Patricia Lockwood (2021) - First half was a lol-er, second was deeply personal and depressing. I passed that threshold while reading at a pub in San Antonio.
• The Witching Tide, Margaret Meyer (2023) - As part of last year's autumn theme.
• Witches, Stacy Schiff (2015) - Working my way backwards through the oeuvre of my favorite contemporary historian, this one paired with Meyer's novel.
• The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac, Sharma Shields (2015) - A serendipitous choice that is only retroactively work-realted.
• A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, Garry Wills (1999) - For a would-be book club that my co-reader abandoned halfway through, possibly because Wills—like the co-reader, a self-described conservative—did not confirm the co-reader's priors.

Even before getting my hands on a preordered copy of Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal (2024), I knew it would be an instant favorite. Villarreal does so many great things I appreciate from an essayist: blending genres, jumping from everyday to academic registers, and helping me think deeply about people around me.

As usual, I read a lot of books for work. I'm currently working on a review essay on the common themes from Toward an Anti-Capitalist Composition by James Rushing Daniel (2022), Unwell Writing Centers: Searching for Wellness in Neoliberal Educational Institutions and Beyond by Genie Nicole Giaimo (2023), and Storying Writing Center Labor for Anti-Capitalist Futures, edited by Genie Nicole Giaimo and Daniel Lawson (2024).

Another sequence of projects uses Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado (2023), Show Me the Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America by Gowan Dawson (2016), The Jurassic Park Book: New Perspectives on the Classic 1990s Blockbuster edited by Matthew Melia (2023), Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline by David Sepkoski (2015), and The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown by Adam Welz (2023).

And to incorporate across various teaching, scholarship, and service projects: Inclusive STEM: Transforming Disciplinary Writing Instruction for a Socially Just Future, edited by Heather M. Falconer and LaKeisha McClary (2024) and Keywords in Technical and Professional Communication, edited by Han Yu & Jonathan Buehl (2023) (WAC Clearinghouse remains worth the regular donations). Two by Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (1987) and Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (2005), They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer (1955), Engaging Ambience: Visual and Multisensory Methodologies and Rhetorical Theory by Brian McNely (2024) (which I've already assigned to multiple thesis-writing grad students), and What Universities Owe Democracy by Grant Shreve, with Phillip Spector and Ronald J. Daniels (2021).

Maybe because other books I read this year have become overshadowed by famous film adaptations, but I was conscientious of how the books I was reading might look on the screen. I'm not much of a cinephile—I like what I like, I guess—but I do tend to categorize movies in terms of time: either clustering films that were released around the same time (as discussed at length in Brian Raftery's (2019) Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen) or across the oeuvre of a single director. Leaning on the latter, four of Dennis Lehane's novels have already been adapted to film, by Ben Affleck, Clint Eastwood, Michaël R. Roskam, and Martin Scorsese. Affleck best captured the setting, so give him another go with Small Mercies (2023). Some others:

• If he's at all interested in directing a fantasy epic, RaMell Ross could capture the knottiness of Marlon James's Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2019).
• The film version of Colin Meloy's (2011) Wildwood is set to be released this year from the animation whizzes at Laika (Kubo and the Two Strings, Missing Link)—which reminds me, I want to complete that book series in preparation. My choice is to go live-action and lean into nostalgic adventure-horror of The Stars Did Wander Darkling (2022). Richard Donner (RIP) would have been perfect and also obvious. Alfonso Cuarón, who helmed what everyone agrees is the best Harry Potter movie, has shown he can direct younger actors dealing with mature themes. And he hasn't won an Oscar in, like, half a decade—which means he's due for another!
• Both Big Swiss (Jen Beagin, 2023) and A Tale for the Time Being (Ruth Ozeki, 2013) would benefit from a director who could handle the slightly outlandish or fantastical without losing the heart or brain. Can Greta Gerwig and Anna Biller each take one?
• Derek B. Miller's (2012) noir-ish Norwegian by Night is the novel that brought me this idea. Twenty years ago, I would have nominated David Fincher. A decade later, Tomas Alfredson. Today, maybe Joachim Trier could emphasize the local color and reveal the humanity beneath Miller's story.

I've learned that returning to a beloved book is often time better spent than rewatching a movie or watching a lot of what I end up watching for the first time. This past year, I re-read Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton (1990) with a class of rhetoric majors in an upper-division course titled "Writing about Dinosaurs," for which we hosted a showing of the Steven Spielberg (1993) film as our course "final".

Technically a re-read,  Trilogía El Señor de los Anillos is the original Spanish translation of J. R. R. Tolkien's (1954-1955) foundational fantasy series. Luis Domènech, (Francisco Porrúa), and Matilde Horne (1977-1980), working out of Buenos Aires, Argentina, are the credited translators (as far as I have been able to find out, Domènech is one of Porrúa's pseudonyms).

Here are the other books I read over the year 2024:

• Circle of Friends, Maeve Binchy (1990) and Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (1995) - Way better as novels than the 1990s romcom film adaptations led me to expect.
• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Robert Coover (1968) - Annual thing to read while in the stands at Cape Cod Baseball League games.
• The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880) alongside A Short History of Russia: How the World's Largest Country Invented Itself, from the Pagans to Putin, Mark Galeotti (2020)
• When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, John Ganz (2024)
• The Legacy of Luna, Julia Butterfly Hill (2000)
• The Shining, Stephen King (1977) - Read this for a community book club and film showing hosted by the nice folks at Buzzed on Books.
• The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman (2022)
• Dancing in the dark: My Struggle Book 4, Karl Ove Knausgård (2010)
• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Charles C. Mann (2005) and 1421: The Year China Discovered America, Gavin Menzies (2002) - Both Barnes & Noble front-of-the-house display table kinds of books.
• Tender, Belinda McKeon (2015)
• Satanism and Witchcraft, Jules Michelet (A, 1862), A. R. Allinson (T, 2017) - Seems like folks have bene calling out organized religion's problems with women for as long as there's been organized religion.
• My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh (2018)
• Skippy Dies, Paul Murray (2010)
• The Big East: Inside the Most Entertaining and Influential Conference in College Basketball History, Dana O'Neil (2021)
• In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, Nathaniel Philbrick (2000)
• The Witches of Eastwick, John Updike (1984)
• The Elder Wyrm, K.R. VanderBrooke (2024) - Like so many fantasy novels it's loaded with ideas and worldbuilding. If you're going to self-publish why not just fill out the 1,000 pages!
• Let Us Descend, Jesmyn Ward (2023)
• The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead (2016)
• Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge, Mark Yarm (2012)

The Shape of SF to Come

 A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Becky Chambers (2021, 2022)

2023: My Year in Books

“By teaching us how to read, they had taught us how to get away.”

Six years (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022) now, logging my book reading. It's a streak bested by "favorite songs/albums" and "movies that came out last year that I didn't watch but would like to some day" EOY lists.

Here is every book I read in 2023, with some superlatives, followed by holistic observations. Re-reads are indicated by an asterisk*.

1. The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, Stacy Schiff (2022) - 01.11 Book I'm Most Likely to Refer to When in an Argument about Originalism
2. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, 3rd Ed., Ernst Breisach (1983, 2007) - 01.13
3. Places of My Infancy: A Memory, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1961) - 01.13
4. Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson (1995) - 01.30
5. Educated, Tara Westover (2018) - 01.30
6. In Praise of Shadows, Junichirō Tanizaki (1933, 2001) - 01.31
7. Whose Truth, Whose Creativity? Why Postmodern Art Theory Is A Culturally Damaging Mistake And How Neuroscience Can Prove This: A 21st Century Manifesto, George J. E. Sakkal (2022) - 02.03 Book I'm Least Likely to Return to
8. Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry (2019) - 02.05
9. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, Jason Stanley (2018) - 02.12
10. LaserWriter II, Tamara Shopsin (2021) - 02.27
11. On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care, Victor Ray (2022) - 03.03
12. The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays, Julia Koets (2019) - 03.13
13. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, Patrick Radden Keefe (2019) - 03.18
14. Theories and Methods of Writing Center Studies: A Practical Guide, Jo Mackiewicz & Rebecca Day Babcock, Eds. (2020) - 04.02
15. CounterStories from the Writing Center, Frankie Condon & Wonderful Faison, Eds. (2022) - 04.11
16. High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America, Jessica B. Harris (2011) - 04.30
17. Hopscotch, Julio Costázar (1966) - 05.01
18. Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies, Sara P. Alvarez, Yana Kuchirko, Mark McBeth, Meghmala Tarafdar, Missy Watson, Eds. (2022) - 05.16
19. Dis/Rupting the Center: A Partnership Approach to Writing Across the University, Rebecca Hallman Martini (2022) - 05.16
20. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard P. Feynman (1999) - 05.17
21. Bluets, Maggie Nelson (2009) - 05.27
22. Shadow Country, Peter Matthiessen (2008) - 06.05
23. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (2022) - 06.15
24. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Charles Darwin (1872) - 06.17*
25. The Seas, Samantha Hunt (2004) - 06.17
26. A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School, Jack Schneider & Jennifer Berkshire (2020) - 06.24
27. The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth's Ultimate Trophy, Paige Williams (2018) - 06.25
28. Explorers of Deep Time: Paleontologists and the History of Life, Roy Plotnick (2022) - 07.05
29. The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach (2011) - 07.11 This Year's "Book to Read While at CCL Games"
30. The Story of The Earth and Man, John William Dawson (1873) - 07.12
31. Out in the Center: Public Controversies and Private Struggles, Denny, Harry; Mundy, Robert; Naydan, Liliana M.; Sévère, Richard; & Sicari, Anna (2018) - 07.14
32. Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Animal Life, Rev. H. N. Hutchinson (1897) - 07.28
33. One Life, Megan Rapinoe (2020) - 08.01
34. Dinosaurs (With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections), William Diller Matthew (1915, 2006) - 08.04
35. Animals of the Past, Frederick A. Lucas (1913) - 08.12
36. The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom, H. W. Brands (2020) - 08.12
37. The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton (2013) - 08.20
38. Impossible Owls: Essays, Brian Phillips (2018) - 08.26
39. Cheddar Off Dead, Korina Moss (2022) - 09.04 Best Title, Possibly Ever
40. Stay True: A Memoir, Hua Hsu (2022) - 09.04
41. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer (1951) - 09.13
42. Actual Air, David Berman (1999) - 09.13
43. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Robert C. O'Brien (1971) - 09.14*
44. Institutional Ethnography as Writing Studies Practice, Michelle LaFrance & Melissa Nicolas (2023) - 09.15
45. A Death in the Family: My Struggle 1, Karl Ove Knausgård (2009) - 09.17
46. Devil House, John Darnielle (2022) - 09.27
47. I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy (2022) - 10.01
48. The Devil in Silver, Victor LaValle (2012) - 10.10*
49. Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration, Alejandra Olivia (2023) - 10.12
50. Sent for You Yesterday, John Edgar Wideman (1983) - 10.26
51. The Last House on Needles Street, Catriona Ward (2021) - 10.26
52. Keywords in Design Thinking: A Lexical Primer for Technical Communicators & Designers, Jason C. K. Tham (E) (2022) - 11.02
53. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon (1988) - 11.03
54. The Creative Act, Rick Rubin (2023) - 11.03
55. Madvillain's Madvillainy, Will Hagle (2023) - 11.10
56. Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional, Isaac Fitzgerald (2022) - 11.21
57. The New England Grimpendium: A Guide to Macabre and Ghostly Sites, J. W. Ocker (2010) - 11.24
58. A Man in Love: My Struggle 2, Karl Ove Knausgård (2009) - 11.25
59. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Donna J. Haraway (1989) -12.02
60. Christmas and Other Horrors: An Anthology of Solstice Horror, Ellen Datlow (E) (2023) - 12.05
61. Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera (A, 2009), Lisa Dillman (T, 2014) - 12.09
62. A Research-based Approach to Writing and Learning Across Disciplines, Linda Adler-Kassner & Elizabeth Wardle (2022) - 12.15
63. The Axeman's Carnival, Catherine Chidgey (2022) - 12.18
64. King Lear, William Shakespeare (1608-1623) - 12.30*
65. Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir, Norm Macdonald (2016) - 12.31
66. Boyhood Island: My Struggle 3, Karl Ove Knausgård (2015) - 12.31

Patterns and trends I noticed in my reading, beyond the usual anticipated seasonal (St. Patrick's Day, beach reads, Halloween, winter holidays) and travel (Massachusetts, New Zealand, Pittsburgh), had more to do with style and genre.

Not by design, at least not at first, my reading over the past year was marked by writers writing about themselves: autoethnography, memoir, autofiction, first-person narrative, autobiography, manifesto. Hsu felt like hearing a beloved college friend tell stories; same with Fitzgerald, except it was high school. Macdonald's Not a Memoir was as factual as Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, and as silly, too. I plan to talk about Knausgård elsewhere when I've finished the set, so I'll save my thoughts for summative assessment. McCurdy, Herrera, and Westover started with me feeling miserable for the authors, but then respectively hopeful, in reverence, and somewhat letdown. Rapinoe's book left me with a greater sense of respect for ghostwriters.

Three instances of writers writing about other people — Say Nothing, The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, The New England Grimpendium —not coincidentally with ties to my home state of Massachusetts, caused me to seek out additional works by their authors.

Three that I've had in the queue for a while and that I finally made space for invoked different recognizable aesthetics that I would broadly attribute to 21st century writing. Impossible Owls picks up where the blog era left off, but shows the benefits of working with an editor that even the best writing of the pre-social media moment lacked. The Seas is lyrical and magical-realist, the latter in my favorite sense of that genre, when you can't tell if the magic is real and knowing the distinction might not matter. LasterWriter II juxtaposes straight fiction, fictionalized non-fiction, and fourth-wall breaking practical advice.

Finally, the longest gap between my first read and the reread, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. You might recognize the title from the animated film The Secret of NIMH, part of Don Bluth's absolutely killer 1980s cv, which along with Dragon's Lair, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, and All Dogs Go to Heaven, is a run that rivals any animation studio before or since. If you're familiar with the accelerating conflict of the story, which can be read as character versus nature or technology depending upon where you scale a bunch of rodents who can read and write, you'll recognize why it was silly of me to select this as an autumn reading. The header quote is from this book.

2022: My year in books

Once again (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021), I logged my book reading for all of 2022. Here's the list, followed by some reflection. Re-reads are indicated by an asterisk*.

1. Year of the Monkey — Patti Smith (2019) - 01.04
2. The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Radical Change — C. J. Polychroniou & Noam Chomsky (2021) - 01.05
3. White Evangelical Racism: the Politics of Morality in America —Athea Butler (2021) - 01.07
4. Rhet Ops: Rhetoric and Information Warfare — Jim Ridolfo & William Hart-Davidson (E) (2019) - 01.17
5. Critical Discourse Analysis: A Literature Review — Jennifer Tabernero-Diamante (2016) - 01.20
6. Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds — Jodie Clark (2016) - 01.25
7. 4 3 2 1 — Paul Auster (2017) - 02.24
8. The Faraway Nearby — Rebecca Solnit (2013) - 02.24
9. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson — (2020) - 02.25*
10. Beowulf — Seamus Heaney (2000) - 03.04
11. Bird by Bird — Anne Lamotte (1994) - 03.05
12. Shuggie Bain — Douglas Stuart (2020) - 03.23
13. Dinosaurs Rediscovered: the Scientific Revolution in Paleontology — Michael J. Benton (2019) - 04.08
14. The Border Crossed Us: the Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border — Justin Akers Chacón (2021) - 04.09
15. The Sellout — Paul Beatty (2015) - 04.14
16. Multilingual Contributions to Writing Research: Toward an Equal Academic Exchange — Natalia Ávila Reyes (Ed.) (2021) - 04.19
17. Community is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change — Aimée Knight (2022) - 04.25
18. Gods and Fighting Men: The Story of the Tuatha De Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland — Lady Augusta Gregory (1904) - 04.26
19. The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu (A), Ken Liu (T) (2006) - 04.30
20. The Future of our Schools: Teachers Unions and Social Justice — Lois Weiner (2012) - 05.01
21. Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe — Michael Löwy (2011) - 05.10
22. Queerly Centered: LGBTQA Writing Center Directors Navigate the Workplace — Travis Webster (2021) - 05.15
23. The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext — José Olivarez, Willie Perdomo, Felicia Chavez (E) (2020) - 05.24
24. The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany — Graeme Gibson (2021, 2005) - 06.04
25. A Long Petal of the Sea — Isabel Allende (2019) - 06.04
26. Vesper Flights — Helen Macdonald (2020) - 06.05
27. Prisons of Poverty — Loïc Wacquant (2009, 1999) - 06.14
28. This Is Not Propaganda — Peter Pomerantsev (2019) - 06.20
29. Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm — Dan Charnas (2022) - 06.26
30. Fossils: A Story of the Rocks and Their Record of Prehistoric Life — Harvey C. Markman (1954) - 07.16
31. The Devil and the Dark Water — Stuart Turton (2020) - 07.21
32. Research Methods for Digital Discourse Analysis — Camilla Vásquez (Ed) (2022) - 07.22
33. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — John Berendt (1994) - 07.24*
34. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study — Fred Moten & Stefano Harney (2014) - 08.04
35. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 — John Carey (2012) - 08.07
36. Try This: Research Methods for Writers Research, Pedagogy, Writing — Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Derek Mueller, & Kate Pantelides (2022) - 08.27
37. Geek Love — Katherine Dunn (1983) - 08.28*
38. Where the Devil Don't Stay: Traveling the South with the Drive-By Truckers — Stephen Deusner (2021) - 08.31
39. Monsieur Pain — Roberto Bolaño (1999) - 09.03
40. Corpus Approaches to Discourse: A Critical Review — Charlotte Taylor & Anna Marchi (E) (2018) - 09.06
41. We, the Drowned — Carsten Jensen (2006) - 09.07
42. Book of the Dead — E. A. Wallis Budge (1920) - 09.08
43. Ways of Seeing — John Berger (1972) - 09.11
44. Graveyard Shift (Lana Harvey, Reapers Inc. Book 1) — Angela Roquet (2014) - 09.17
45. Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War — Isaac A. Kamola & Ralph Wilson (2021) - 10.02
46. Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders (2017) - 10.13
47. Underland: A Deep Time Journey — Robert MacFarlane (2019) - 10.18
48. The Neoliberal Crisis — Johnathan Rutherford & Sally Davison (E) (2012) - 10.26
49. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion — Jia Tolentino (2019) - 11.06
50. Mind Lit in Neon — R. J. Lambert (2022) - 11.20
51. The Lathe of Heaven — Ursula K. Le Guin (1971) - 11.30
52. Doctor Socrates: Footballer, Philosopher, Legend — Andrew Downie (2017) - 12.18
53. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures — Merlin Sheldrake (2020) - 12.19
54. Winter Street — Elin Hilderbrand (2014) - 12.20

Notes:

The publication date for The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson is 2020, but that obviously isn't indicative of when the poems were written. The most famous (and famously reclusive) resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, lived and wrote during the middle of the 19th Century. Each poem in the collection is conveniently numbered, and I will inconveniently indicate the ones that stuck out to me as I read: 28, 51, 76, 84, 128, 131, 135, 145, 148, 173, 175, 185, 214, 254, 255, 328, 465, 520, 698, 699, 712, 718, 809, 810, 822, 866, 893, 917, 919, 943, 980, 1104, 1272, 1303, 1308, 1395, 1422, 1479, 1512, 1545, 1627, 1681, 1736.

As anyone reading this has likely come to expect, I read strategically and contextually. Each year, that means themed readings around St. Patrick's Day (Gods and Fighting Men), Halloween/Día de los Muertos/Autumn (Book of the Dead, Graveyard Shift, Lincoln in the Bardo, Underland), and this year, the FIFA Men's World Cup (Doctor Socrates).

Sometimes, I plan to read something based on where I expect to be reading, such as Where the Devil Don't Stay during breaks from driving through Alabama and other parts of the South. I listened to Welcome 2 Club XIII, the latest album by the Drive-By Truckers, while actually driving.

I spent one long summer afternoon reading The Devil and the Dark Water—a creepy murder mystery, possibly supernatural, set on a 17th century Dutch merchant ship—sipping a Flyaway New English IPA from Shovel Town Brewery (North Easton, Massachusetts). This was my view:

My favorite reads of the year include: Beatty's style in The Sellout is relentless; a less careful, more pretentious, writer would have made mincemeat out of all those clichés, puns, slang, and references. Macdonald has for some time been one of those "I'll read whatever they write" authors, and Vesper Flights shows how a familiar theme can manifest across shorter modes. Entangled Life—paired with Bjork's mushroom-influenced-but-not-in-that-way-album, Fossora—was less about fungi than about how humans perceive the interconnectedness of things (I was hoping for a little more on those other definitions of "entanglement," though).

Some other observations, by the numbers:

At least nine of my completed books are ones that I have or am likely to incorporate into my teaching and research: White Evangelical Racism, Rhet Ops, Bird by Bird, Queerly Centered, Fossils, The Bedside Book of Birds, The Undercommons, Try This, and Free Speech and Koch Money.

Five books were read as part of various "book clubs", a term employed here to mean a combination of accountability group and an excuse to regularly gather together to share a chat and coffee/beer.

Four were written by folks I know (or have met). Two of these, Mind Lit in Neon and Queerly Centered, represent projects I followed throughout development, so it was rewarding to see them in print.

None of the books I read are regrets, although a couple or three were less engaging than their reputations led me to select them.