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 2024:

• 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)