"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." — Stephen King
November 3, 2016
To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Hogarth commissioned “today’s best-loved novelists” to retell “the world’s favourite playwright’s” dramas. Anne Tyler’s novel Vinegar Girl is based on “The Taming of the Shrew,” a play that Tyler said she hated because it’s “totally misogynistic” and … Read More
October 27, 2016
In a Paris Review interview, Jesse Barron observes that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work is “so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary.” What makes it revolutionary is Knausgaard’s goal to write “as close to life as possible” even if it means “breaking” the form of the traditional … Read More
October 20, 2016
Much like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, this collection of elegant essays by the poet Mary Oliver is for those who “are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.” It’s a guide for dreamers – … Read More
October 13, 2016
The poet Naomi Shihab Nye is an expert on how fragile the world can be. She is an Arab-American who grew up in Ferguson, Missouri and Palestine. Perhaps she has never taken “safety” for granted. She describes how knowing “how desolate the landscape can be” has … Read More
October 6, 2016
My list of the books that have sparked the biggest changes in how and why I teach continues this week. What are your favorites? Share your recommendations in the “Leave a comment” box below or email me at CStover1@madisoncollege.edu.
6. For those who are looking for … Read More
September 29, 2016
As a college teacher who spent many hours during the last ten years reading books, articles, and conference proposals on the art and science of teaching, I believe that the best books for college teachers are the ones that provide a new framework, new research, or new … Read More
September 22, 2016
After having read my share of books about learning, I was initially reluctant to read this one because a reviewer said it is a “gift to guilt-ridden slackers everywhere.” Fortunately, it’s the review, not the book, that is misleading about the effort learning requires. How We … Read More
September 15, 2016
Can a 20-year-old character study still be relevant? In the case of this essay by New Yorker writer Mark Singer, which one British newspaper said offered “clearer insight into the mind” of Donald Trump than the longer biographies, my answer is yes. After spending several months … Read More
September 8, 2016
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, perhaps the most dog-eared book on my shelves, doesn’t give advice on writing poetry. Instead, it’s what Einstein –his contemporary — might have written if he had been a poet. Compare the Theory of Relativity to this statement: … Read More
September 1, 2016
This 2015 winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction – “a work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty” that is “highly provocative, thoughtfully presented” — is a meditation on race as a social construct. Written as a set of letters to his young son, … Read More
August 25, 2016
This is how the great-granddaughter of Iowa farmers Walter and Rosanna Langdon describes what’s left of the topsoil on the original family farm when she visits it in the closing pages of The Last Hundred Years Trilogy by Jane Smiley. We can see the how this … Read More
August 11, 2016
This is the first sentence in the chapter titled “Plurals before Swine: Blunders with Numbers” in Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O’Conner. The tone is light-hearted, which, as the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer noted, makes it readable … Read More
August 5, 2016
Now, however, Saundra Yancy McGuire believes that even the best teachers will not see the kinds of learning gains that are possible “as long as students do not come to our classrooms prepared to learn efficiently and independently.” This book shows faculty members how to teach students … Read More
July 28, 2016
If you were a novelist, what compliment would you most like to see in a review of your work? A comparison to Tolstoy, perhaps? That compliment was in fact given in the British newspaper, the Guardian, in a review of Jane Smiley’s novel Early Warnings… Read More
