||[Apr. 10th, 2016|05:42 pm]
one thing at a time
Veronika Decides to Die, adult fiction by Paulo Coelho, mistakenly recommended by Amy.|
Riding Lessons, adult fiction by Sara Gruen, mistakenly recommended by my father.
Satin Island, adult fiction by Tom McCarthy, sorta cool at the time, but barely remembered.
Ever, young-adult fiction by Gail Carson Levine, ideologically intriguing.
Disgruntled, adult fiction by Asali Solomon, see below.
Brain On Fire, memoir for adults by Susannah Cahalan, sloppy enough to bring out my inner Professor Kirke.
The Memory of Light, self-help pamphlet for young adults by Francisco X. Stork, which would be fine if he didn't go around calling it a story.
Lessons That Change Writers, teacher development by Nancie Atwell, increasingly removed from any sense of what goes on in classrooms in the real world.
Read and Succeed: Practices to Support Reading Skills in African American Boys, teacher development by Terry Husband. Really just an outline of practices that support reading skills, with find+replace "African American boys" for "students" -- thus most likely a crucially useful exercise for the majority of trainee teachers.
Lit Up: One Reporter, Three Schools, and Eighteen Books That Can Change Lives, nonfiction for adults by David Demby. He's stunned that these young people, some of them brown or black, some of them even female, are almost as smart as he was when he was fifteen. Also features a quick three-paragraph dismissal of the tedious proposal that a course on American literature might possibly bother to include any nonwhite nonmale writers. Dickish.
The Kite Runner, young-adult fiction by Khaled Hosseini. Like the Harry Potter books and The Da Vinci Code, it's probably pretty amazing if you've never read a book before.
The Residue Years, adult fiction by Mitchell S. Jackson, see below.
(I'm in a reading streak of brand-new black-authored fiction that dazzles me with craft, breaks my heart, then frustrates the shit out of my childish desire for satisfyingly redemptive beginning-middle-end. Pretty sure that's the sort of the point?)