Starting a Career

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov

  For some reason, other reviewers tend to tout Pnin as hilarity incarnate, which only really works if they're referring to the Heh of Existential Recognition. Or "funny boo-hoo" instead of "funny ha-ha." Either one. More tragedy than comedy, Vladimir Nabokov's overlooked… Read more »

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, by Erik Larson

By Jill Silos-Rooney Historian William E. Dodd's bookish and retiring nature made him a most unlikely choice for high-profile diplomatic service, and Erik Larson's entertaining but sobering account of Dodd's tenure as the American ambassador to Nazi Germany shows just how difficult it could… Read more »

"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," by James Thurber

  And now for something completely different. Not a man with a tape recorder up his nose (or a man with a tape recorder up his brother's nose), but rather the fact that this go-round, I'm reviewing a short story instead of a book. Specifically...uhhhh...read the title. I probably shouldn't… Read more »

The Replacements

  No, I'm not writing the band. That wouldn't be relevant. Awesome. But not relevant. Actually, what I'm going for today involves taking English syllabus classes and offering up some less popular - yet still fully viable - alternatives. Because I don't want the comments section… Read more »

The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

  What makes The Handmaid's Tale such an eerie read is how timely it seems despite its 1985 publication date. Better Book Titles perfectly (not to mention hilariously) summed up the book's contemporary relevance here, and part of me feels like all I need to do is just drop a link to it… Read more »

Fun with Campus Book Clubs

Happy New Year! No doubt many of you, regardless of whether or not you're currently enrolled in any classes, have probably resolved to read more. I'm just assuming this because exploring more books always seems to be a pretty common New Year's goal, of course. For all I know you guys are… Read more »

Sexual Civility: The Hot New College Romance, by Tom Bissonette

  As all two of my readers (hi, Mom!) have no doubt already figured out, I've had a bit of time off this month, and next week won't be any different. So this will be my last posting until next year! We're planning on debuting some cool new features come 2012; please do come back and… Read more »

Crowdsourcing the Canon, Round 2

Crowdsourcing the Canon, Round 1 proved a fascinatingly fertile experiment, and I thought it'd be interesting to try my hand at seeing what sort of response I could scratch up for the second. This time around, I asked What award-winning books do you feel deserve more attention than they typically… Read more »

Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle

  By this point, ruminations on how technology shapes communication and promotes isolation — particularly those involving anecdotes about families at the dinner table clicking away at smartphones instead of talking to one another — have grown into something of a… Read more »

Happy Thanksgiving!

In case the title didn't give everything away, I won't be posting anything major this week. Instead, I'll be curling up with Alone Together, Sexual Civility and a pile of knitting that needs doing before the company holiday party. How about you guys? Reading anything particularly interesting?… Read more »

Fun with Book Club Running

This probably should come as absolutely no shock to anyone whose spent even one millisecond on this blog, but I co-run a book club through the Houston Great Books Council, dubbed "Young Thinkers." It launched back in June with The Hunger Games, and since then we've covered a pretty diverse… Read more »

Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond

Although my focus lay primarily with reading and reviewing education-themed reads, I'll be branching out and taking suggestions for educational books as well as ones that should enjoy a beefcakier role (or a role period) on syllabi everywhere. Jared Diamond's Pulitzer-winning inquiry into why… Read more »

Custom Reads

  A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail from Alex at Custom Reads inviting me to serve as one of the site's "book experts." While other work obligations have prevented me from taking advantage of his seriously cool offer for the immediate future, I am nevertheless excited about hooking… Read more »

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe

  A manipulative frat boy of acid morals "knock[s] the dust off" (528) a naive, rural freshman and concludes the experience with public mockery of her bleeding and "hillbilly beaver" (528). Because people are terrible. Basketball, lacrosse and football players exploit their… Read more »

Crowdsourcing the Canon, Round 1

  Crowdsourcing the Canon's initial launch proved so successful, so I'm going to make this an ongoing feature! It's exciting to see so many impassioned readers lending their voices to this project -- they offer such interesting perspectives and recommendations. And now I can't wait… Read more »

Crowdsourcing the Canon: Intro

Over the next few months, expect me to start presenting new content beyond the book reviews and occasional interview. The one I'm most excited about is Crowdsourcing the Canon and its simple premise - asking students, teachers and librarians alike, "What books do you think should be on the syllabus,… Read more »

America's Douchiest Colleges, by Peter Littleton and H.L. Rogers

Like The Hipster Handbook and Food Court Druids, Cherohonkees, and Other Creatures Unique to the Republic's Robert Lanham, Peter Littleton and H.L. Rogers joyfully skewer American subcultures through amusing, short blurbs and lists relayed through a mock sociological tone. It's all about as scientific… Read more »

The Cheese Monkeys, by Chip Kidd

  Even though The Cheese Monkeys wasn't intentionally written as my life story, it's my life story. For I, too, once found myself ensconced in an art department so criminally underfunded, it could turn the Pope into an atheist and an atheist into Richard Dawkins. I, too, whittled away my… Read more »

Pym, by Mat Johnson

  Mat Johnson deserves far more recognition than he's currently getting. I've read both Pym and Incognegro, and he possesses one of America's sharpest eyes for contemporary race-based social commentary. Thoroughly provocative, sometimes nauseatingly visceral stuff, but absolutely necessary… Read more »

On Beauty, by Zadie Smith

  Dedication   Today marks the last day of the Speak Out With Your Geek Out campaign, to which my beloved old friend and fellow writer Angeli Pidcock alerted me earlier this month. Time constraints and internet issues conspired against my plans for a full essay - because of course they… Read more »

The Finishing School, by Muriel Spark

    Were such a thing physically possible, I would enjoy it if The Finishing School's major characters piled into a rusty bus with broken brakes. And then watch them jettison over the side of the Grand Canyon. Also, they're on fire. Look, I am all about unpleasant protagonists.… Read more »

Lucky, by Alice Sebold

  Trigger Warning: This book and, by extension, my review contain explicit, frank discussions of rape and sexual assault.   At least one out of every four college women survive a sexual assault while in school. This tragically common experience often carries with it a crushing burden… Read more »

Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, by Kathleen A. Bogle

No, readers. Hooking Up isn't a practicum. If you're looking for fluffy-hatted misogynists urging you to insult the ladies, it's best you mosey over elsewhere. But if you're a foaming-at-the-mouth social science nerd like myself, Kathleen A. Bogle shares some pioneering research on the… Read more »

Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities, by Alexandra Robbins

  By its very nature, even the most straightforward examples of undercover and investigative journalism will inevitably end up with some pretty nasty accusations slapped onto the reporter in question. It definitely happened to Alexandra Robbins when Pledged hit the shelves, to the point many Greek… Read more »

The Big U, by Neal Stephenson

  Seeing as how Neal Stephenson is primarily known as one of the literary world's most preeminent cyberpunk writers (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age), it certainly comes as a shock to many fans when they find out his very first novel centers around brutally - and hilariously - satirizing college… Read more »