1. Turtle Valley by Gail Anderson-Dargatz n#
2. The Rules of Gentility by Janet Mullany n+#
3. Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion by Janet Mullany n
4. Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes; translated by Richard Howard nf#
5. Refuse to Choose! by Barbara Sher nf+
6. Mean Boy by Lynn Coady n#
7. On Writing Well by William Zinsser nf+#
8. Heave by Christy Ann Conlin n+
9. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story by Frank O’Connor nf+
10. Cockroach by Rawi Hage n+#
11. Why is it Always About You? by Sandy Hotchkiss nf+
12. The Cottage Builder’s Letter by George Murray p+
13. The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews n+#
14. Room by Emma Donoghue n+#
15. The Sky is Falling by Caroline Adderson n+#
16. Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov, translated by Robert Payne s+
17. The Science Writers’ Handbook, Thomas Hayden + Michelle Nijhuis, eds. a/nf+
18. Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life With the Tree-planting Tribe by Charlotte Gill nf+#
19. Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen n+
20. The Redeemer by Jo Nesbo n+
21. Road Dogs by Elmore Leonard n+
22. The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver n#
23. The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel n+#
24. Leaving Atlanta by Tayari Jones n#
25. Certainty by Madeleine Thien n+#*
26. Friend of My Youth by Alice Munro s#
27. The Melting Season by Jami Attenberg n+
28. Running with the Mind of Meditation by Sakyong Mipham nf+
29. The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper n+
30. Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, Ann Hood, ed. a/m/e+

Currently Reading

What’s on My To-Read Shelf?

Ratings Code:
a anthology
e essays
m memoir
n novel
nf non-fiction
p poetry
pb picture book
r recipes
s short stories
v visual (art, photography)
+ first book by this author
# will read more by this author
* best on this list

Chapters (for dissertation)

1. “The Cult of the Social” in Digital Vertigo by Andrew Keen
2. “Opportunity” in Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky
3. “The Illusion of Literacy” in Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges
4. “Everyone Gets a Say: Changes in Audience and Community” in Shimmering Literacies by Bronwyn T. Williams
5. “Canadian Postmodernism: Genre trouble and new media in contemporary Canadian writing” in The Routledge Concise History of Canadian Literature by Richard Lane
6. “Material Culture and Narrative: Fusing Myth, Materiality, and Meaning” by Ian Woodward in Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches (Phillip Vannini, ed.)
7. “How the Brain Adapted Itself to Read: The First Writing Systems” in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
8. “The Enduring Reader” by Joan Shelley Rubin in A History of the Book in America, Volume 5 — The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America (D.P. Nord, J.S. Rubin, M. Schudson, eds.)
9. “Books and the Media: The Silent Spring Debate” by Priscilla Coit Murphyin A History of the Book in America, Volume 5 — The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America (D.P. Nord, J.S. Rubin, M. Schudson, eds.)
10. “Book Collecting and the Book as Object” by Robert DeMaria Jr. in A History of the Book in America, Volume 5 — The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America (D.P. Nord, J.S. Rubin, M. Schudson, eds.)
11. “Valuing Reading, Writing, and Books in a Post-Typographic World” by David Reinking in A History of the Book in America, Volume 5 — The Enduring Book: Print Culture in Postwar America (D.P. Nord, J.S. Rubin, M. Schudson, eds.)
12. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
13. “Focal Things and Practices” in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry by Albert Borgmann
14. “The Pain of Reading A Million Little Pieces” in What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans by Timothy Aubry
15. “Interactivity and Interaction: Text and Talk in Online Communities” by Ruth Page in Intermediality and Storytelling (Marina Grishakova & Marie-Laure Ryan, eds.)
16. “Narrative, Media, and Modes” + “Drawing and Transgressing Fictional Boundaries” in Avatars of Story by Marie-Laure Ryan
17. “Commodity and Communication: The First American Novel” in Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America by Cathy N. Davidson
18. “Memes: The New Replicators” in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
19. “Art, Narrative, Fiction” + “Fiction as Adaptation” in On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by Brian Boyd
20. “The End of Civilization (or at least civilized reading) As You Know It” in Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins
21. “The Electronic Book” + “Writing Culture” in Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print by Jay David Bolter
22. “Why Read Literature?”  in On Literature by J. Hillis Miller
23. “Literary Fiction and Reality” in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue by Frank Kermode

Skim-reads (for dissertation)

1. The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (read all)
2. Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene
3. Complete Your Dissertation Once and For All! by Alison B. Miller
4. Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584-2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe
5. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology by Sherry Turkle
6. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams
7. The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, Jeff Martin & C. Max Magee, eds.
8. Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture by Leslie Howsam
9. Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelm Our Lives by Todd Gitlin
10. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall
11. Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times by Andrew Piper
12. The Event of Literature by Terry Eagleton
13. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation by Gerard Genette
14. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldana