Another Best Of List

Unidentified woman and her reflection

2024 is coming to a close, and who doesn't love a good reflection? Here, then, is a look back at my year in reading in the form of arbitrary awards with occasional runners-up. Want to learn more about the titles listed here or buy yourself a holiday treat? Shop my Bookshop Best Of 2024 List or go by your local library. Those places are the best.

Best Just-in-Time Advice:

"Let the future be the future" from Oliver Burkeman's Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts

Burkeman, whose excellent newsletter The Imperfectionist offers regular inspiration, is a reformed productivity guru whose work aims to help readers see the value in their own finite humanity. For an anxious perfectionist like myself, especially one facing another round of big decisions, I felt seen by this blunt reminder:

We're hopelessly trapped in the present, confined to this temporal locality, unable even to stand on tiptoes and peer over the fence into the future, to check that everything's all right there.

What could be seen as a disappointment or frustration becomes a balm to the worry and anxiety -- you cannot peer over that fence, so why would you even try?

Runner-Up:

"Don't talk about the moon" from Miranda July's All Fours.

Sure, everyone's talking about the sex, but as important as that is, Miranda July's book is about so much more than that particular awakening. The lines I copied out were all about the reality of being a perimenopausal person finding her truths, like this one:

But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.

But the reminder to exit the world you create inside your head and ask others about their experience -- well, that advice applies to all, regardless of age or gender.

Best Reading While Driving Experience:

My audiobook game was top-notch this year, so here goes a three-way tie of books that were amazing in their own right AND wildly good on audio --

Ann Patchett is a magician, creating characters that are simply and completely true, but Meryl Streep's narration of Tom Lake elevates this beautiful book to even greater heights.

I resisted this one for so long, but it turned out to be one of my favorites of the year. Actor and narrator Charlie Thurston brings unbelievable tenderness and truth to Demon's character, making an already fantastic book even stronger.

When I looked up the narrator for Kevin Wilson's Nothing to See Here, I was delighted to find Marin Ireland also voiced my favorite audiobook of last year (Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr). The blunt tone and hard edges of Lillian's voice rang familiar in my Tennessee ears, which added to my already considerable delight at this wholly unexpected, wholly delicious book.

Runner-Up:

I don't recall the narration being anything remarkable, but it was definitely good, and the book -- oh, wow, the book. Crying while driving not recommended, but despite that very real possibility, I heartily encourage you to read Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.

Most Surprising:

Sometimes a book so far exceeds your expectations that the shock of how good it is hits with a near-physical force.

If you had told me my favorite book of the year (yeah, I said it) would be about an affair, an unwanted pregnancy, and an OnlyFans account, I would have suspected you didn't know me at all. But Rufi Thorpe's Margo's Got Money Troubles is all that and so much more. You can read my full review over at Shelf Awareness.

Runner-Up:

I have never been accused of being a cozy murder girlie, but dang, if Richard Osman isn't trying to convert me. This book surprised me in every way -- from plot (who did do all those murders?) to setting (an upscale retirement village in England), The Thursday Murder Club offered me what I never knew I needed.

side note: I also listened to this one, and it was terrific on audio. Highly recommend.

Best Reminder of the Power of Visual Art:

Levine Querido makes beautiful books, even when they are not graphic novels. Agnes Lee's debut is a lovely physical artifact, but it is the relationship between idea and image that makes this book so good. The way it uses relatively simple art to move readers into consideration of loss and love and obligation and growth is extraordinary. It made me cry.

Runner-Up:

Someone please remind future me, when I get stuck in a muddling spiral of anxiety or despair: Lynda Barry will fix me right up. Her Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor was a reread for me, and it was just as inspiring (more even?) than the first time around. One of my most valued texts as a teacher.

Best Reminder That Big Business Will Always Screw the Little Guy but One Person Trying to Do the Right Thing Can Always Help:

I requested Jared Sullivan's Valley So Low: One Lawyer's Fight for Justice in the Wake of America's Great Coal Catastrophe for review because it hit so many personal marks for me: Tennessee, Justice, Coal Industry, Community. It was everything I wanted it to be and more. I spent about a week raging about all I didn't know about this terrible event that happened so close to my home. And I've spent months thinking about how easy it would have been for nobody to have cared enough to fight. A brilliantly executed, thoroughly researched work of non-fiction. You can read my full review here.

Best Non-Fiction:

The non-fiction book I loved the most this year was probably Braiding Sweetgrass, a title that needs no further celebration but will undoubtedly receive it. But since I started it in 2023, I will give this year's title to Amy Tan's The Backyard Bird Chronicles, which caught me off guard with how insightful and thoughtful each entry was -- and, honestly, how great her drawings were. Another reminder of how powerful it can be to give something your full, honest attention. Full review at Shelf Awareness.

Runner-Up:

Adam Moss's doorstop of a collection -- The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing -- had me scribbling down insights for days. Like Tan's beauty, it is one that I stumbled on early because of review work, and I've been recommending it ever since. It's also the winner in the unwieldy category of Most Likely to Buy Physical Copy After Reviewing Digital Copy. Tan's book, appropriately, is that category's runner-up.

Sleeper Hit of the Year:

Maybe it's because I traveled to Iceland this year, but more likely because it was a killer book. Sharp and inventive, Your Absence is Darkness made me want to read more of Iceland's beloved novelist Stefánsson. I was pleased to see this one included on Shelf Awareness's "Best of" list.

Runner-Up:

Like the tiger stalking around the titular Bomb Island, this book pounced on me with a ferocity and didn't let go. I love an indie press, particularly love Hub City and their Decentralize Publishing model, and I LOVED this story of Fish and his found family. I disagree with the publicity content that it's funny, but it is brilliant, and I can't wait to read more from author Stephen Hundley. Full review here.

The "Took You Long Enough" Award:

Y'all. I read my first Ali Smith, and it was everything. A fever-dream of a book, Gliff tries to appear all nonchalant but utterly fails, like a really obvious bad guy trying to whistle his way into a bank or a single-name celebrity trying to pick up milk at the local Walmart. Uncomfortable, but in the good way, this book made me feel like a fool for waiting so long to encounter this writer. It's not out until February, so maybe it shouldn't get a 2024 award, but this is my list and I do make the rules.

The "Can Do No Wrong" Award:

When I read Isaac Blum's debut The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, I was demolished -- both by the unexpected and powerful story and by the remarkable confidence of this emerging YA writer. No wonder that he was awarded ALA's Morris Award, an ALA committee on which I gleefully served that year. His follow-up novel The Judgement of Yoyo Gold completely sidesteps any worry of the sophomore slump, and offers something equally captivating but thoroughly itself. Blum is a force, and I'm so glad to be reading in the world where he's writing.

Runners-Up:

One living and one long dead, but these are writers I will always read and never be disappointed by. I loved Leif Enger's I Cheerfully Refuse so much that I cheerfully refused to leave it at home with 100 pages remaining, so I carried my library copy with me for three weeks in Iceland rather than make myself wait to finish it. Completely worth it.

And I finally read the gorgeous Belt Publishing edition of Willa Cather's One of Ours, reminding me of why she will always be one of my favorites. Every moment with a Cather novel is a gift.

To close, here's one I just finished last week, coming in as the winner in the anxiety -inducing category of

Best Book I Worried I Wouldn't Like as Much as the Others in the Set, but Ended Up Loving Completely

In difficult times, I return to Gilead, the fictional Iowa setting created by Marilynne Robinson. Over the years, these novels (Gilead, Home, and Jack) have taught me so much -- about my faith, about community, about myself. But for several pages of Lila, I worried. I just wasn't falling into the rhythm of it. It didn't seem to be doing anything for me. How could this be? What would I do if I didn't like it as much as the others? What would I do if I didn't like it at all? But then, just like that, it happened, and every page brought Lila closer to the lofty expectations I held for it until all of that faded away, and I was just steeping in this story of a broken woman and her attempt to believe she is worthy of love.

It was a good year, folks. Even the hard stuff gets better with a good book.

Shifting the Perspective on Writing Instruction

Earlier this fall, I sat in on the English department meeting where there was much discussion around the revised General Education student learning outcomes (SLOs) for the Composition program. At our college, students are required to take English 1010, and depending on their program, possibly English 1020. Departmental leadership recently decided to move our courses into greater alignment with partner institutions, where 1010 is traditionally a basic composition course and 1020 focuses on the information literacy and research aspects of academic writing. This shift is a significant departure from the old sequence of 1010 (academic writing and research) and 1020 (literature and literary analysis). Change is never easy, and these changes (along with other institutional mandates) have necessitated a lot of adaptation in recent years.

And now faculty must also face the existential threat that is Generative AI. I appreciate the work of Marc Watkins at Rhetorica for his candid thoughts on how the pace of development in the AI field is forcing educators to grapple with something few would have requested, as well as his insistence (citing the work of the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI) that we remember: "Engaging with AI isn't Adopting AI." While Watkins (and others) are rightly and helpfully doing practical work around AI in the classroom, there is another vital component to the discourse, one that does what great educators have always done: begin with the end in mind.

This framework, championed by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe in Understanding By Design, suggests that before an educator considers any particular content or assessment strategy, they must first determine what they hope students will know, understand, or be able to do at the end of the course. Then, everything they build is held up to that expected outcome. These ideas are why (at least partially) the department was revising its program SLOs and why our institution has ISLOs -- things we expect all of our graduates to have attained when they complete their program. We can't make a plan if we don't know what we are building.

Before I was a librarian, I was a teacher, and most of my years in the classroom found me teaching first-year composition courses. I have always been a fierce advocate for student voice, and that advocacy has taken on a different urgency as I consider the future of composition programs through the lens of AI. Where once I argued against plagiarism-detection software like Turnitin for the way it devalues student voice (a position I still hold), now I want to help faculty see the threat of AI for what it is: a tool that legitimizes the wholesale elimination of student voice.

For the record, I am not anti-AI. I am intrigued by its history, the potential use-cases that might bear fruit, and by the questions its intrusion into education has wrought. The biggest of these is one we may well need to ask ourselves: What's the point?

In many cases, we teach what and how we do because that's what has always been done. Possibly those original decisions were sound, resulting in curricula that adhere to the backward design framework described above. But those of us who work in the literacies (here, I include traditional literacy -- reading and writing -- as well as information, digital, media, visual, and yes, even AI literacy) must reconsider our purpose. We must reimagine our courses or maybe even our programs, beginning with the end in mind. But what end?

In the past, we have argued that students, even those with no plans for a career in academia or as a writer, must have the ability to read complex texts and write lengthy papers. The world of "Education" has insisted we respond to questions of "career readiness" or "real life application," a stance I've often balked at for two reasons:

1. It isn't true

2. It isn't enough.

   
   

Of course, without access to AI, employees do need to be able to read and write emails, reports, and other work-related communication. But we all know individuals who are fully successful despite limited skill in this area. Most people in their daily work get by on well less than what is expected in a traditional composition program.

But it's the second argument that is most salient here. If all we have to offer is "you will need this one day, trust us," we should be very concerned. With Generative AI available to read and summarize any text-based communication for us and to create all manner of communication on our behalf, we have no leg to stand on when the business department encourages its students to use AI to write memos or reports. If it's what most are doing in the field, it should be taught. But that doesn't mean composition programs must now be seen as obsolete. There's always been a more important reason for the work we do: developing student voice.

Writing is thinking, and without practice, students will struggle to identify, articulate, and trust their own ideas -- they won't recognize their own voice. We will still have emails and reports and slide presentations, but students won't see themselves in what they create. In fact, they may already feel that way in many of their classes. And writing faculty have always been able to discern the difference between an engaged mind and one that is just checking the rubric boxes. But thus far, we've expected to "see" that engagement in the finished work they produce. The option of Generative AI now forces us to consider what we value most and how we might conceivably measure it. It insists we look closely at the habits of mind we want to develop in students and build courses around those skills and practices.

So, what happens if we distill our courses down to the most essential skills, albeit the ones that are hardest (if not impossible) to assess using standardized metrics? What if we write learning outcomes like these?

At the conclusion of this course, successful students will . . .

• Demonstrate their growth as curious and creative readers, thinkers, and writers

• Ask thoughtful questions - of the texts, of classmates, and of themselves

• Write with a spirit of “having something to say” and do it with confidence

• Believe in the power of words and of their own voices

• Cultivate and defend their opinions, recognizing and responding to their own bias and the potential bias of others

I wrote these course objectives years ago, and I would likely revise them now, but I am confident they would remain effective as a guide toward my ultimate goal of developing students -- as people and thinkers. As a librarian, I know that students' research will only be as strong as their investment in the questions they are asking and the ideas they are grappling with. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education aligns with this perspective, calling, as it does, for students to see "Research as Inquiry" and "Scholarship as Conversation."

Seen through this frame, the shifts in our composition program make perfect sense. For students to participate in the conversation of scholarship, they must first have and trust their own voice. For students to engage with research as inquiry, they must first identify and articulate the questions they actually have. In this way, we can equip our students more fully: English 1010 develops their voice and champions their ideas while English 1020 invites them to bring that empowered voice to the scholarly conversation. And though we may explore ways that Generative AI tools might be useful, a student could never achieve those course outcomes by using Generative AI.

Here, then, are a few practical ideas to consider:

• Instead of grading papers, offer feedback and assessment on ideas, process, and voice

• Move more of the "writing process" into the classroom

• Have students give you an assignment in the first week, and then demonstrate how you work through your process -- from idea-generation to draft. Encourage their critique!

• Build assignments that celebrate individual voice and view

• Consider alternatives to the traditional paper -- a podcast or video script involves just as much writing and research as an essay, perhaps more. A photo caption demonstrates voice and identity and encourages discussion around rhetorical modes.

• Ask your librarian to collaborate. Our job is to connect you to resources and to be your support in making your course as effective as possible!

My thoughts on the subject are necessarily incomplete, of course. The field will continue to evolve, especially as new innovations are introduced, and so will my thinking. But like my course outcomes above, I believe in the power of words and the strength that can only come when someone finds and trusts their own voice.