by Jesse Kalvitis

Jesse’s Summer Reading List (Or, What I Did Instead of Anything Visibly Productive):

Pioneer Naturalists: The Discovery and Naming of North American Plants and Animals, by Howard Ensign Evans.

In 1886, when Aven Nelson (for whom a variety of larkspur is named) came to the University of Wyoming, he “had been hired to teach English, but by accident two professors of English had been hired and no one to teach biology. Nelson was assigned the task, and despite his initial weakness in the subject, he went on to a long and successful career as a botanist” (150). Nelson’s story is one of many points at which I mark my place, wave the book at whoever is nearest to hand, and yell “Hey! Listen to this.” This happens every few pages, and who could blame me? Pioneer Naturalists, as the title implies, is a marvelous blend of Old West (and east, and south, and sometimes north) adventure, species information on American plants and animals, and biographical sketches of the people involved. It contains discoveries and scandals and feuds (including the Sparrow War of 1874-1878), no shortage of eccentrics, and delightfully peculiar statements delivered in the matter-of-fact tone of a naturalist and historian who seems to find nothing odd about them at all. In the 1840s, for example, “Louis Agassiz, a dominant figure in American science . . . was forever borrowing specimens from the Smithsonian and forgetting to return them” (34). No big deal.

Read this book immediately. When you find yourself needing to yell “Hey! Listen to this!”, come find me. These tales are good enough for telling twice.

Everything I Have Is Blue: Short Fiction by Working-Class Men About More-or-less Gay Life, edited by Wendell Ricketts.

When I ordered this book, I whined a little to myself: “But it’s fiiiiction. And it’s by a bunch of duuuudes!” I mean, c’mon, way to reinscribe the same old tired hegemonies even within systems of resistance, right? Having read it, I’m not whining any more. I began reading with some trepidation, given the anthology’s rather narrow categorization (which sometimes results in some of the most pretentious, stilted, and generally unreadable stuff being published simply because it focuses on the purported common interests of, say, lesbian Eskimo vertically-challenged left-handed ninjas of an usually pale complexion) (unlimited nerd-points to anyone who gets THAT reference!). Each story, though, turned out to be good enough to stand on its own merits in any category. Several were hauntingly memorable; I often found myself thinking “oh, yeah, there was that gorgeous moment that’s stuck in my head from something I read . . . what was it, again?” The answers, even later in the summer when I turned to mega-doses of fiction in a last-ditch attempt at some down time, kept being the pieces from this book.

I can’t lavish praise on this book without mentioning Ricketts’s contribution not just as editor and champion of the project, but as author of its only full-length nonfiction piece, a 24 page afterword titled “Passing Notes in Class: Some Thoughts On Writing and Culture in the Ga(y)ted Community.” The book was worth it for that piece alone, and I hope to see it anthologized again in a more overtly theory-focused context.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King.

As anyone knows who has stubbornly kept reading him despite eye rolling from all quarters, Stephen King goes through rapidly fluctuating phases in the quality of his work. When he’s good, it’s blindingly clear why he’s so widely read. When he’s bad . . . well. There’s a desperate sense of audience in much of King’s newer fiction. “They want aliens! And really gross stuff. And explosions,” I can almost hear him muttering. “No goddam patience. Fine, then. I’ll reuse the characters from ‘The Body’ or from It, the plot from Tommyknockers. Lemme just sand the serial numbers off and call it Dreamcatcher.” Oh lord, if that’s what success is, let me remain obscure.

King, much to our culture’s loss, rarely writes creative nonfiction. Exceptions include the book Danse Macabre, an essay on baseball that I enjoyed despite loathing the sport itself, and the best short story collection introductions since Isaac Asimov. Like most of us, he is at his best when he writes from an honest, unpretentious place. This book, with its odd but perfect combination of memoir and craft tips, is powerful and pure. No aliens, I promise, and very few explosions.

Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, edited by Jessica Yee.

I first read this book in fall of 2012 for a combined undergrad and graduate class in feminist theory, part of the required curriculum for the graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies. I’ve been bristling at it with a fierce ambivalence ever since. Its designation in the Kalvitis-Barrett household is Feminism for Reallllz, which we always recite in a tone of earnest self-aggrandizement, then follow with laughter. That said, I did and do deeply enjoy most of this book, especially the pieces “A Slam Poem on Feminism in Academia” (which I assigned to my students last semester) and ”’Maybe I’m Not Class-Mobile; Maybe I’m Class-Queer’: Poor kids in college, and survival under hierarchy.” However, I can recommend the text as a whole only with the following caveats. First, please consider it as supplemental to, not a replacement for, the canon of feminist theory. It’s intended to be a critique of this canon as well of higher education in general, but I often wonder whether the authors have actually read what they’re attempting to critique. One of my marginal notes reads “Gloria Anzaldua already said it better.” She did. So did Luce Irigaray, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and a host of others. Read those first, but then pick up this slim red paperback from 2011 to have your faith in the next generation alternately shaken and restored.

All the Time in the World, by E.L. Doctorow.

If you read Doctorow’s earlier collection Sweet Land Stories (and if not, why on earth haven’t you?), then three of the stories in this collection will not be new to you. Then again, if you’ve read the stories in question, you’ll know that reading them a second, or third, or twentieth time is no hardship. The new stories are marvelous as well, especially the title story. “All the Time in the World” strikes a perfectly balance between surreal interpolations and grounded emotion. E.L. Doctorow’s short stories, this collection included, fall precisely into some overlap between keenly observed reality, ugliness as art, and a sense of the driftingly peculiar that I particularly enjoy. Other authors occupy the margins of this category as well—Ray Bradbury, Haruki Murakami, Wells Tower, Joyce Carol Oates et al—but there’s something about the solidity of Doctorow’s prose that sets him apart.

What to Eat, by Marion Nestle.

I’m nearly embarrassed to include this book on my list, as the title makes it sound like either a diet guide (ha) or an earnest foodie tome about artisanal something-or-another. It is neither. It is, however, an astoundingly good read. Nutritionist and and NYU professor Nestle (no relation) walks readers through more than a century of changing food culture, production, and politics. Especially politics. What? Did you think there aren’t years of debate, thousands of pages of vaguely-written policy, and millions of dollars behind one of the breakfast cereals you eat carrying the “hearth healthy” logo and another not? That’s adorable. Hint: it has literally nothing to do with whether the product inside is or isn’t good for your heart. Nestle’s matter of fact and deeply thoughtful style is a calming antidote to some of the frantic “eat this! No, wait! Eat this! But don’t eat this other thing!” rhetoric that pervades modern media. She rarely makes specific or exclusive recommendations, but rather gives the reader an understandable overview of the factors that inform their own choices. This book, though it offers a fantastic historical perspective and is largely still relevant, was published in 2006, which makes it a bit outdated in its field. Fortunately, an updated version of one of Nestle’s previous books, titled Food Politics, came out in May. It’s on the top of my reading list for my next bit of spare time.

This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, edited by C.L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law.

This is by far the best book I read this summer. Unfortunately, I have left its review to the end of my day, when all enthusiasm I may have been able to express has been beaten out of me by a rampaging horde of other mentally exhausting tasks. Whoops. Life lesson.

I first ordered This Fine Place So Far From Home as part of the preliminary research for a project I’m undertaking, in which I’ll examine the educational experiences of students from working class and/or poverty-level backgrounds. Though I hope to see the project shaped by its subjects themselves, and though several media outlets have been publishing excellent articles on the subject recently, this book seemed to be worth a shot. Who better, I figured, to point out some of the commonalities of working class experiences in higher education than those whose journeys spanned the unimaginable space between freshman year and tenure? I figured correctly. In addition to the shared experiences that I discovered from piece to piece, I was also treated to an extremely entertaining view of what happens when you take academics from a wide variety of fields and ask them to write a personal narrative. Their interpretations of that task were various and wonderful, from the economists to the French literature folks to the to psychologists and beyond. This book, in many delightful and unexpected ways, was a study in diversity. I cannot possibly recommend it strongly enough.