January 26, 2025 at 5:28 PM

Here are the books, with Commentary that I’ve read and most admired in recent months, July 2024-January 2025. The commentary at the end of this post is “Inspiring Short Texts for Today’s Challenging Times.”

• Lucky by Jane Smiley, fiction
• Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, fiction
• The Balancing Act: An Evidence-Based Approach to Teaching Phonics, Reading, and Writing by Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking, professional
• Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning: Second Edition, by Peter Johnson, professional
• An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960’s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, nonfiction, history, and memoir
• Bite by Bite: Nourishments & Jamborees by Aimee Nezhukumatathil; illustrations by Fumi Nakamura, food essays.
• Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman
• True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything In Between by Gretchen Whitmer, memoir stories
• The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo, “observations on sustaining a creative life.”
• Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, fiction
• Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, fiction
• In Community With Readers: Transforming Reading Instruction with Read Alouds and Minilessons by Lynsey and Franki Sibberson, professional
• Heart at the Center: An Educator’s Guide to Sustaining Love, Hope, and Community Through Nonviolence Pedagogy by Mike Tinoco, professional
• The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, history of notetaking through the ages
• Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haight, psychology, self-help book
• Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout, fiction
• Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit, defense of hope, essays
• Dearly by Margaret Atwood, poems
• Birds of America by Lorrie Moore, short stories
• Still Life With Remorse by Maira Kalman, family stories—poetry and prose along with gorgeous paintings
• The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer, treatise on reciprocity and relationships with the natural world
• To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff: Helping Students Build and Use Prior Knowledge by Kelly Gallagher, professional
• Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide by Keith Payne, psychology and research on how and why people think and vote as they do
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, fiction
• Literacy at the Crossroads: Crucial Talk About Reading, Writing, and Other Teaching Dilemmas by Regie Routman, the politics around literacy and advocacy efforts (1996)
• Upstream by Mary Oliver, selected essays
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, novella
• The Dog Who Followed the Moon by James Norbury, inspirational fable/picture book about living, accepting life’s challenges, and finding peace

While I highly recommend all the books on the list, I especially want to call out three books of nonfiction, two professional books and-- in the final Commentary—short inspirational books that are beautifully written, calming, and that have helped me find hope through these uncertain times. Finally, do check out the “What I’m Reading” archives—which date back to 2012—for highly recommended books and for Commentaries on teaching, learning, and living.

Also, before elaborating on several books on the reading list, I want to say a few words about one long but important book, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Walking into my local bookstore, seeing a book titled Full Catastrophe Living grabbed my attention and compelled me to purchase it. While I’ve only read the parts of the book that piqued my interest, learning how to do mindfulness breathing has helped to ease anxiety.  

Three nonfiction books particularly stand out: An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960’s by Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, and Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide by Keith Payne. Each of these takes a reading effort, but the information in each is fascinating and enlightening and worth the effort. Also, each of the books are very well written. 

As I was reading An Unfinished Love Story, A Personal History of the 1960’s by Doris Kearns Goodwin it was just several months before our 2024 Presidential election. It was fascinating to see how much of Doris Goodwin’s personal and professional history of the 1960’s resonated with what was happening in our country 60 years later. For example, for the 1964 Presidential campaign, Lyndon Johnson was advised, and took the advice, not to debate despite being pressured by Republican candidate, BarryGoldwater, and reporters. “In fact. . . presidential debates were discontinued until 1976 when Gerald Ford, to his great misfortune, agreed to debate Jimmy Carter.” (p. 197.) And we witnessed the effect of the disastrous debate by Joe Biden in 2024, which left many shocked and disappointed. In that regard, one quote from the book particularly impacted me in our role as citizens. “It is not our privilege but our duty as patriots, to write, to speak, to organize, to oppose any President and any party and any policy at any time which we believe threatens the grandeur of this nation and the well-being of its people. This is such a time.” (p. 287) 

Doris Kearns Goodwin is a Pulitzer Prize winning, presidential historian and biographer. I have read most of her books, the most recent one before this one being the superb Leadership in Turbulent Times. (See archives.) Each time I read one of her books I come away fascinated with facts and insights into the lives, personal and presidential, of key historical figures and how they impacted history, not just in the past but in present times as well. In An Unfinished Love Story she narrates her last years with her husband Dick Goodwin, who was a major speech writer—and by all accounts a passionate and gifted one—for John F. Kennedy and, later, for Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. What’s so riveting about reading this book is listening in to their conversations and thinking about how the different—and often opposite--perspectives of Doris and Dick then and now--as they look back on their lives interacting with Presidents and influential figures of that time, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Moyers, and many others. Now, as then, much of the 60’s was a time of racial tension and division with ongoing efforts for civil rights and human rights, and many of the same battles are still waging today. 

At the age of 85, Doris and her husband Dick tackle more than 300 boxes he had saved from  more than 50 years of work: diaries, speech drafts, recordings, videos, newspaper articles and columns, journals, letters, documents, and memorabilia--all depicting well known events in our country’s history. As Doris Goodwin writes, “These boxes contained notes of a working writer who was reading widely in history, philosophy, and literature.” p. 389. An Unfinished Love Story is a fascinating book, and so much of the information is useful for navigating today’s challenging, political times. For more information on the book, see insightful Washington Post book review and PBS News Interview.

The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen is a most unusual book, one I never would have picked up without my local bookseller raving about it. It’s a detailed and riveting explanation and storytelling of the origins, history, and essentials of keeping notebooks from antiquity and clay tablets to the present-day use of expensive Moleskins and how writing on paper has influenced—and continues to influence--civilization. For anyone who has ever kept any kind of notebook or has wanted to, this book will surprise, inform, and entertain you. A few personal highlights: I found the use of notebooks on Charles Darwin’s thinking profound, the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci captivating, and the present-day use of notebooks in Intensive Care Units mesmerizing. You’ll have to read the book for that last stunning and easy-to-implement innovation that helps patients, who have come out of a coma, heal.

Many authors we admire kept notebooks for drafting and writing: Joan Didion, Agatha Christie, Virginia Wolf, and Jane Austen, to name a few. No doubt, notebooks will continue to influence human behavior, observation, documentation, and thinking in the future, but what form those notebooks will take is not yet known. However, with history and recent research as our guide, writing on paper is certain to play a major role. We humans are most often more effective, efficient, and learn more taking notes with pen and paper as compared to a phone or tablet or other digital counterparts. (p. 370) While the digital age continues to produce and offer all kinds of technological devices, research confirms that paper and pencil endure. Roland Allen writes, “Something about the act of writing by hand, and the production of a physical object, makes the older technology more effective than the new.” (p.18) For more information on The Notebook, see outstanding review and summary  by Michael Dirda (Oct. 2024).

 Good Reasonable People: the Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide by Keith Payne is a well-researched, thoughtful, eye-opening book about how and why our country’s political divide exists and why that divide feels so personal. (The author, a professor of  psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill grew up in rural NC in a conservative family with diverse political views.) Keith Payne convincingly presents and analyzes decades of research and evidence to explain our political views concluding that “liberal” and “conservative” views/labels are, in fact, primarily a product of circumstance. “Social science research for the last sixty years has made clear again and again that the vast majority of people—including those who express strong political views—have virtually no political ideology. And so it makes no sense to call most people liberals or conservatives.” (p. 59)

One of Payne’s most powerful findings is that race remains the most significant factor in how people vote and that our nation’s history of slavery and racial inequality continues to influence the present. “We have a long history of passing laws that did not explicitly mention race but had the effect of disadvantaging Black people. These laws were incredibly effective at reducing voter registration among Black citizens.” (p. 91) In a PBS interview with JudyWoodruff  (Nov. 2024) , Keith Payne states, “If you were born in a place that had a lot of slavery in 1860 and you're white, we can predict with high degree of accuracy that you're likely to support Republicans.” In fact, in our 2024 Presidential election, approximately 80% of whites voted Republican; approximately 80% of Blacks voted Democratic.

A convincing theme of the book is that we all believe we are “good and reasonable people,” which causes us to staunchly defend our own viewpoints before considering others.’ “We all have self-serving biases” (p. 69) which can cause us to hold negative attitudes about a particular group. “And those viewpoints are largely from chance elements of our upbringing and other life encounters.” (Kirkus Reviews) Good Reasonable People is a crucial and illuminating book for humanizing people on all sides of the political divide and for opening up the conversation on politics and the social order with knowledge, compassion, and good will. It is a book sorely needed for today’s contentious times.

A powerful quote by the author to leave you with: “One generation’s inequality of outcomes becomes the next generation’s inequality of opportunity. (p. 129)

Regarding the five professional books I’ve recently read and found outstanding, I am calling out two titles here because of their practicality for immediate application to the classroom and their brevity—relatively speaking-- as we teachers tend to avoid reading long books. That said, the longer books on the list are also gems and worth digging into. The first professional book I will discuss here is To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff: Helping Students Build and Use Prior Knowledge by Kelly Gallagher (170 pages). The second book is Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning. Second Edition, by Peter Johnston. (175 pages).

As soon as I heard Kelly Gallagher had a new book out I ordered it. To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff: Helping Students Build and Use Prior Knowledge is a book you will want to own—to return to for guidance over and over again. It is based on the principle that students who know more comprehend more and are stronger, more engaged readers. And the foundation for becoming a discerning reader is building knowledge.

As a high school teacher in Anaheim, CA - with 35 years of experience - Kelly’s lessons are tailored to meet the needs and interests of his students. It is a gift to educators that he makes his literacy lessons and his thinking explicit. He models for us how building knowledge at the word, sentence, paragraph/passage, article, and book level increases student vocabulary, understanding, enjoyment, stamina, competence, comprehension monitoring, and volume of reading. It is ultimately that large volume of reading that propels readers into a continuous developing of knowledge on multiple levels.

One of Kelly’s many examples of how to build background knowledge--and it’s been a personal, longtime favorite--is through his now classic Article of the Week (AoW), (pp. 87-92.) In AoW, the teacher gives students an AoW each Monday and collects the student response to the article on Friday. When introducing the assigned activity, Kelly details how he models his writing and thinking process out loud in front of his students. Go to www.kellygallagher.org for his AoW assignments, now featuring articles for the 2024-2025 school year. 

Kelly Gallagher’s extensive body of work, either on its own or along with his writing/ thinking partner, Penny Kittle, has mentored me and countless teachers on how to motivate and engage middle and high school readers, writers, and thinkers. While most of my literacy work has been with elementary school students, Kelly’s lessons and ideas are easily adaptable for learners of all ages—including our youngest ones and are crucial for reaching our turned-off, discouraged learners, and fake readers. To Read Stuff You Have to Know Stuff is a beautifully organized, clarifying text on the crucial role of background knowledge to the learning process and how to get students to move students from “word poverty” to becoming engaged, joyful, critical readers and writers. Finally, be sure to view the informative interview on why and how Kelly wrote the book and to soak up more of his brilliant thinking. See YouTube video for that interview. He emphasizes that in this age of misinformation, it’s imperative we teach students how to critically consume knowledge. Kelly ends the interview by stating, “How much you know today is indicative of what you’re going to learn tomorrow.”

Peter Johnston’s Choice Words: How Our Language Affects Children’s Learning. Second Edition is a must-have book for all teachers, beautifully building on his groundbreaking First Edition. Johnston demonstrates for us teachers (and caregivers too) the power of words carefully chosen and how classroom talk can and must become the mainstay that drives literacy learning and student agency—both academically and social-emotionally. The end result is a transformed, joyful culture of possibilities where we witness the power of language for enhancing classroom dynamics, mindsets, power sharing, and engagement in what becomes a more equitable, inclusive, and democratic environment. Strong on research and rich on practices, Peter Johnston’s book is a treasure trove for teachers; there are so many strategic and detailed examples of language use for promoting optimal classroom talk. The dedicated reader/learner will come away committed to noticing, naming, and applying carefully chosen words that empower student talk where students are in control of their thinking and learning. For much more on Peter Johnston’s current thinking and work, see Just and Equitable Literacy Learning: Developing Children’s Social, Emotional, and Intellectual Lives, a powerful video conversation with Kathy Champeau--literacy champion, reading specialist and literacy consultant-- who has worked alongside Peter in classrooms for many years.

Looking back on my long teaching career, I wish I’d had Choice Words as my guide and been cognizant early on of the significance of classroom language patterns and carefully crafted teacher and student talk for optimal teaching and learning. Sadly, I don’t remember promoting much student talk in the classroom. Here are some words of wisdom from Choice Words I wish I’d put into practice, right from the start. 

• When students notice something and bring it to the class’s attention, they’re exercising curricular agency, taking control of their learning lives. . . (p. 13)
• Starting with the child’s observations rather than the teacher’s has many advantages. (p. 17)
• The effect of soliciting students’ questions is to cede control of the topic of conversation to the students, or at least to engage in more balanced negotiation of the topic. . . (p. 89)
• Listening to each other is central to collaborative learning communities. (p.100)
• Teachers’ language can offer children, and nudge them toward, productive identities. (p. 25)
• If nothing else, children should leave school with a sense that if they act, and act strategically, they can accomplish their goals—a sense of agency. (p. 37)

Commentary: Inspiring Short Texts for Today’s Challenging Times

Over the past year and into the present, and perhaps like you, I have found myself despairing at the state of the world—locally, nationally, and internationally. That despair has caused me to mostly avoid reading long and complex texts and books with a lot of violence. However, short texts,  beautifully written and illustrated, have brought me respite and hope for a promising future. What follows are some of my favorites from recent months. You can read most of these in one or two sittings. I hope they bring you some peace and optimism along with some joyful moments.

The Dog Who Followed the Moon by James Norbury, fable

If you are feeling a bit at loose ends about the direction of your life’s journey, this book will inspire you. Beautifully written and illustrated, this fable tells the story of a lost and endangered puppy who is rescued by a wolf. Together, they begin a challenging journey through the forest to find a way home. Readers of all ages, and especially adults, will feel supported to find their own way forward and to adapt to life’s changing circumstances with courage, hope, and love. Stunning illustrations complement the spare, poetic text. A mesmerizing, wise story with the look of a gorgeous picture book. I loved it!

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Written by the best-selling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, this is a stunning book. The author says in By the Book, in an interview, about her reading life and her new book, “It’s an invitation to question the values that underpin our current exploitative relation to the living world. Why do we tolerate an economy that actively destroys what we love.” She writes hopefully about a gift economy, one built from generosity and reciprocity—rather than accumulation-- where those who have a sense of equity and “enoughness” share their gifts from the earth and do compassionate acts to those in need. Realistically, she notes creating such a regenerative economy works best in small, close-knit communities, and the author shares stories of some while noting that gift economies are fun and joyful.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit         

Solnit, a highly respected scholar and essayist, champions the value of hope as an antidote to despair. She is a deep thinker and a beautiful writer. “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others.” (xiv)

Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver.

Mary Oliver never disappoints. Her thoughtful essays are a balm on the soul. Reading them brought me a sense of peace, quiet, and desire to get out more into nature and live life more fully. This is an encouraging, wise, uplifting book.

Dearly by Margaret Atwood

If you’re a fan of Margaret Atwood or new to her work you’ll savor her latest book of selected poems. “Atwood’s book of poems are vibrant with purpose, brilliant, hard-edged, and instantly legible, and they will doubtless become classics of our troubled times.” (Scotsman) Poetry can be healing, especially during challenging times.  

Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

This pleasing book by a poet and essayist presents “gorgeous vignettes around food, drink, and the boundaries between heritage and memory.” The author’s descriptions, explanations, and reflections around food traditions take the reader into a delicious world that embraces food and nature. A total delight!

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.

I have read this novella three times now. It’s that good and that beautifully written. It’s one of  my favorite books of all time, and many others agree. It’s on the New York Times: 100 Best Books of the 21^st Century. See my original remarks extolling the book from a previous reading blog. 

Still Life with Remorse by Maira Kalman

This extraordinary book is like nothing I’ve ever seen or read before. It’s a gorgeous combination of sensational painting with significant prose and poetry writing about life circumstances in challenging times. This hardcover book is hard to describe--and impossible to find the words to do it justice--as it’s so beautifully unique. Autobiographical stories in the midst of 50 striking, full-color paintings. You’ve never seen a book like this one.

I give the last words here to the brilliant writer and thinker Toni Morrison.

In troubling times, the role of creating, giving, receiving, and enjoying inspiring art, music, beauty, literature, poetry, and/or cuisine can offer solace for the weary soul and a hopeful way forward.

"This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal...the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art."

- Toni Morrison, No Place for Self-Pity. No Room for Fear