Here’s something a little OCD about me: Whenever I take a stack of books back to the library, I record them in a little list because I’m afraid I haven’t gotten everything out of them and might need to go back and reread them.
I almost never reread them, of course.
- Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do
- Bernard Bergonzi, Exploding English: Criticism, Theory, Culture
- Michael Berube, The Employment of English
- Robert Boice, Professors as Writers
- William E. Cain (ed), Teaching the Conflicts
- Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe
- —, Beyond the Culture Wars
- Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (ed), Redrawing the Boundaries
- Robert Bechtold Heilman, The Professor and the Profession
- Thomas P. Miller, The Formation of College English
- Isaiah Smithson and Nancy Ruff (ed), English Studies / Culture Studies
I sense a theme. What are you working on? Inquiring minds want to know!
Have you thought about reading William V. Spanos’s The End pf Education? Horribly written, but on point.
I started a private blog in which I dump book titles. Some of them are ones I want to read or find, but the ones I finally have to take back to the library because I’ve reached the renewal limit take up a significant chunk of space, too. One of my categories is “Library.”
Not OCD at all. isn’t it just good academic practice? to build your list of notes/research archive?
KF, thanks for your interest! I was just batting around thoughts about the state of the profession and its current public image. To the extent that those thoughts developed beyond inklings, they appeared here.
Joe, I haven’t read that book, but consider it added to the list.
Heidi and Mel, I guess what I do is probably more common than I thought, which makes me think of something Matt wrote,