{"id":554,"date":"2010-11-22T16:24:02","date_gmt":"2010-11-22T21:24:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bsuenglish.wordpress.com\/?p=554"},"modified":"2019-04-16T16:39:02","modified_gmt":"2019-04-16T20:39:02","slug":"you-gotta-read-this-with-professor-debbie-mix","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bsu.edu\/english\/blog\/2010\/11\/22\/you-gotta-read-this-with-professor-debbie-mix\/","title":{"rendered":"“You Gotta Read This!” with Professor Debbie Mix"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Debbie Mix<\/p><\/div>\n

Anyone who has talked to me for more than, say, five minutes, probably knows the first book on this list: Moby-Dick<\/em>.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because it\u2019s about everything!\u00a0 Love, grief, justice, power, gender, epistemology, language, disability, anger, belief, history, responsibility, humor, awe, identity, race\u2014and that\u2019s just the beginning.\u00a0 I\u2019ll admit that I didn\u2019t pick up this book by choice the first time (I had to read it in grad school), but now I pick it up regularly, and I really think you should, too.\u00a0 After Moby-Dick<\/em> the choices get harder, but here are a few more books I read this summer that I think are worth your time and effort:<\/p>\n

Oryx and Crake<\/em> and The Year of the Flood<\/em>, by Margaret Atwood: These two books are linked\u2014two perspectives on a single set of events\u2014and I read them side-by-side. These stories take us to a future riven by economic and genetic distinctions, and ask us to follow, and care about, the lives of characters living in different circumstances in that world.\u00a0 Global warming, genetic modification, the gap between the haves and have-nots, pandemic diseases, all these subjects (and more) are Atwood\u2019s concern.<\/p>\n

Stuck Rubber Baby<\/em>, by Howard Cruse: It tells the story of Toland Polk, growing up white and gay in a small southern town in the middle of the Civil Rights movement.\u00a0 The combination of image and text creates a compelling and profoundly human narrative about the intersections of the personal and political.\u00a0 Cruse\u2019s book is a great example of the nearly unlimited potential of graphic narrative to address complex issues in more than black and white ways.<\/p>\n

The Circus in Winter<\/em>, by Cathy Day: Even if Cathy Day hadn\u2019t just joined our English Department, I\u2019d encourage you to read this wonderful collection of linked short stories.\u00a0 Set in the fictional town of Lima, Indiana (a stand-in for Peru, Indiana), these stories center around the Great Porter Circus, which makes its winter home in Lima.\u00a0 We see the lives of performers, clowns, animal trainers, and others linked to the circus by chance, desire, and heredity.\u00a0 At times funny, poignant, and heartbreaking, this collection is always humane and always fascinating.<\/p>\n

The Plague of Doves<\/em>, by Louise Erdrich: Too often American Indians are represented in American culture as artifacts of the past rather than as citizens of the present.\u00a0 One of Erdrich\u2019s most important projects as a novelist has been to challenge that myth through her beautiful and unflinching depictions of present-day indigeneity.\u00a0 This book, set on an Ojibwe reservation and the nearby town of Pluto, North Dakota, reaches back to the past\u2014the brutal murders of a white family near the reservation in 1911\u2014but its attention is on the present as Erdrich\u2019s signature style of multiple intersecting narratives and gorgeous detail fills in the whole story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who has talked to me for more than, say, five minutes, probably knows the first book on this list: Moby-Dick.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because it\u2019s about everything!\u00a0 Love, grief, justice, power, gender, epistemology, language, disability, anger, belief, history, responsibility, humor, awe, identity, race\u2014and that\u2019s just the beginning.\u00a0 I\u2019ll admit that I didn\u2019t pick up this book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[160,258,293,390,684,953,977,1049,1133,1249,1403,1456,1483,1497,1640],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommendation-station","tag-ball-state-university","tag-bsu","tag-cathy-day","tag-debbie-mix","tag-howard-cruse","tag-louise-erdrich","tag-margaret-atwood","tag-moby-dick","tag-oryx-and-crake","tag-reading-list","tag-stuck-rubber-baby","tag-the-circus-in-winter","tag-the-plague-of-doves","tag-the-year-of-the-flood","tag-you-gotta-read-this"],"yoast_head":"\n"You Gotta Read This!" with Professor Debbie Mix - 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