Here are the five books I’ve recommended most frequently in 2019:
Novel: It appears that Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is on every “Best of 2019” list. What makes it so appealing? In addition to having likable, open-hearted characters in an interesting situation — which we can expect from Patchett — this novel is infused with questions about what really happened in the past. Many assumptions turn out to be wrong – and revisions in history can change everything – including the future.
Patchett, Ann. The Dutch House. Harper, 2019.
Pedagogy: I’ve come to believe that usually the best way to give people information is to tell them a story. While it may seem more efficient to simply lay out the facts and be done with it, it’s often best to keep in mind that Aristotle was right about the importance of appealing to people’s emotions. That’s what David Gooblar does in this wonderful new book for college faculty members about teaching.
Gooblar, David. The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching. Harvard University Press, 2019.
Novel: The Most Fun We Ever Had is, in fact, not about the most fun the characters ever had. Instead, it provides a complex and contradictory account of how a family functioned over a period of decades. It’s written by a social worker who can be non-judgmental about how things happened. Of the books in this year’s list, this is the one I’m most likely to reread first. The second time around, the story will feel very different.
Lombardo, Claire. The Most Fun We Ever Had. Doubleday, 2019.
Memoir: In the Life of the Mind Interrupted, Katie Rose Guest Pryal shows us what life has been like for her as a law professor with a chronic mental health condition. For twelve years, she kept her psychological disability hidden, choosing to reveal it only after she left academia. In this moving memoir, she describes the stigma, hostility and suspicion that come with having an invisible disability.
Pryal, Katie Rose Guest. Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education. Snowraven Books, 2017.
Novel: Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People is not about people who are normal at all. Instead, it is a brave, raw story about the lies a young man and a young woman tell themselves and each other. Both of them start their adulthood with significant deficits, and it’s very hard to predict how it will go. What’s remarkable is that the book ends with hard-won hope that’s both believable and uplifting.
Rooney, Sally. Normal People. Faber & Faber, 2018.