A Fine Line

“Keeping secrets was the family business.”

January 5, 2017

What should you tell? What should you leave out? These used to be the most important questions for memoirists and for writers of all genres. However, I have come to believe that we are entering a new era where the boundaries of realism are being pushed to … Read More

Five Intriguing Ideas from 2016 Books

December 29, 2016

This blog focuses on one idea from one book each week, and so selecting just five from the 50 or so that I’ve published in 2016 is a challenge. But after looking through them all, I have to say that the ideas that I enjoyed the most … Read More

Five Best Novels of 2016

December 23, 2016

The five novels that rose to the top of my 2016 list are:

The best word to describe Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton is exquisite. What I love about Strout is her ability to dive right in to the heat of the moment without engaging … Read More

“Attributes like confidence, enthusiasm, and likability can be perceived in the briefest of exposures.”

December 15, 2016

In The Spark of Learning, Sarah Rose Cavanagh describes a study where students were asked to rate professors after seeing 30-second videos of lectures that had no audio. The students’ ratings predicted with surprising accuracy the professors’ actual end-of-semester evaluations. It probably shouldn’t come as a surprise … Read More

“There’s work to be done, there are plots to be plotted, there are scams to be scammed, there are villains to be misled!”

December 8, 2016

This may be Margaret Atwood’s greatest masterpiece. In Hag-Seed, she retells Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” by turning it inside-out and adding a layer. It’s a play within a play within a novel. This restructuring results in a hybrid form of story-telling that’s actually very funny. In her … Read More

“Bernard Shaw said you should try everything once except folk dancing and incest.”

December 1, 2016

This is how Michael Billington, “the” British theater critic, who has reviewed more than 9000 plays over the last 50 years, begins his piece on “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles. Charming, gossipy, insightful, authoritative, knowledgeable, and passionate, Billington is a great writer. It’s hard to … Read More

“To look closely with the attention of questioning changes everything.”

November 26, 2016

“It is,” Jane Hirshfield writes in this collection of essays about poetry, “if undertaken fully, revolutionary.” More stimulating than a triple-shot of espresso, these essays show what can happen when a great poet sets out to describe how poetry is primarily “an instrument of investigation and a … Read More

“If anything has been learned from this century of research on learning, it is that learning is not one thing but many things.”

November 17, 2016

What I love about this book is its informed and nuanced contribution to the “lecture vs. active learning” discussion that has been bubbling up for some time now at college campuses. The authors say that decisions about teaching methodology must be based on learning outcomes. This isn’t … Read More

“The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”

November 10, 2016

I predict that this opening sentence of Ann Patchett’s new novel, Commonwealth, will become one of those classic opening sentences that creative writing instructors refer to when talking about creating tension right out of the gate. Who is Albert Cousins? Why did he bring gin to … Read More

“You need to develop some social skills. Some tact, some restraint, some diplomacy.”

November 3, 2016

To mark the 400^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Hogarth commissioned “today’s best-loved novelists” to retell “the world’s favourite playwright’s” dramas. Anne Tyler’s novel Vinegar Girl is based on “The Taming of the Shrew,” a play that Tyler said she hated because it’s “totally misogynistic” and … Read More

“What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean?”

October 27, 2016

In a Paris Review interview, Jesse Barron observes that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work is “so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary.” What makes it revolutionary is Knausgaard’s goal to write “as close to life as possible” even if it means “breaking” the form of the traditional … Read More

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

October 20, 2016

Much like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, this collection of elegant essays by the poet Mary Oliver is for those who “are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.” It’s a guide for dreamers – … Read More

“If we are not fragile, we don’t deserve the world.”

October 13, 2016

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye is an expert on how fragile the world can be. She is an Arab-American who grew up in Ferguson, Missouri and Palestine. Perhaps she has never taken “safety” for granted. She describes how knowing “how desolate the landscape can be” has … Read More

The 10 Best Books for College Teachers — Part 2

October 6, 2016

My list of the books that have sparked the biggest changes in how and why I teach continues this week. What are your favorites? Share your recommendations in the “Leave a comment” box below or email me at CStover1@madisoncollege.edu.

6. For those who are looking for … Read More

The 10 Best Books for College Teachers – Part 1

September 29, 2016

As a college teacher who spent many hours during the last ten years reading books, articles, and conference proposals on the art and science of teaching, I believe that the best books for college teachers are the ones that provide a new framework, new research, or new … Read More

“Keeping secrets was the family business.”

Like this:

Five Intriguing Ideas from 2016 Books

Like this:

Five Best Novels of 2016

Like this:

“Attributes like confidence, enthusiasm, and likability can be perceived in the briefest of exposures.”

Like this:

“There’s work to be done, there are plots to be plotted, there are scams to be scammed, there are villains to be misled!”

Like this:

“Bernard Shaw said you should try everything once except folk dancing and incest.”

Like this:

“To look closely with the attention of questioning changes everything.”

Like this:

“If anything has been learned from this century of research on learning, it is that learning is not one thing but many things.”

Like this:

“The christening party took a turn when Albert Cousins arrived with gin.”

Like this:

“You need to develop some social skills. Some tact, some restraint, some diplomacy.”

Like this:

“What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean?”

Like this:

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”

Like this:

“If we are not fragile, we don’t deserve the world.”

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The 10 Best Books for College Teachers — Part 2

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The 10 Best Books for College Teachers – Part 1

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