Reading Notes

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All my reading notes

These notes are for works I've actually started reading. You can find additional placeholder notes for works on my reading lists that aren't indexed below.

Alphabetical by Title
  1. :green_book: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin :herb:
  2. :page_facing_up: Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes. by Shannon A. Riggs & Kathryn E. Linder open access :herb:
  3. :page_facing_up: Against AI: Critical Refusal in the Library by Kailyn "Kay" Slater :herb:
  4. :green_book: Binti: The Complete Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor :herb:
  5. :green_book: Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse? by McKenzie Wark :herb:
  6. :green_book: Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey :herb:
  7. :green_book: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick :herb:
  8. :green_book: El oro de los sueños by José María Merino :herb:
  9. :green_book: Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge by Natalia Cecire :herb:
  10. :green_book: Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD by Jesse J. Anderson :herb:
  11. :page_facing_up: Flaubert, Foucault, and the Bibliotheque Fantastique: Toward a Postmodern Epistemology for Library Science by Gary P. Radford :herb:
  12. :green_book: Foundation by Isaac Asimov :herb:
  13. :green_book: Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers by Jessamyn Neuhaus :herb:
  14. :green_book: How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies by Robert Dale Parker :herb:
  15. :green_book: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens :herb:
  16. :green_book: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles :herb:
  17. :green_book: Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. by Eric Hayot :herb:
  18. :green_book: Infomocracy by Malka Older :herb:
  19. :page_facing_up: Information as Thing by Michael K. Buckland :herb:
  20. :page_facing_up: Information is the enclosure of meaning: Cybernetics, semiotics, and alternative theories of information by Paul Kockelman :herb:
  21. :green_book: Information Literacy and Writing Studies in Conversation: Reenvisioning Library-Writing Program Connections by Andrea Baer :herb:
  22. :page_facing_up: Information literacy: a contradictory coupling by Christine Pawley :herb:
  23. :green_book: Information: A Reader by Edited by Eric Hayot, Anatoly Detwyler, and Lea Pao. :herb:
  24. :page_facing_up: Informed Open Pedagogy and Information Literacy Instruction in Student-Authored Open Projects by Cynthia Mari Orozco :herb:
  25. :green_book: Intersectionality by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge :herb:
  26. :page_facing_up: Juan Ponce de León and the Discovery of Florida Reconsidered. by Samuel Turner open access :herb:
  27. :green_book: Machinehood by S.B. Divya :herb:
  28. :green_book: Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville :herb:
  29. :green_book: Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State by James Purdon :herb:
  30. :green_book: My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles :herb:
  31. :green_book: Oil on Water by Helon Habila :herb:
  32. :green_book: Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution by Maurice S. Lee :herb:
  33. :green_book: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler :herb:
  34. :green_book: Paradise by Toni Morrison :herb:
  35. :green_book: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison :seedling:
  36. :green_book: Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts :herb:
  37. :green_book: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson :herb:
  38. :green_book: Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric by Quality Matters :herb:
  39. :green_book: Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin :herb:
  40. :green_book: Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism by Patricia E. Chu :herb:
  41. :green_book: Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto by Kevin M. Gannon :herb:
  42. :green_book: Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education by Thomas J. Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling :herb:
  43. :green_book: Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading by Jenae Cohn :herb:
  44. :green_book: Slaughterhouse-five, or, The Children’s Crusade: a Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut :herb:
  45. :green_book: Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes by Flower Darby & James M. Lang :herb:
  46. :green_book: Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything by William P. Germano & Kit Nicholls :herb:
  47. :green_book: Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom by bell hooks :herb:
  48. :page_facing_up: The (im)possibility of AI literacy by Luci Pangrazio :herb:
  49. :green_book: The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault :herb:
  50. :green_book: The Essentials of Instructional Design: Connecting Fundamental Principles with Process and Practice. 5th ed. by Abbie H. Brown and Timothy D. Green :herb:
  51. :green_book: The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. by Thomas Richards :herb:
  52. :green_book: The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason De León :herb:
  53. :green_book: The Old is Dying and the New Cannot be Born by Nancy Fraser :herb:
  54. :green_book: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault :herb:
  55. :green_book: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde :herb:
  56. :green_book: The Rhetorical Foundations of Society by Ernesto Laclau :herb:
  57. :green_book: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten :herb:
  58. :green_book: Toward Collective Liberation: Anti-racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy by Chris Crass :herb:
  59. :green_book: Universal Design for Learning: Principles, Framework, and Practice (3rd edition) by Anne Meyer and David H. Rose :herb:
  60. :green_book: What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice by Julia Molinari :herb:
  61. :page_facing_up: What's 'Critical' about 'Critical AI'? A Recommitment to Humanistic Inquiry in the Ostensible March to Hyper-Automation by Jennifer Sano-Franchini :herb:
  62. :green_book: White Noise by Don DeLillo :herb:

All my reading notes, by year finished

2026
  1. :page_facing_up: Against AI: Critical Refusal in the Library by Kailyn "Kay" Slater :herb:

    Slater critiques the notion of ‘AI literacy’ and argues that generative AI runs counter to many ethical positions claimed within LIS.

  2. :page_facing_up: Flaubert, Foucault, and the Bibliotheque Fantastique: Toward a Postmodern Epistemology for Library Science by Gary P. Radford :herb:

    Radford uses Foucault, Barthes, and other examples of literary criticism, to offer alternative accounts of the modern library experience than the dominant positivist epistemology.

  3. :green_book: Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers by Jessamyn Neuhaus :herb:

    Neuhaus encourages faculty to embrace their inner nerd and critically reflect on how to translate their scholarly expertise into authentic student learning.

  4. :page_facing_up: Information as Thing by Michael K. Buckland :herb:

    Buckland distinguishes between different meanings of ‘information’ and explains how viewing ‘information-as-thing’ helps describe uses of data, text, documents, antelopes, etc.

  5. :page_facing_up: Information is the enclosure of meaning: Cybernetics, semiotics, and alternative theories of information by Paul Kockelman :herb:

    Largely framed as an intervention in misunderstandings of Donald MacKay’s accounts of information, Kockelman offers the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce as a better source of the ideas that literary or aesthetics scholars seem to want from MacKay.

  6. :green_book: Information Literacy and Writing Studies in Conversation: Reenvisioning Library-Writing Program Connections by Andrea Baer :herb:

    Baer argues that recent developments in librarianship and composition instruction evidence increasing convergence between the fields, likely improving results for students.

  7. :page_facing_up: Information literacy: a contradictory coupling by Christine Pawley :herb:

    Recounting the conflicting discursive histories of “information” and “literacy”, Pawley argues that librarianship needs to center more critical analysis of how knowledge and meaning are made when readers make sense of decontextualized information within intersecting systems of power relations.

  8. :green_book: Information: A Reader by Edited by Eric Hayot, Anatoly Detwyler, and Lea Pao. :herb:

    A humanistic introduction to the concept of information in historical, literary, and cultural studies.

  9. :page_facing_up: Informed Open Pedagogy and Information Literacy Instruction in Student-Authored Open Projects by Cynthia Mari Orozco :herb:

    Orozco reminds readers that it is unethical to expect students to produce open work before students understand the implications of open practice, then provides examples lessons and projects she has used in her own course.

  10. :green_book: Machinehood by S.B. Divya :herb:

    Welga Ramírez, and her WAI companion Por Qué, attempt to find out who is behind the Machinehood’s threats before they cause more harm.

  11. :green_book: My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts by N. Katherine Hayles :herb:

    Hayles provides new ways of discussing how code relates to speech and writing, as well as how our conceptions of works or texts relate to human subjects and identities.

  12. :green_book: Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto by Kevin M. Gannon :herb:

    Gannon argues that teaching, when done effectively, is by definition emancipatory and hopeful.

  13. :green_book: Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education by Thomas J. Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling :herb:

    Tobin and Behling detail how UDL can help increase access for a wide range of learners in higher education.

  14. :green_book: Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading by Jenae Cohn :herb:

    Pulling from across disciplines, Cohn shows how teachers can better frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital reading assignments.

  15. :page_facing_up: The (im)possibility of AI literacy by Luci Pangrazio :herb:

    Pangrazio’s brief editorial reminds readers of Paolo Freire’s assertion that literacy involves reading the world and its relations of power, not merely words. Unfortunately, most current ‘AI literacy’ approaches merely provide instrumental instruction on how to use AI rather than helping learners question the social structures its use promotes.

  16. :green_book: The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault :herb:

    In this work, Foucault works toward a new method of historical analysis that examines ‘statements’ within their own level, examining discursive formations rather than histories of ideas or truths.

  17. :green_book: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault :herb:

    Foucault doesn’t aspire to making a history of progress toward an objectivity recognizable as current science, but rather to examine how the epistemological field established its conditions of possibility.

  18. :green_book: Universal Design for Learning: Principles, Framework, and Practice (3rd edition) by Anne Meyer and David H. Rose :herb:

    Universal Design for Learning (UDL) aims to help educators create learning experiences that increase outcomes for all learners.

  19. :green_book: What Makes Writing Academic: Rethinking Theory for Practice by Julia Molinari :herb:

    Molinari proposes a critical realist approach to academic writing, arguing that academicness emerges from social and historical practices rather than conventions or formal attributes.

  20. :page_facing_up: What's 'Critical' about 'Critical AI'? A Recommitment to Humanistic Inquiry in the Ostensible March to Hyper-Automation by Jennifer Sano-Franchini :herb:

    Sano-Franchini outlines conflicting uses of the word ‘critical’ with respect to technology use, and suggests that ‘critical interface analysis’ as a useful method for deeper contextual interrogation of these systems.

2025
  1. :green_book: Binti: The Complete Trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor :herb:

    Binti leaves her homeworld for Oomza University and grows in unexpected ways.

  2. :green_book: Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey :herb:

    The author describes his experiences serving for three seasons as a park ranger in southeastern Utah.

  3. :green_book: Experimental: American Literature and the Aesthetics of Knowledge by Natalia Cecire :herb:

    Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena.

  4. :green_book: Foundation by Isaac Asimov :herb:

    As the Galactic Empire crumbles, a group of scientists and scholars attempt to interpret and influence world-historical forces as The Foundation, aiming to minimize the span of human suffering and ignorance.

  5. :green_book: Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. by Eric Hayot :herb:

    As Hayot writes in the intro, this book “reclaims and redescribes the work of humanist thought [and…] scholarship as a form of reason [and…] truth-seeking”.

  6. Internship AI List by Ryan P. Randall :evergreen_tree:

    This is the “topic” list for my comprehensive exam, with links to my own reading notes.

  7. :green_book: Oil on Water by Helon Habila :herb:

    A young journalist tries to help find and negotiate the release a British oil executive’s wife, who has been kidnapped by militants in the Niger Delta.

  8. :green_book: Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler :herb:

    It’s the mid-2020s. Climate, economic, and social crises wash over California—even the gated communities. Teenage Lauren Olamina knows change is coming, and she intends to shape it.

  9. :green_book: Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison :seedling:

    Morrison maps how American authors invented and deployed tropes associated with America’s constant ‘African’ presence, using these tropes as a foil to organize their growing sense of ‘Americanness’.

  10. :green_book: Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin :herb:

    Benjamin argues that tools for automation often appear neutral or even benevolent while their discriminatory designs encode and exacerbate preexisting structural inequalities.

  11. :green_book: Race, Nationalism and the State in British and American Modernism by Patricia E. Chu :herb:

    Chu argues that innovations of form and style developed by modernists chart anxieties about personal freedom in the face of increasing governmental controls.

  12. :green_book: Slaughterhouse-five, or, The Children’s Crusade: a Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut :herb:

    Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time. So it goes.

  13. :green_book: Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything by William P. Germano & Kit Nicholls :herb:

    You know how film has the idea of a MacGuffin, a device that sets the plot in motion but fades in importance? Well, this book absolutely does discuss the role a syllabus plays in a course—but it quickly expands into addressing larger concerns such as pedagogy, community, and activity.

  14. :green_book: Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom by bell hooks :herb:

    In the third book of her teaching trilogy, hooks discusses how teachers can practice and encourage critical thinking, working with students to create new ways of thinking and being that can bring us away from dominator cultures.

  15. :green_book: The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. by Thomas Richards :herb:

    Thomas Richards analyses the ways in which the Victorian organization of knowledge was enlisted into the service of the British Empire.

  16. :green_book: White Noise by Don DeLillo :herb:

    Jack Gladney teaches at a liberal arts college, and an airborne toxic event begins menacing the town.

2024
  1. :green_book: Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse? by McKenzie Wark :herb:

    Wark asks us to think about information less like Marxists and more like Marx.

  2. :green_book: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick :herb:

    Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter searching for escaped androids in a radioactive Northern California where social status is measured by caring for live animals, as an indicator of empathy.

  3. :green_book: El oro de los sueños by José María Merino :herb:

    A edition of José María Merino’s book, adapted by Yolanda Pinto Gómez.

  4. :green_book: Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD by Jesse J. Anderson :herb:

    Anderson’s Extra Focus provides a truly ‘quick start’ guide to dealing with ADHD as an adult, with useful ways to reframe situations and find motivation.

  5. :green_book: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics by N. Katherine Hayles :herb:

    Hayles examines literary fiction and technological texts for her study of how information became conceived of as immaterial, of how the figure of the cyborg was invented in cultural and technological discourses, and how this cybernetic discourse altered the understanding of the liberal humanist subject.

  6. :green_book: Infomocracy by Malka Older :herb:

    Twenty years into a global experiment with micro-democracy, and Information workers (or antagonists) hope to protect this political experiment through the next world-wide election cycle.

  7. :page_facing_up: Juan Ponce de León and the Discovery of Florida Reconsidered. by Samuel Turner open access :herb:

    This article provides an up-to-date interpretation of primary and secondary accounts of Ponce de León’s travels to Florida.

  8. :green_book: Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution by Maurice S. Lee :herb:

    Lee explores the history of how various cultural formations around literature and information grew through the 19th Century Information Revolution.

  9. :green_book: Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts :herb:

    Hall and co-writers provide a classic analysis of the rhetoric of a moral panic.

  10. :green_book: Small Teaching Online: Applying Learning Science in Online Classes by Flower Darby & James M. Lang :herb:

    Darby and Lang offer a wealth of small interventions one can make to improve the experiences of online learners and teachers. I definitely recommend this for anyone who teaches online.

2023
  1. :page_facing_up: Actively Engaging Students in Asynchronous Online Classes. by Shannon A. Riggs & Kathryn E. Linder open access :herb:

    Abstract: This paper suggests a three-pronged approach for conceptualizing active learning in the online asynchronous class: the creation of an architecture of engagement in the online classroom, the use of web-based tools in addition to the learning management system, and a re-imagining of discussion boards as interactive spaces.

  2. :green_book: Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State by James Purdon :herb:

    Purdon examines modernist fiction to trace how writers experienced information culture as a disturbing interruption and governmental intrusion.

  • :seedling: = emerging note
  • :herb: = established note
  • :evergreen_tree: = evergreen note
  • open access = open access
  • :closed_lock_with_key: = paywalled
  • general web link = general web link

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