Here’s where I track what I’ve been reading—and occasionally share my public thoughts, too. As you’ll notice, I typically read works in parallel.1

I’ll be heavily prioritizing the reading lists for my Ph.D. qualifying exams, which I’m aiming to take in October of 2026.

About This Reading Log

I first built this reading log system in 2023, when I realized I wanted my own little alternative to corporate-owned platforms. You might consider BookWyrm if you’re interested in something similarly non-corporate, but more social and less DIY.

I’ll occasionally add works that I read before 2023 when I realize I might want to refer to them on here.

This reading log system uses a separate Markdown note for each work, with relevant information like the page count and the dates when I started & finished. The tools that build this site, Jekyll and Liquid, take that information and create the sections you see below, as well as individual pages for each work.

As of 2026-01-20, I’m considering writing up a “How did I do this?” guide in the next couple months.

Currently Reading

My Reading Lists

My Comprehensive Exam Reading Lists

Exam List 1: Information Control and Making Meaning in Modern/Postmodern Texts

Started: 2024-04-22
Last updated: 2024-12-28
Amount read: 13 of 35 works.

13 works

Exam List 2: Mobility, Agency, & Surveillance in 20th & 21st Century American Literature

Started: 2024-04-22
Last updated: 2025-03-15
Amount read: 4 of 35 works.

4 works

Exam List 3: Composition and Information Literacy, Pedagogy and Instructional Design

Started: 2024-04-22
Last updated: 2025-04-21
Amount read: 4 of 35 works.

4 works

Previously Read

2026
  1. :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.

  2. :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.

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. :memo: 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.

2022
  1. :green_book: Quality Matters Higher Education Rubric by Quality Matters :herb:

    A rubric used to evaluate the design of online and hybrid courses in higher education.

2021
  1. :green_book: How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies by Robert Dale Parker :herb:

    Parker’s book presents critical theory across both literary studies and cultural studies, to great effect. This could be a great introduction to critical theory, whether you’re particularly interested in literature or intersted in cultural studies more broadly.

  2. :green_book: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde :herb:

    Despite living the indulgent life of a libertine, Dorian never seems to age. His painted portrait, however….

2017
  1. :green_book: The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail by Jason De León :herb:

    Drawing on the four major fields of anthropology in this study of migration through the Sonoran Desert, De León uses an innovative combination of ethnography, archaeology, linguistics, and forensic science to produce a scathing critique of ‘Prevention through Deterrence,’ the federal border enforcement policy that encourages migrants to cross in areas characterized by extreme environmental conditions and high risk of death.

  1. I’ve done this long before encountering the approach Casey Boyle shares in his …something like a reading ethics… (my notes)—and I like his ways of thinking about reading enough to highlight his approach here! ↩

Kudos

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