Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynn Truss

This book makes an impassioned plea for the continued importance of punctuation as marker of clarity and style. It consists of several essays (some longer and some shorter) on different punctuation marks including the comma, the dash, the semi-colon, the colon, the apostrophe, the hyphen, the question mark, the exclamation point, and even the emoticon. I agree strongly with some of its observations, and disagree just as strenuously about others (although the latter is hardly surprising as the author punctuates according to British conventions, and I find some of them, especially regarding the location of terminal punctuation marks and closing quotation marks, entirely unsettling). But I applaud her two most important theses: punctuation matters, and some rules about punctuation should be strictly observed, while others are matter of style and taste. The essays themselves cover a wide swath of ground: the history of punctuation, humorous observations on why punctuation is important and why those who care about punctuation are so-self important, and some rules and guidelines to effective (British) English punctuation. If you're just looking for a style guide, there are better places to go. If you're looking for entertainment and someone who cares deeply about language, you've come to the right place, in addition to helpful observations about style.

Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement edited by Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson

This collection of essays proposes that American universities are changing in ways that harm them because of the rise of corporate interests, which focus on lowering labor costs as much as possible without worrying about the effects these changes will have on the laborers themselves or the quality of education they are able to provide. The book shows how the casualization of academic labor harms faculty and provides accounts of attempts (both successful and not) of various employees (including graduate students) to unionize and negotiate for better working conditions. Even though this book was written about a decade ago, it still feels very relevant and its arguments still managed to persuade me.

Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger

This collection of essays examines the role of the vampire in contemporary literature. Its essays are grouped into four categories: the development of the vampire metaphor in an historical continuum, on writing vampire fictions, the role of disease and disease metaphors in writing contemporary vampire fictions (especially AIDS), and the vampire as an other (especially related to sexuality). I found some of the essays in the collection stronger than others ("Consuming Youth: The Lost Boys Cruise Mallworld" by Rob Latham on the ways in which the film The Lost Boys enacts the capitalist/vampire metaphor in our contemporary economy was particularly good), but all of the essays do better with reading a given text or set of texts than theorizing in new and exciting ways.

The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead

This collection of essays is part travel writing, part memoir, and part creative non-fiction. It gives a beautiful blazon of New York: a portrait in parts. The writing at times is descriptive and at times is in dialogue with its reader, who is always a both a visitor to and resident of New York. I was impressed by the spatial reasoning that this book displays.

Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature edited by Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr

This collection of essays analyzes the role of vampires in literature. It's particularly interested in both Dracula and in the changes in the portrayal of vampires at the end of the twentieth century. The collection of essays covers a fairly broad span of literature. The essays contribute more to an understanding of the individual works they focus on than to overarching theoretical developments.

Four Decades of Magic: Celebrating the First Forty Years of Disney World by Chad Emerson

This book contains a collection of essays about the history of Walt Disney World. It took me several months to read because I read it intermittently, an essay at a time. Some of the essays were really excellent and clarified and informed me about bits of Disney history with which I was not previously familiar. Other essays seemed to retrod familiar ground. Overall it was an entertaining collection.

Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis by David Herman

This collection had a several very good articles. I particularly found the ones that connected recent work in computers to narratology, the "Speak, Friend, and Enter" article on linguistic forking paths, and the first essay (which gave a great account of "Cat in the Rain" helpful. The collection made a good case for the continued relevance of narratology.

Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson

This volume collects a number of essays by a wide range of authors on the history of the Royal Society and various scientific discoveries from its founding to the present day. I enjoyed this collection, although I found some of the essays much more compelling than others. Particularly noteworthy essays include the one by Margaret Atwood on Jonathan Swift and Gulliver's Travels, the one by Georgina Ferry on x-ray crystallography, and the one by Richard Fortey on collections. I'd recommend dipping into and out of this volume rather than reading straight through.

How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish

This book makes an argument for the sentence as the primary unit of literature. It tries to simplify the way people understand sentences by arguing that they're thoughts, and that they should be judged not by dangling modifiers but by whether they are clear. Fish argues there are two forms of sentence, generally speaking, worth considering: the subordinating sentence and the additive sentence. I found the text clear, and Fish's love of the language shines through. I wouldn't go so far as to say, however, that this book is particularly better than other books as far as ways to teach grammar go.

American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative by Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy

This collection of essays reflects on American forms of Gothic literature. After a few introductory essays (which insist that the American Gothic in general is played out but that we should focus on specific criticism and delve into its particularities), the collection does just that. I found the reading of The House of Seven Gables and Absalom, Absalom! particularly useful. I don't necessarily buy the book's main contention that overarching Gothic narratives are played out, but I did appreciate the specific readings. I don't practice the type of criticism used to read Poe's story "The Black Cat," but that essay was well-researched (lots about animals and child-rearing in the nineteenth century). I also enjoyed the essay on The Wide, Wide World and punishment and desire. Overall a solid collection.

Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler

This book collects five stories and two essays by Octavia Butler. The stories are challenging, because they're often set in different societies (the title story focuses on an outpost of humans who have developed a parasitic relationship with a host species) or in a different version of our society (two focus on disease--a psychological disorder that happens to children whose parents took a miracle drug for cancer, and a world where people are losing their ability to hear and read)--and it often takes almost the entire story to figure out what's happening. I really enjoyed these stories, which all focus on what constitutes a family, what does it mean to love another being, how do we communicate with one another, and how do we cope with disease. All in all, a brilliant collection.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

I found this collection of essays to be really refreshing and amusing. Wallace covers a wide range of topics with erudition and grace. From the adult entertainment industry to Dostoevsky and Kafka, and from the 2000 primary campaign trail with John McCain (a deeply ambivalent piece in which Wallace admires McCain's character but deprecates his political positions) and conservative talk radio to the September 11th bombings, from the ethics of eating lobster to a review of Garner's guide to American usage, Wallace is always thoughtful, thought-provoking, and witty. The last-mentioned usage review is the best single piece in the collection, but I enjoyed all the essays.

Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates edited by Mary Jo Bona and Irma Maini

This collection of essays contends that the culture wars of the 1980s are not yet over, and that we need to continue studying and acknowledging the importance of multiethnic literature, especially in an American context. The quality of the essays varies. Some merely rehash the debates over the canon (sometimes with a particular perspective). Others give readings; I found the reading of The Great Gatsby as an ethnic work particularly helpful. The third section (which has more of a cultural studies bent and examines the canon from the perspective of popular culture) was perhaps the most useful section and the most innovative.

Portraits and Other Short Works by Gertrude Stein

This collection of Stein's short work includes a range of materials dating from 1903 to 1932. Included in this collection of thirty-six works are a number of short sketches (portraits) of people she knew in Paris, Tender Buttons, Four Saints in Three Acts, "If I Told Him" (a remarkable poem about Picasso), and "Composition as Exposition" an essay derived from a lecture she gave on writing. I particularly liked "If I Told Him" for its playfulness. Stein's work presents an interesting challenge to the reader, because in some senses it demands to be both seen and heard--if you don't read it aloud you don't get the playfulness and the phonetic connections between words that are so important to it making any sort of sense, but if you don't see it, you'll miss the work she's doing with homonyms and punctuation.

I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson

This book contains a series of essays written as a weekly column for a British magazine during Bryson's first several years back in the United States after twenty years in England. Although they're not linked by a narrative arc, it's endearing to follow the progress of several years through the essays (in an almost Walden-like way), and they're all quite funny. There's also a fair amount of trenchant commentary on the United States and its culture and the practices of its citizens. This book would be a great occasional book--the kind of thing you would keep by your bed and pick up when you can't sleep.

The Novel and the Police by D.A. Miller

This collection of essays probes the relationship between forms of official and unofficial discipline and the Victorian novel. Miller takes Foucault's work on power and discipline as a starting point and applies those theories to the novel. Among the books that Miller offers convincing readings of are Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Bleak House, Barchester Towers, and The Eustace Diamonds. I found Miller's insights about the relationship between the police and the criminal and his analysis of the policing powers in the novels particularly convincing.

Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century edited by Helena Michie and Ronald R. Thomas

This collection contains seventeen essays that together make the argument that conceptions of geography changed in the United Kingdom and the United States during the nineteenth century. They analyze cultural products to determine the ways in which people's relations to the spaces and places in which they lived changed. I found the essays, by in large, to be very smart, and the ones by Lipscomb on Cooper and Brady on the Southwest to be particularly helpful.

Sex, Class, and Culture by Lillian S. Robinson

This monograph comprises a collection of twelve essays, written over half a decade, that start by outlining a practice of feminist criticism (one which pays attention to history and does not ignore class) and then demonstrates how this criticism would work on a wide variety of cultural texts (A Room of One's Own, Pride and Prejudice, Renaissance epic poems, television, and more). I found the first part (the theoretical exposition) more even than the second part (though I thought the essay on why Charlotte Lucas marries Mr. Collins to be nothing short of brilliant).

Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? edited by Gustavo Pérez Firmat

This collection of essays features thirteen scholars' perspectives on the relationship between literature produced in the United States and the literature produced in Latin America (more or less). While the style of some of these essays was more casual than I usually expect from academic essays, I found a number of them (particularly the early ones on history and literature, the one on Poe, Borges, and detective fiction, and the one on Faulkner and Carpentier) helpful and intriguing. I am a strong believer in these kinds of juxtapositions and think that more of this kind of scholarship is necessary.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson

This book chronicles Bryson's experiences hiking the Appalachian Trail in 1996. In addition to his personal experiences, there's a lot of information about the history of the trail, and the nature and other things one encounters along the way. He's willing to push beyond the appearance of things (for example, what do the National Park Service and National Forest Service actual do with the land and resources they're protecting), and he serves it all up in an entertaining and humorous style. This book prompts some great reflection about our relationship to the natural world and to our own bodies and their capabilities. A great read.