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JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no
particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text

#Books
#BookSky'
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 20/20

My students love a nonfiction work with a unique organizing principle—a life story told via botany or via vignette, etc. That’s what they loved about Fowzia Karimi’s family- & heritage-focused Above Us The Milky Way. An alphabetical autobio as clever in design as it is moving. Plus it’s published by Dallas’s own independent publisher Deep Vellum :)

https://store.deepvellum.org/products/above-us-the-milky-way-an-illuminated-alphabet

December 26, 2024 at 7:25 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 19/20

I was not prepared for how engaging this book would be. I'm not sure, to be honest, that it is really YA, other than that it features a young adult as its captivating, brave, complex, strong moral & narrative center. Boulley draws so much into this story (sports, ritual, suspense, class difference, law & order, womanhood, etc) that as I write this, I'm stunned that the story holds together so well. FOR ME, it held together also because of the narrator Isabella Star LeBlanc, herself a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota actor, who animates Boulley's Ojibwe words & phrases & patterns beautifully. Definitely recommend the audiobook for this one.

https://www.audible.com/pd/Firekeepers-Daughter-Audiobook/1250779510?source_code=ASSGB149080119000H&share_location=pdp

December 23, 2024 at 8:02 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽
#Books
#BookSky💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 18/20

As with many items on this list, Satrapi’s Persepolis took root with me because of seeing how it landed on young readers in my classes. They learned enough about history to want to learn more; they saw enough about mental health struggles to want to learn more; they saw in Satrapi’s depictions of family & exile the echoes / reflections of their own family stories. A real joy to read & reread.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/160892/the-complete-persepolis-by-marjane-satrapi/

December 21, 2024 at 11:06 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽
#Books
#BookSky💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 17/20

Anybody who has taught Clint Smith knows how thoughtful & accessible, how honest & hopeful his work is. He gazes unblinkingly into history and horror, then and now. Just when you think the book cannot get any better, he brings it right home to his family. Just stunning, unforgettable, especially as an audiobook.

https://www.audible.com/pd/1549123416?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=pdp

December 20, 2024 at 9:26 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽
#Books
#BookSky💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 16/20

This book is a highbrow night at the museum. The author, born in France but of Bosnian and Montenegrin origin, meditates in the short book on family & exile, art & theft, history & legacy, and the interplay of all of them. I
read it happily, suspensefully in one afternoon, which is how I would recommend you read it.

https://www.fernfernfern.com/skyinside

December 19, 2024 at 10:12 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽
#Books
#BookSky💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 15/20

As a Catholic school boy, I might be overly susceptible to / dependent on ways to find the sacred in the everyday. English teachers have no shortage of authors that guide us through that. Not sure that anyone teaches Ram Dass outside of mindfulness / meditation spaces, which is something of a shame. It's a book that moves from the personal to the universal quite abruptly at times. The opening 70 pages or so are on white paper, which you read with the book spread horizontally, like all books. That part is the author's spiritual autobiography. Then you rotate the book ninety degrees so that you read it kind of lengthwise vertically, each two-page spread a different / discrete meditation on its own, this time all on earthy brown grocery bag textured paper. It's a really powerful reading & thinking experience. A deep well of challenges & affirmations, awakenings & blessings.

https://beherenownetwork.com/be-here-now/

December 16, 2024 at 8:20 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

I need to check Victoria out! My favorite on this playlist is for the cover & the band name 🤠🤣

Front cover of Hurray for the Riff Raff album The Past is Still Alvie

December 16, 2024 at 8:12 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky
💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 14/20

I’m a big fan of literature in translation and of anything published by New York Review of Books. So it’s no surprise that I both bought & loved Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World (translated by Adrian Nathan West), an erudite, strange, original book telling the stories of erudite, strange, original people--true geniuses of chemistry, math, quantum mechanics, geometry. One wonder of Labatut’s book is the accessible ways these geniuses think about big ideas--about a point, about waves, about matter. For all the hard scholarship, Labatut never loses the humanity of his characters--even when they almost lose theirs. The persistent thread of the book is a kind of archetypal Tower of Babel Frankenstein anxiety about the challenges and consequences of seeing beyond our lived experience and into the heart of the heart of time and space.

https://www.nyrb.com/products/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world

December 15, 2024 at 9:24 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky
💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 14/20

December 15, 2024 at 9:23 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky
💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 13/20

Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass was the first of a dang bumper crop of scientifically minded culturally responsive essay collections I discovered. Haupt’s Rooted, Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders, Renkl’s Late Migrations, Wilkinson’s Madder: A Memoir in Weeds. Like these other works, Kimmerer takes the science seriously and makes it accessible and poetic; like & better than these other works, Kimmerer illumines the cultural background in which her botanical acumen is rooted (Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation). The everyday becomes fantastic and sacred, both earthly and eternal. Each part of the memoir is driven by a single scientific artifact--pecans, strawberries, squash, etc. Kimmerer works within the scientific realities of the artifact without ever sacrificing the moving poetry, in the end yielding tremendous personal fruit from these scientific ideas. Highly highly recommend--very teachable

https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass

December 13, 2024 at 7:27 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 12/20

You’d think that the cover would have prepared me for Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric—it kinda did. It is artfully provocative, and it makes you rethink how we process imagery. It is politically personal, in a way that challenges how you think of your own advantages & assumptions & comforts. It is varied, in a way that makes you interrogate your own limited lens on Blackness &/in history, on media &/in our lives. To paraphrase the collection’s closing line, this collection is not a match focused on who wins or loses—it is a lesson.

https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/citizen

December 12, 2024 at 7:48 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 11/20

Before I was a bookish person, I was a prayerful person. I loved the iconography and the ritual behind my family's faith. I loved gathering in community, reading a text and glean some sort of moral meaning from it as a community. I never thought of the saints as fully human, though … Until I read Augustine. His story and his struggles still feel fully modern, still feel fully authentic. And as I get older, I admire most the attempts to put into words, the eternal, the ineffable, the divine, that move Confessions beyond mere autobiography. And into something like an earned union with G-d.

https://www.hpb.com/st.-augustines-confessions/M-6755552-C.html

December 11, 2024 at 7:11 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 10/20

You should read Stephen Graham Jones--Mapping the Interior was his first that I read & really enjoyed, and now The Only Good Indians. It’s difficult to explain Stephen Graham Jones’s appeal without simplifying it. He crafts utterly believable flawed and conflicted characters who are fully aware of their flaws. You will care about these characters, and you will suffer for them, in this case, four Blackfoot Indian men haunted by a ten-year-old choice. Jones also knows suspense and setting. You will want to know what happens next, and it will often shock and move you. You will learn a lot about the complex spiritual and political history of his postage-stamp of a world, and you will be both thankful for learning about the lived here-and-now experience of Blackfoot (and Crow, among other) people and horrified at what they have endured. I’m making it sound like homework--it isn’t. It’s got great basketball, an extended & hilarious sweat lodge set piece, men & women … it’s funny and uplifting (& surprisingly feminist). Seriously, check it out.

https://www.demontheory.net/the-only-good-indians/

December 10, 2024 at 3:43 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Michael Jordan calmly looking into the camera with a serene mature look that says “F7ck them kids”

December 9, 2024 at 8:05 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 9/20

I am a big fan of the short story: The best ones usually offer some satisfying moral commentary or some abrupt narrative surprise. I can't say that Borges's short stories offer either, but they're my favorite. In Labyrinths, he plays with genre & tone, setting & resolution. Revenge stories, detective stories, origin stories, confessions, instructions --you never quite know what you're going to get from story to story, but you'll always find it compelling & original. Every single one. Start with Library of Babel if you've never read one. Then move through the whole collection. Then listen to his landmark 1968 Norton lectures. All links below.

https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf

https://www.ndbooks.com/book/labyrinths/

https://www.ubu.com/sound/borges_norton.html

December 9, 2024 at 3:31 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 8/20

Vonnegut was the first novelist that made me feel smart for liking him. Not because the prose was elevated, but because the prose was precise. Not because the issues were "adult" issues, but because the issues were real. Reading his stuff never felt like homework, but it always felt like something in me had been awakened or quickened or confirmed or respected or illumined.

Like any good satirist, he never pulls punches, but he never punches down. His characters had bizarre names & spoke with a frankness that I longed for in my own life. His pacing & chapter length were precise—each chapter, each dialogue, each scene, each novel was exactly as long as it was interesting. If anything, there was a kind of abruptness to his chapters that had a power something like what I'd recognize later with poetic line breaks & line endings. He had surprises too—little asides, flash forwards, goofy sketches, enigmatic refrains ("And so it goes") that made you feel in on a joke and in on a wisdom.

I know he was once widely taught & read; I hope he remains so for a while. Oh, and these little pocket-sized editions of his books were always my favorite. (PS I loaned out Slaughterhouse Five, or it would be in the photo too.)

December 8, 2024 at 5:50 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 7/20

In 2013, the Dallas Theater Center put up two plays in rep: Lorraine Hansbury's A Raisin in the Sun and Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park, a kind of return to that setting and characters. Dallas theater goers know the power of Liz Mikel, who played Lena Younger. So many moments in the play come to mind when I think of her performance--Her slapping Walter, her reminding Beneatha that there's always something left to love, and the last moment.

In the script, after the entire Younger family has packed up all their belongings to leave the apartment, Lena returns to stage to retrieve a potted plant on the kitchen windowsill.

DTC's theater tech crew had a surprise: rather than having Lena exit through a door as expected, she walked with her plant as if to exit ... while the entire back wall of the stage parted to reveal the home of the family's dreams. All that tech theater magic for a single cathartic moment. I don't cry often at non-musical theater, but this time I did.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-raisin-in-the-sun-lorraine-hansberry/16339349

December 7, 2024 at 4:36 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Bought it at the National Theater Bookshop right after the show the summer of 1991. Not sure if it’s in print anymore 😱

Image of King Lear with the fool in the storm

December 7, 2024 at 3:58 AM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude for Mark Doty’s “A Display of Mackerel” & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 6/20

This was the poem that awakened my love of poetry as a living thing, as the genre of our lives. If you don’t know Doty’s work, I’d say that in philosophical terms, his gift is seeing / revealing the
universal in the particular.

Here he is reading it: https://youtu.be/83slEB_k_O4?feature=shared

Here’s a link to the collection: https://bookshop.org/p/books/fire-to-fire-new-and-selected-poems-mark-doty/7385416

A DISPLAY OF MACKEREL
They lie in parallel rows, on ice, head to tail, each a foot of luminosity
barred with black bands, which divide the scales' radiant sections
like seams of lead in a Tiffany window.
Iridescent, watery
prismatics: think abalone, the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soapbubble sphere,
think sun on gasoline.
Splendor, and splendor, and not a one in any way
distinguished from the other
—nothing about them of individuality. Instead
they're all exact expressions of the one soul, each a perfect fulfilment
of heaven's template, mackerel essence. As if, after a lifetime arriving
at this enameling, the jeweler's made uncountable examples, each as intricate
in its oily fabulation as the one before.
Suppose we could iridesce, like these, and lose ourselves entirely in the universe. of shimmer-would you want
to be yourself only, unduplicatable, doomed to be lost? They'd prefer,
plainly, to be flashing participants, multitudinous. Even now they seem to be bolting
forward, heedless of stasis.
They don't care they're dead and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably,
they didn't care that they were living: all, all for all,
the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms, in which no verb is singular,
or every one is. How happy they seem, even on ice, to be together, selfless, which is the price of gleaming.

December 6, 2024 at 3:35 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude for each & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 5/20

Like many folk around the pandemic, I've read my fair share of minimalist books, and I've watched a lot of YouTube reflections on the practices & payoffs of severing yourself from things. It's not easy for me. A huge part of my identity was formed around the content I consumed & curated, shared & gave. Music, books, movies, and now podcasts, were the main elements of my intellectual self--and of my material self. What is left when I sever ties or when I throw away these things? Abraham Joshua Heschel has an answer.

In The Sabbath (1951), Heschel offers a powerful argument for re-viewing this severing not as a loss but as a chance to rejuvenate. Each chapter is both scripturally rigorous and personally considerate. It's a book that hits you in the heart & in the head, that offers wide gateways into thinking about opening up what the sabbath provides, in Heschel's words, "the architecture of time". The week doesn't end with the sabbath; it culminates in the sabbath. Everything we do during the week is informed by, is nourished by, is made sacred in this much-needed, oft-misused time.

The Sabbath is not a lengthy book, but it's one that I needed to read quite slowly, so poetic & elegant is the prose. It's not a stuffy orthodox book, but it's one that shows the vitality & gift of a cultural, spiritual inheritance. Representative quotation: “[…] the sabbath is not an occasion for diversion or frivolity […], but an opportunity to mend our tattered lives, to collect rather than to dissipate time. Labor without dignity is the cause of misery; rest without spirit, the cause of depravity” (17-18). Heschel offers the reader gems / challenges like that three or four times a page. It's a dizzying & challenging work, one that guides the reader to interrogate their own values, their own choices, and the consequences of living so busily that we don't let menuha (tranquility, serenity, peace and repose) in.

https://shop.thejewishmuseum.org/the-sabbath

December 5, 2024 at 6:50 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude for each & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 4/20

The first time I needed a passport was around my 21st birthday, when I crossed an ocean for the first time the summer of 1991 to complete the last course I needed as undergrad. Six weeks at Brasenose College in Oxford, studying romantic poetry, and Shakespeare, with trips to the Lake District and the national theater all summer long. It was transformative, in part because of Ralph Fiennes.

He had not yet had his movie debut in Schindler‘s list. He was just another strikingly handsome stage actor. I saw him play Troilus in the Barbican Pit, a pretty conventional if entertaining role. (Where Simon Russell Beale stole the show as Thersistes.) But Fiennes' performance as Edmund the bastard in Lear is one I can conjure up at will even today.

His long hair was slicked back, and he was decked out in Armani. At one point in a speech to the audience (not quite a soliloquy, if you know what I mean), he explains that in order to gain sympathy & as part of an elaborate revenge plan, he will have to wound himself. Edmund pulls out a knife and draws blood. Now, I know that it's Fiennes pulling out a stage knife & drawing "blood", but that's not what it felt like in the crowd. With the entire audience, I gasped at Edmund's wound. He looked directly at us and said "I have seen drunkards do more than this for sport."

Neither I nor any of my friends had read the play at that point, so we were convinced it was an ad libbed line. It wasn't – – and it kinda was. Don't ever tell me the theater doesn't bring things to life. It does. He did. It always will, with the right script, the right actor, and a willing audience.

https://shakespeare.mit.edu/lear/full.html

December 4, 2024 at 5:16 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude for each & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 3/20

I cannot imagine a better gateway into Jenny Erpenbeck's work than the enigmatic powerful novel Visitation. I’ve read Holocaust memoirs before, usually centered on a single person, a single survivor. Visitation focuses on a postage-stamp of a world (a house in a lovely hilltop village overlooking a lake outside of Berlin) throughout the 20th century. The daily routines of the often-nameless people living & working there (the Writer, the Architect, and most importantly, the Gardener) is interrupted and informed by WWII, by news from the front, by local pogroms & bureaucratic consequences of state-sanctioned anti-Semitism. And then life & the property (& most of the characters we’ve met) go on. As she rarely names her characters and rarely includes dialogue, Erpenbeck makes the reader feel like a kind of helpless voyeur--genocides and garden-pruning, reclamations and losses of property taking on a kind of elemental geologic heft hinted at in the prologue. So powerful and so moving with a kind of dry craft & cultural reckoning

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780811218351/jenny-erpenbeck/visitation

December 3, 2024 at 5:18 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude for each & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 2/20

I know that it’s something of a cliche these days to name check Montaigne when talking about the possibilities of the personal essay, AND I know that discovering his writing / lens / approach was like discovering a continent, or a tool, or a fresh water well.

For those that haven’t read him, Montaigne is surprisingly modern, surprisingly timely & timeless. For those that teach writing, he offers a great model in discursive disarming thinking—writing as a means of thinking rather than as a record of a thing-having-been-thought.

Start with On Cannibals. Or on Repentance. Or on the Education of Children. Or any other

https://www.sup.org/books/theory-and-philosophy/complete-essays-montaigne

December 2, 2024 at 5:51 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Just narcissistic enough to get off on this Content Analysis: A delightful mix of conversational warmth and academic sharpness, Joel writes like a friendly professor who just threw a few puns into the syllabus :)

blueskyroast.com

December 1, 2024 at 6:35 PM

JoelRGarza

@joelrgarza.bsky.social

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.

My explanation / gratitude for each & url to purchase is in the alt text 🤠🫶🏽

#Books
#BookSky 💙📚
#BookChallenge
#20BookChallenge

Day 1/20

Front cover of Yasunari Kawabata palm of the hand stories, which I discovered through an epigram in a William T. Vollmann novel. Kabata focuses on three kinds of characters that he says see the world more clearly than anyone else: children, young women, and dying men. Each story is about two pages long, and will have you meditating on its meaning for days (or in my case, decades) later.

Start with Thank You or Umbrella.

https://www.hpb.com/palm-of-the-hand-stories/M-3669506-T.html?srsltid=AfmBOopWw2EEU1IZP4MaC9iGBkTB5_swsNc5ke1VE6hfGRmL-WHrqGeK

December 1, 2024 at 6:12 PM

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