My work these days has primarily involved helping others on their own projects: supporting books, essays, and all sorts of public-facing things related to the excellent research and creative work happening at WashU.
But I've managed to write a few book reviews in the meantime. A review of John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed, for The Common Reader; a review of Rebecca McCarthy's Norman Maclean: A Life of Letters and Rivers, and a review of Steve Ramirez's Casting Homeward, both for The FlyFish Journal. I also have a review of Michelle Currie Navakas's Coral Lives coming out soon in the journal Novel.
I have probably written more than 50 book reviews now. I was thinking of collecting them all together in a book, as a sort of archive of my reading and reviewing life over the past 20 years. I think book reviews (and book review essays) are an under-appreciated genre. They are a chance to try out ideas, experiment with essay forms, and engage with other writers. It might be interesting to see what over two decades of book reviews look like, constellated. This often happens in single-author essay collections, inadvertently. But what about a book that takes this on deliberately, and begins with a discussion of this mode of writing? An idea I'll continue to incubate...
