Top Ten Books on my Summer TBR List: The Grown-up Edition

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and Bookish.

I mostly read children’s, middle-grade, and YA, but this summer I have been following my whimsy with reading and finding myself drawn to books for grown-ups and especially nonfiction books for grown-ups. Here are ten nonfiction books for grown-ups I’m really looking forward to reading this summer.

Bluets has been sitting on my shelf for awhile, but I plan to start my reading of Maggie Nelson’s oeuvre with her new book, The Argonauts, after reading a terrific interview with her in Poets & Writers magazine.

One of my colleagues, Steve Coughlin, just published his first collection of poetry, Another City. I’ve felt just a little bit devastated by the handful of Coughlin’s poems I’ve read so far: he writes so well about hard experiences. Plus, It’s kind of cool that the poet is in the office just down the hall from me.

Lynsey Addario is an award-winning war photographer whose new memoir focuses on the risks and bravery necessary in her career. It sounds like this book balances exciting stories about her career with reflections on feminism and motherhood.

Heidi Julavits’s The Folded Clock sounds like the perfect book for me–written in diary format, focused on everyday life, experiences, objects, feelings, with an extra emphasis on writing, art, and motherhood.

Sarah Mancuso is another writer I’ve been hearing about a lot but have never read. Ongoingness is a book that about a diary she’s kept for 25 years in which she has tried to capture everything about her everyday life in writing. Plus those favorite themes of mine, art and motherhood.

I read Abigail Thomas’s memoir, A Three Dog Life, about the aftermath of her husband’s traumatic brain injury years ago and loved her writing. I just finished her new book, What Comes Next and How to Like It, which has made me want to reread her earlier memoirs.

No educator has had more influence on my teaching and learning over the past three years than Will Richardson. I’m really excited about his new book, From Master Teacher to Master Learner.

I’m teaching a new course in creativity this fall and I have lots of reading to do to prepare. I’m most looking forward to Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit.

I’ll also be teaching Secondary Methods in the fall, and I really challenge my students to imagine something better for the secondary English classroom. I’m hoping Luke Reynolds’s Imagine It Better will inspire our thinking about what’s possible in school.

Kate Messner provides some amazing free writing professional development for teachers through her Teachers Write summer camp. Before that gets started in July, I hope to read 59 Reasons to Write, which should include lots of inspiration to get me writing.