What We're Reading in the OEL | February 2025
One of the strengths of the OEL team, we like to think, is that we come to our work from different experiences, perspectives, and fields of study. We’re also a group of people who read widely and explore ideas outside our own fields.
With that in mind, we thought it might be interesting to have a few of us share some of the things we’ve read lately. What you’ll find below are not our all-time favorite books, per se—we’ll do another installment on that sometime—or even works from our “home” fields of study. Rather, these are the things that are bouncing around our minds right now as we go about our days.
You’ll find below an eclectic mix. Feel free to ask any of us about any of these—or, better yet, read them for yourself and invite us to coffee (we’ll pay!), where we can ponder over ideas together.
Tammy Adair
My reading list is broad and long. I have so many books to read! I read in science and nature, in areas that grow my faith, and in challenging areas outside my main interests.
As a scientist, most of my reading takes place in the scientific literature. I spend time trying to keep up with new discoveries happening at an unbelievable pace, specifically those addressing the global challenge of antibiotic resistant organisms.
Here’s a review article that describes this area of need.
Biological research is attractive to those that see life as beautifully complex. We want to know how living things work. The simplest forms of life are so complicated. Trying to understand molecular and ecosystem processes and mechanisms can get tedious, and I try to balance reading (and reading assignments) with literature that points to how personal and world events interact with the progress of science.
For a good example, a recent account of the progress of phage therapy is The Good Virus, by Tom Ireland.
I also like to read in the area of biological systems. This is because I love learning how our bodies work and being in nature and observing the intricacies and connections of the plant and microbial world. From forest canopies to the microbial world of the soil, it is all fascinating. I like to read books about how systems work together, which may keep us healthy, or make us ill and how our environment contributes to this.
One author that has a lot to say about this is Daphne Miller in her book Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up.
Our campus ecosystem is also important to me. The trees on our campus are amazing, and extremely important! Studying trees is exciting and addictive! I am interested in helping our students recognize this through course work and by participating in the efforts of our sustainability office to have Baylor designated as a Tree Campus USA.
A book that I am reading now is by Douglas Tallamy, The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees.
Another good book about trees is The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession, by Amy Stewart.
I always have something challenging on my reading list and find most everything interesting! Last year I read Empire of the Summer Moon and became fascinated with the history of “Comancheria” and learning more about the indigenous peoples of North America. This year I am working on The Civil War by Shelby Foote and learning so much about this part of American history.
Anna Beaudry
After completing my graduate education in the fall, I had a lot of people asking me what I was going to do when I could read for fun again, when, in fact, I made a promise to myself at the start of graduate school to not let the journey ruin reading for me. I held to that promise, and I’ve been reading for fun throughout my last six years of grad education. I am enjoying, however, being able to read more widely and freely than I could during the exhaustion of a PhD.
My latest read that I’m telling everyone about is Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. I can never go back to who I was before reading this, and for that I’m grateful. Read at your own risk, though–it’s a book that might just make you drop out of school or quit your job. Next on my shelf, I’m eager to finish Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Anxiety by Britt Wray, the leading scholar at the intersection of climate crisis and mental health. After that is Peggy O’Donnell Heffington’s Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother. As someone who is child-free by choice and is a nerd, I’m excited to delve into the history of childfree women throughout the ages.
In the realm of literature, I have a collection of short stories that is calling to my mycelium obsession, titled Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan. I love eco-gothic/body-horror/eco-horror literature, so this promises to be right up my alley. Right now I’m re-reading The Pearl of Orr’s Island by Harriest Beecher Stowe and A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett in preparation for writing the final chapter of my book project, which I hope to be sending out to publishers this spring.
Finally–though I could go on endlessly, I love books!–I try to always have a book of poetry on my nightstand that I work and meditate through. Right now, it’s The Ordering of Love, a collection of poetry by Madeleine L’Engle (you may be more familiar with her fiction, as she wrote the Wrinkle in Time series). I’m convinced that poetry is prayer, and her poems help me pray, especially in these “irrational seasons” we find ourselves in daily.
Daniel Benyousky
I must admit that lately I’ve been slowly reading several things, at times taking time away from and then returning to several books. This has not always been my reading habit, but it is my current one. One of those books is Sextant by David Barrie. I love the ocean, and some of my scholarly work has been on maritime topics, so I often find myself reading something related to the ocean. This book simultaneously tells the tale of Barrie’s time sailing from the US to the UK in a small sailboat after college alongside a cultural history of the sextant, a navigational tool that revolutionized how we could get places and make maps of those places. I’ve also been slowly reading Dylan’s Vision of Sin by Christopher Ricks. This book looks at Bob Dylan’s lyrics through the lens of the seven virtues and seven vices. Ricks, a literary scholar (don’t be scared off by that), riffs on Dylan’s lyrics in ways more creative then most writers on Dylan, offering close readings of Dylan’s songs that are meant to both come to some understanding of the songs and that attempt to work on our emotions and inner worlds like music does. On plane rides, I have been listening to Trusting the Gold by Tara Brach. Brach is a therapist and leader in the mindfulness world, and this book discusses ways to pursue radical self-compassion.
I’m cheating a bit here, but I’m also listing several books that I really liked over the last few years. I listened to Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan. This is my favorite book I’ve read in a while. The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize, the memoir shares Finnegan’s lifelong love of surfing, beginning as he grew up in Los Angeles and Hawaii, and continuing as he traveled the world in search of the next wave. I don’t surf, but as I have noted I love the ocean, and Finnegan’s reading of the book is calmly meditative, like the waves of the ocean. His prose style is beautiful—he is a staff writer for the New Yorker—and he connects the craft of writing with the craft of surfing, which I love. And he recounts how he lived in several different countries because of his love of surfing, where he encountered many significant world events like the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa.
I also really liked Sidwalking by David Ulin. It is a book about how Ulin, a Los Angeles Times writer and avid walker, came to understand and love Los Angeles after moving from New York City through walking the streets of the city. Is This Anything? by Jerry Seinfeld is a collection of all the jokes he’s ever told. That’s it. It is funny. And I love baseball, so I really liked Baseball in the Garden of Eden by John Thorn. There have been many origin stories told about baseball over the years, mostly for one self-interested reason or another. Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, tells a more complicated origin story.
Mona Choucair
My Medicine, Literature, and Public Health students and I are reading When Breath Becomes Air, by the late Dr. Paul Kalanathi. This is a profoundly moving memoir that transcends the boundaries of a typical autobiography. This book is a poignant exploration of life, death, and the human condition, written with a surgeon's precision and a poet's grace.
Dr. Kalanithi's journey from a neurosurgeon to a patient diagnosed with terminal lung cancer is both heart-wrenching and inspiring. My students and I were in awe of his reflections on his career, his illness, and his quest to find meaning in the face of mortality—all of which are deeply personal and universally relatable. The narrative is beautifully crafted, with each page offering profound insights into the fragility and resilience of life.
What sets this memoir apart is Dr. Kalanithi's ability to articulate the complexities of the human experience with such clarity and empathy. Many of my students are on the Pre-Health track and have found this book to be so profound. His writing is not only intellectually stimulating but also emotionally resonant, leaving readers with a renewed appreciation for the preciousness of life.
"When Breath Becomes Air" is more than just a memoir; it is a testament to the enduring human spirit and a reminder of the importance of living fully, even in the face of uncertainty. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the deeper questions of existence and the true meaning of life.
I am also enjoying Mary Oliver’s Blue Pastures, which is joyful, prophetic, and heartbreaking.
Rebecca Flavin
If you ever watched the show Gilmore Girls, you’ll understand this reference: like Rory Gilmore, I always have an emergency book (or two or three) in my bag in case I have time to read for pleasure. Usually, this includes a mix of fiction, historical fiction, and non-fiction and a combination of physical books and e-reader versions on my tablet or phone. Right now, I am in the middle of four different books: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (which I had to put down last week and start a new book because it was giving me nightmares), Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (just started this when I needed a break from Prophet Song), A Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah Maas (a fantasy novel that is honestly not I genre I typically gravitate toward), and Grant by Ron Chernow (which, in full disclosure, I have been trying to finish for over year because I can only read so much about the Civil War before I need something lighter). Last week I finished one of my new favorite books, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. The best book I read in 2024 was Never Whistle at Night: A Dark Fiction Anthology. This collection of short stories by North American Indigenous authors was a page turner that I devoured in nearly one sitting on a long flight, and I loved it, despite it being a genre I seldom read.
Andy Hogue
My reading, always, is nothing if not eclectic. I tell folks that my favorite genre is poets writing prose, so when the master of that genre, Christian Wiman, released Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair last year, I devoured it as quickly as I could. I come back to it at least monthly because it’s easy to be seduced by despair these days, and Wiman is good medicine. I pair that often with Joy: 100 Poems, a poetry collection also edited by Wiman that has become my very favorite. Li-Young Lee’s “From Blossoms,” Craig Arnold’s “Meditation on a Grapefruit,” and Lucille Clifton’s “hag riding,” which appear in the volume, offer lines that rattle around my brain almost daily, making me wish I were better at memorizing poems. I’ll work on that. (Ps. Good news: Wiman will be at Baylor in March for the Beall Poetry Festival. You should go hear him!)
Lest you think my reading is all overly serious, I read plenty for fun. I love golf, and I actually enjoy reading about it almost as much as I enjoy playing it. A lot like surfing, golf can attract mystics, of which I am one, so I’ve been reading a lot of meditations on the game in the last few months. John Updike’s Golf Dreams was a delight, as was Michael Bamberger’s To the Linksland, because it transported me to dear, beloved Scotland.
In the category of longform journalism and feature writing, I grieved over “The Anti-Social Century” and “The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows” from this month’s Atlantic, then remedied that by laughing hysterically at Caity Weaver’s “How My Trip to Quit Sugar Became a Journey Into Hell” in the New York Times Magazine.
Molly Simpson
I love people and prioritize face time with others to a fault, and thus most of my reading is concentrated in the slower summer months. During the academic semesters, my reading list includes my inbox, texts for courses such as Laila Lalami’s Conditional Citizens, a bit of news, and a daily psalm from The Bible. When I’ve caught up on those other sources and have some time, I read another chapter in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. As a parent of teenagers and educator of college students, I care deeply about the ways that our media habits are forming us. I appreciate Haidt’s clear and practical recommendations on reforming our habits–salient counsel for any generation.