What are you reading?

For years, we’ve shared noteworthy books with our readers. Now, it’s your turn! New or old, fiction or nonfiction — tell us the name of a book (or a few) that you’ve recently enjoyed, why you chose it and what makes the book memorable to you.

Send your suggestions to WisconsinWeek. We’ll print several submissions in upcoming issues of Wisconsin Week.

“Room”

by Emma Donoghue

This book, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, starts out with a mom and her 5-year-old boy escaping from the room in which they’d been held captive for the boy’s entire life. The rest of the book chronicles their adjustment to the outside world: being in the news, meeting family who didn’t know they were alive.

I’m intrigued by stories of people like Elizabeth Smart or the families on the YFZ compound, people re-entering the world from an unfamiliar place. It’s kind of got that Stockholm Syndrome feeling.

The story is written from the point of view of the five-year-old boy. Donoghue does a great job capturing how he talks and sees the world, including the way he begins to realize that the things he has seen on TV actually happened. I was worried that I wouldn’t connect with the style or vocabulary, but I found it easy to follow.

—Submitted by Kendra Gurnee
Academic adviser, College of Letters & Science

“Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work”

by Matthew B. Crawford

This book began as an essay in The New Atlantis, which Crawford then expanded into book form.

The title says it all, but it goes deep. The book reads like a dissertation about the trades; it’s very compelling. It garners a respect for working with the hands and notes that intellectualism isn’t limited to academia: It’s out there if you look for it.

The New York Times says: “Crawford has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and was a postdoctoral fellow on the school’s Committee on Social Thought. Mr. Crawford is an intellectual who can probably take you in a bar fight.”

—Submitted by Michael Wood
Humanities Building Classroom Media Support, Space Management

“Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830-1930”

by Jerrold Seigel

This entertaining book was originally published in 1986 by Johns Hopkins University Press and reissued several years ago.

It’s a great introduction to a very busy time in the history of Paris. It contains many brief biographies of artists and journalists and politicians — people such as poet Arthur Rimbaud, novelist and playwright Emile Zola, and dramatist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau — tied together with relevant sociological and political information. 

—Submitted by Paul Rowe
Professor of voice, School of Music