Reading Roll Call – March 16, 2020 – COVID-19 Stack

Reading Roll Call is a classroom activity I conduct with my students at the beginning of every week to see what they are independently reading. I always share the title of a book that I am reading to model participation and showcase the lifelong commitment to reading that I’ve made.

The Reading Roll Call idea stems from Donalyn Miller‘s book Reading in the Wild. I have adapted the activity and idea into blog form to track my reading progress on a weekly basis. Happy Reading!

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I’ve come across a lot of extra time on my hands after the governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer ordered all K-12 schools to be closed until at least April 6, 2020 due to outbreak of COVID-19. The district I work in is very conscious of equity, so, at the time of writing this blog post, we have been told not to deliver curriculum.

Over the weekend, I unloaded all of the boxes of books that were moved into our new house late last fall. I then organized the books into stacks based on time period, subject matter, or genre. The stack books pictured below resonated with me as the United States and the world navigate with COVID-19.

The 33 books in this stack find themselves here for multiple reasons. Check out the breakdown below and order I’m reading them. Unread books will have an * next to it.

The Spread of Germs

• The Andromeda Strain* – Michael Crichton
• Killer Germs: Microbes and Diseases That Threaten Humanity* – Barry E. Zimmerman and David J. Zimmerman

Science Fiction Situations

• Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
• World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War* – Max Brooks
• The Arrival* – Ted Chiang
• Dark Matter* – Blake Crouch
• The Circle* – Dave Eggers
• American War* – Omar El Akkad
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
• Dear Cyborgs* – Eugene Lim
• 1984* – George Orwell
• The Invisible Man* – H.G. Wells
• The Time Machine* – H.G. Wells
• The War of the Worlds* – H.G. Wells

Real World Catastrophes

• The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy* – Anna Clark
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies* – Jared Diamond
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed* – Jared Diamond
• Zeitoun – Dave Eggers
• Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt* – Chris Hedges
• American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land* – Monica Hesse
• Three Famines: Starvation and Politics* – Thomas Keneally
• The Age of Terror: America and the World After September 11* – Strobe Talbott

Food Supply

• Eating Animals* – Jonathan Safran Foer
• The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields, and the Dinner Table* – Tracie McMillan
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals* – Michael Pollan
• It Must’ve Been Something I Ate* – Jeffrey Steingarten

National and Global Implications

• Between the Lines: A View Inside American Politics, People, and Culture* – Jonathan Alter
• The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart* – Bill Bishop
• Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism* – Thomas L. Friedman
• The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century* – Thomas L. Friedman
• The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance*- Ben Sasse

Words of Wisdom in the Face of Adversity

• The Last Lecture – Randy Pausch

I am looking forward to getting started and making connections between the books and the reality we are living through with COVID-19.

Would you add any books to this stack? Let me know!

Happy Reading!