ENGLISH DEPARTMENT Summer Reading Recommendations
The English department is happy to share our reading recommendations for this summer. You’ll notice that Percival Everett’s book 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel James is mentioned several times. The English department will be leading a discussion of this book in the fall–date, time, and location to be announced. Please add the book to your summer reading list and join us for that event in the fall!
SAMIRA ABDUR-RAHMAN
A Book I Read: I enjoyed reading and teaching Randa Jarrar’s short story collection Him, Me, Muhammad Ali in my Spring Lit 101: Cultures and Canons course. Whether taking on the perspective of a half-woman, half-Transjordanian Ibex navigating the contemporary dating scene or a bird facing interrogation in a black site, Jarrar’s raucous and provocative humour blends perfectly with meditations on faith, motherhood, desire and home.
A Book I Plan to Read: I plan to read Tao Leigh Goffe’s Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis which goes beyond myths of the Caribbean to look at how slavery, indentured servitude and the forced labor of Chinese and enslaved Black people impacted the ecologies of the islands. Using her own family history and archival research, Goffe centers the Caribbean as a framework for understanding the origins of racism and climate catastrophe.
DAVID BLAKE
A book I read this year: I’m recommending two books this year, both of which meditate on the nature of borders and migration. Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border is a lyrically written memoir about the author’s disillusionment as a Border Patrol officer working on the US-Mexican border. Cantú’s appreciation of the landscape, history, and people of the region was both haunting and revelatory. Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Go, Went, Gone tells the story of a retired Classics professor who finds himself drawn to the plight of African refugees seeking asylum in Berlin. In truly beautiful prose (translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky), the novel considers what it means to be from the abundant West in a time of global crisis and need. What makes this question especially interesting is that the protagonist (like Erpenbeck) grew up in East Germany and has difficulty reconciling the values of his youth with the capitalist world in which he currently lives. Go, Went, Gone is the most astonishing novel I have read in several years.
A Book I Plan To Read This Summer: Alain Mabanckou has been widely celebrated for his novels about Congo, where he grew up in the 1970s. (In addition to being hailed by Salman Rushdie and Uzodinma Iweala, his work has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.) The Death of Comrade President recounts the murder of Comrade President Marien Ngouabi from the perspective of an awkward teenage boy. This plot line sounds very serious, but I have been told the novel is hilariously funny. I am eager to see how Mabanckou pulls this off.
JO CARNEY
Book I read this past year: Trust by Hernan Diaz is one of the most intriguing novels I’ve read in a long time; it is set in 1920s New York and centers on a Wall Street tycoon but the focus on
greed, economic inequality, and utter amorality (sadly) echo today. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2023. Highly recommend.
Books I plan to read:
I plan to re-read Percival Everett’s remarkable novel James and am eager to talk about it with the campus community in the fall. With or without a rereading of Huck Finn, it is a wonderful example of talking back to and with the canon.
I loved Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (part thriller, part eco-critique), so I am eager to read her latest novel, The Empusium, a folk horror story set in a health resort/sanitarium, described by one reviewer as “page-turning, profoundly stirring, and richly Gothic.”
And finally, for yet one more spin on dystopian literature, Ali Smith’s Gliff, a postmodern riff on Brave New World, with two courageous children and a horse at the center. Perhaps there is hope.
ANDREW ERKKILA
If you’re into detective fiction, Five Decembers, by James Kestrel is my go-to recommendation. It won the 2022 Edgar Award for best novel. It concerns Detective Joe McGrady, who is trying to solve a missing persons case in Hawaii. The case takes him to Japan, and as the detective begins to unravel the case, Pearl Harbor happens. What results is an amazing confluence between detective and historical fiction as McGrady not only tries to survive the war, but solve the case.
I’m prepping a new FYS for the fall, “World on Fire,” so this summer I’m mostly reading books in the “critical environment studies” genre: Gregory L. Simon’s Flame and Fortune in the American West, and Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear.
I’m also rereading my wife, Catherine Boland Erkkila’s new book, Spaces of Immigration: American Ports, Railways, and Settlements (University of Pittsburgh Press), which examines American immigration at the turn-of-the-century through a cultural landscape approach–delving into architectural history, transport, politics, xenophobia, public and private wheeling and dealing, and best of all, the main character is Robert Louis Stevenson.
JEAN GRAHAM
Recommendation: Plastic, by Scott Guild. In this alternate world, not only things but also people are made of plastic, with fragile bodies and superficial lives. The novel depicts tensions between the plastic people, who are politically liberal, and the conservatives, whose bodies are waffles. Add in some ecoterrorists, and the novel deals with serious issues, but in a lighthearted and surrealistic manner.
Plan to read this summer: The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler. In a near-future thriller, a marine biologist studies a species of octopus that may have developed its own culture. This novel won the Locus Award for Best First [Speculative Fiction] Novel, but more importantly, it was highly recommended by a student in my speculative fiction course.
IRA HALPERN
A book I read this year: An illuminating book I read this year is Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives (2022) by Linda Villarosa, which examines longstanding and ongoing racial health disparities in the U.S. through the lens of public health policies, medical education, and patients’ experiences. Reading selections from it proved to be productive with students in my 2024 First Year Seminar, “Cultural Perspectives on Illness, Disability, and Medicine,” an interdisciplinary course about health justice in the United States from the Revolutionary Era to the present day.
A book I plan to read this summer: I have read part of Heather Clark’s very engaging Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2020), but this summer I hope to read the whole thing. As a teacher and scholar of the health humanities, I’m always fascinated by writers’ encounters with health care. Clark pushes against a historical tendency to pathologize Plath, and deals in part with Plath’s encounters with the psychiatric establishment. I anticipate that Red Comet will continue to challenge me to think creatively about the culturally constituted aspects of health, including mental health, that resist strictly clinical modes of understanding. Generally speaking, I really enjoy biographies, including biographies about authors that reveal how inseparable life and art can be.
LINCOLN KONKLE
A book I read last year is a must-read for fans of my favorite sitcom of all time: The Big Bang Theory (a series about geeks, made for geeks, although surprisingly it became a mainstream hit. Maybe the Bible misquoted Jesus: Should have been “the geek shall inherit the earth”). The Big Hang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series by Jessica Radloff with a foreword by Chuck Lorre (co-creator of the series and the best writer of comic dialogue in network television).
What I will read this summer: three more scholarly books about the films of Hayao Miyazaki (writer/director of Studio Ghibli films such as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke) to enhance my teaching of my FYS on Miyazaki’s films. I will also read the next installment of the Star Wars: Legacy of the Force series, Bloodlines. If I have time, I hope to also read Vector Prime, the first volume in The New Jedi Order series because–get this–the guy who inspected our new AC unit is a Star Wars fan and when I told him I teach a course on Star Wars he asked me if I had ever read that novel; he highly recommended it. Okay, one literary novel is on my nightstand: James by Perceval Elliott. It’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, Huck’s escaped slave companion.
CHRISTINA MAFFA-JOHNSON
A book I have read this year: I read Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange which tells the story of several generations of the family that also features in Orange’s other novel There, There. There is a lot of sadness in this book, and it is emotionally hard to read at points. But there is also hope and it is beautifully written. I also finally read the Leigh Bardugo duology Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom after having them recommended to me several times. Both were fun to read and hard to put down. I would recommend them as summer reads if you enjoy YA fantasy.
A book I plan to read this summer: I’ve been inspired by a book Emily Meixner loaned me and am going to read Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us. I’m also looking forward to reading Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane which will be released in a couple of weeks. I’ve enjoyed his other writing and so have high expectations. I also have a large body of water connected to my backyard, so I’m curious as to how my perception of it will change after reading the book.
MINDI MCMANN
A book I read this year: So sometime in mid-2024, I entered what I jokingly called my “Soviet era.” While this culminated in starting (but not yet finishing) The Americans, which played more on my nostalgia for a time I was too young to really remember, I also read Hamid Ismailov’s The Underground is set in Moscow during the final years of the Soviet Union. The novel follows Mbobo, the son of a troubled Siberian woman and an Black athlete who participated in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Cruelly nicknamed “Pushkin,” Mbobo navigates the city’s underground spaces—abandoned tunnels and metro stations. The book is a reminder that the USSR was an imperial project. I also read Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún’s Èṣù at the Library a poetry collection that traces a series of encounters with the Yoruba god Èṣù (the deity of crossroads) as a kind of travelogue across time and space to consider the consequences of imperialism and language.
This summer, I’ll be reading James in preparation for the English Department’s fall event on Percival Everett’s reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a book I haven’t read in decades); Chimamanda Ngoni Adichie’s new book Dream Count; and continuing my Soviet odyssey with Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow (though Gospodinov is technically Bulgarian).
EMILY MEIXNER
A book I read this year: Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures. An action packed adventure (to save the world), courageous child characters, a deep abiding friendship, stunning sacrifice. I wasn’t sure as I started this book if I liked it or not, and I wasn’t sure as I continued to read (I wish each chapter had included a small map of where the characters had been and were going), but, wow…this one packed an emotional wallop. It was exactly the kind of the middle grade book I love best: a story that hits you in the heart as the characters navigate hard choices, grief, joy, and hope all at the same time. And the writing. So much to talk about.
A (few) books I plan to read this summer: I’m not typically drawn to nonfiction, but that’s what’s calling me at the moment. First on the list is John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis. I’ve read most of Green’s work and haven’t been disappointed yet. I’m also intrigued by the weaving together of medical, scientific, and social histories, particularly when they’re tied to legacies of inequity and injustice. I can’t imagine I’m going to be happy after reading this book, but it feels necessary. I also need to finish reading the essays in Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy. In these essays, Gay explores fourteen “incitements”: Joy [and Sorrow], Death, the Garden, Time, Skateboarding, Laughter, Losing Your Phone, The Orchard, Pickup Basketball, The [Music] Cover, School, Dancing, Falling Apart, and Gratitude. Perhaps I’ll read these two books together, alternating between chapters and essays to stay balanced. And, finally, I’ll be reading John Warner’s More Than Words: How to Talk about Writing in the Age of AI because, well, AI.
JODI MONSTER
Novels I have recently read include James by Percival Everett, Outline by Rachel Cusk, Fault Lines by Emily Itani and Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. Four very different stories, each wonderful in its own way.
This summer I plan to read The Overstory by Richard Powers. Really looking forward to diving into this one!
CATIE ROSEMURGY
A book I read this year: I made a rule in January: no reading news after dinner. Alas, I did not often follow my own rule. But I did manage, at least, to keep myself from reading news right before bed, and I accomplished this by stacking beautiful collections of haiku poetry on my nightstand. I found reading the short, blossom-like poems utterly transporting. If you need some timeless beauty and profundity in your life, my favorite collection is Bashō: The Complete Haiku of Matsuo Bashō (trans. Andrew Fitzsimons.) You can read this book a hundred times and it will be a revelation when you read it for the one hundred and first.
A book I plan to read this summer: During a quiet moment, I picked up a book at a friend’s house and started reading the opening pages. I had a hard time putting the book down when my host came back into the room. The opening pages of The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave offer everything I want from a novel–expert prose, a strong sense of place and time, and an immediate sense of portent. Here’s a little summary from Kirkus Reviews: “British poet and playwright Hargrave plucks a piece of 400-year-old legal history—a European king’s prosecution of 91 people for witchcraft—and gives it a feminist spin. The story opens in 1617 in the Arctic Circle, with a historic, strangely sudden storm off the island of Vardø…”
FELICIA JEAN STEELE
Books I read last year: Non-fiction: I read two really powerful pieces this year, one a memoir and the other a history: Patric Gagne’s, Sociopath: A Memoir, thoughtfully describes her experience in dealing with her own behavioral and emotional differences and the interpersonal fall-out from having the diagnosis “Sociopath.” The history Everyone Who is Gone is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer has helped me understand some of the political context around deportation and protected status at this very moment. For fiction, I recommend the whole Between Earth and Sky series by Rebecca Roanhorse, but I read Mirrored Heavens in January. For anyone who might be interested in Native American literature, or speculative fiction, this series is not to be missed. I also recommend Shark Heart by Emily Habeck, an incredibly compelling allegorical novel with absolutely magnificent style.
Books I plan to read this summer: I am highly skeptical of AI triumphalism, so I have two books on my “to read” list for this summer: Arvind Narayana and Sayash Kapoor’s new book from Princeton University Press AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference and Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future we Want, due out May 13, 2025, from Harper. I also plan to finish my dear friend Michael Erard’s book Bye Bye, I Love You: The Story of our First and Last Words, which came out from MIT press earlier this year. I began it and found myself very emotional as I thought about the people I’ve lost in the last few years. For fiction, I’m eagerly awaiting Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s latest foray into a new genre: The Bewitching. I love all of her books.
GLENN STEINBERG
Books that I plan to read include John Bright’s A History of Israel (4th edition) and Jared Rosenbaum’s Wild Plant Culture: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities. Bright’s book is timely but not in the way that you think. It’s not about modern-day Israel but about Biblical Israel. As such, it provides important context for any reading of the Hebrew Scriptures — in a time when uncontextualized readings of the Bible have become political grist for far too many American Christians. Rosenbaum’s book is about two relatively new movements in sustainable gardening — rewilding and permaculture. Another book that I plan to read is Fritz Breithaupt’s The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell, which is not a book about neuroscience but about the scientific evidence for how and why humans tell stories.