Summer Reading Archive 2009

“When I’m not near the book I love, I love the book I’m near.”

—Finian’s Rainbow

“Two books I recommend, the novel because I just finished it last night, the poems because I can never finish reading them, “a few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet—”

— Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

This year's summer reading list has been brought to you by the Stonehill College English Department and writers the world over. To review recommendations from years past, please visit the archive.

Contemporary Fiction

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Recommended by: Prof. Andrea Opitz

The setting of the novel -- post-apocalyptic America -- might not scream "summer reading" but after the first 40 or so pages the story becomes so engrossing that one hardly notices what the weather is like outside.

The novel tells the story of a father and son journey through a world that is dark, sometimes brutal, and often equally despairing and hopeful. As Janet Maslin writes in her New York Times review, the novel "offers nothing in the way of escape or comfort. But its fearless wisdom is more indelible than reassurance could ever be."

St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

Recommended by Prof. Sarah Gracombe

In this impressive debut collection of short stories, Karen Russell creates a series of extremely weird yet strangely plausible worlds. There is a camp for kids with abnormal sleep disorders, an island off Florida where two boys swim with ghost fish, and Swamplandia, an abandoned "Gator Theme Park."

As this list suggests, Russell has also created her own distinctive style: a magical realism located in both a recognizable, contemporary America and an imaginary space unburdened by borders and names. Like Swamplandia's entrancing pools, it is easy to get sucked into these distinctive stories and very hard to leave them behind.

Film

Recommended by Prof. Robert Goulet

After you've seen Star Trek several times, you might view the following films -- all available on DVD -- to provide a (literal) change of pace:

Reprise (2007)

Joachim Trier's Reprise, an imaginative, time-shifting treatment of the achievements and disappointments of young writers in contemporary Norway;

Poison Friends (Les amitiés maléfiques; 2007)

Emmanuel Bourdieu's Poison Friends, ripe material for ideological analysis in its story of the influence a "cool" university student has on the aspirations of his classmates;

Outsourced (2008)

John Jeffcoat's Outsourced, a satiric treatment of globalization that should dampen any fervid fantasies about life in the contemporary business world;

In Bruges (2008)

Martin McDonagh's In Bruges, a gangster plot serving as a vehicle for a bright, nasty textbook on how to write witty, economical dialogue for film.