Summer Reading Archive 2008
To view archived recommendations, please select a genre from the list below:
Contemporary Fiction
Away, by Amy Bloom
Provost Conboy says:
"This novel is as finely wrought a piece of contemporary fiction as I've read in a long time. Lillian Leyb, fleeing a Russian pogrom that destroys her entire family, seeks to reinvent herself in 1920s New York City.
The first part of the novel meticulously details her Lower East Side world and a cast of vivid characters with whom Lillian interacts. The last half of the book, however, turns picaresque. When Lillian hears that her daughter survived the pogrom and is living in Siberia, she sets out to reunite with her child.
The journey is gripping and unflinching in its gritty particulars. The novel will surprise you, both with its elegant language and with its unsentimental conclusion."
The Abstinence Teacher, by Tom Perotta
Provost Conboy says:
"Definitely more of a 'beach read,' Perrotta's most recent novel takes aim at a suburban community where the culture wars have become personal to Ruth Ramsey, a High School Sex Education teacher who finds herself replaced by an 'abstinence teacher.'
Ruth chooses to see this as all about the influence of a local evangelical church. But she ultimately has to ask herself more complex questions when her daughters reject what she has given (or chosen not to give) them in the way of a religious grounding and when she looks honestly at her own sex and love life.
By times humorous and poignantly sad, this novel does not offer pat answers to the questions it raises. If you like it--check out Perrotta's earlier work--especially The Wishbones and Bad Haircut."
Falling Man, by Don DeLillo
Recommended by Prof. Green
Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, writes, "Today 9/11 carries so many burdens - of interpretation, of sentimentality, of politics, of war - that sometimes it's hard to find the rubble of the actual event beneath the layers of edifice we've built on top of it. (Or built on top of all of it except ground zero.)
In his new novel, Don DeLillo shoves us back into the day itself in his first sentence: 'It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.' He resurrects that world as it was, bottling the mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion that seem so distant now."
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz
Recommended by Prof. Green
Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times says: "[The novel is] a wondrous, not-so-brief first novel that is so original it can only be described as Mario Vargas Llosa meets "Star Trek" meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West. It is funny, street-smart and keenly observed, and it unfolds from a comic portrait of a second-generation Dominican geek into a harrowing meditation on public and private history and the burdens of familial history."
Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth
Recommended by Prof. Green
Michiko Kakutani, in her review in The New York Times, writes, "Mr. Roth has created a melancholy, if occasionally funny, meditation on aging, mortality, loneliness and the losses that come with the passage of time."
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
Prof. Scales says:
Narrated by a man who was once a girl, this novel about a hermaphrodite is part Greek epic, part myth of American immigration, part coming-of-age story. An Oprah's Book Club selection, a Pulitzer winner, and my favorite book of 2003."
Kingdom of Shadows, by Alan Furst
Prof. Peek says:
"I'm in thrall to Alan Furst who writes elegant and involving novels about European spies at the dawn of World War II.
I especially love Kingdom of Shadows, which has the reader traveling back and forth between Paris, Brussels, and the Carpathian mountains, where all hell is breaking loose in the winter of 1938.
The Janissary Tree, by Jason Goodwin
Prof. Gracombe says:
"This mystery takes readers into the fascinating world of 1830s Istanbul, when the Ottoman Empire was threatening to crack under pressures both domestic and international. We follow Yashim, a polyglot palace detective who can slip in and out of the city's many subcultures because he is also a eunuch, which renders him trustworthy (or at least invisible). This is escapist fiction that comes with a bonus: all you ever wanted to know about Turkish architecture, cooking, and castration."
Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald
Prof. Gracombe says:
"Austerlitz is one of the three best contemporary novels I've read in the past ten years. Sebald confronts the Holocaust from an indirect angle, exploring the damage done even to those who don't know they were involved.
His distinctive style-with its distant, mysterious narrator whose story is interspersed with photographs and images-starts off as a memoir of a quirky childhood in Wales but slowly builds to one of the most moving, melancholy examinations of World War II. Austerlitz depicts the trauma of forgetting in a way you, at least, won't be able to erase from your memory."
The Piano Teacher, by Elfriede Jelinek
Prof. Duncan says:
"I've been reading Jelinek (the Austrian writer and Nobel Laureate 2004) for decades and recommend in particular The Piano Teacher-a compelling account of a neurotic mother/daughter relationship, sexual repression, and obsession-not for the faint at heart. The novel was also made into a film in 2001 with Isabelle Huppert, directed by Michael Haneke.
A couple of other titles more than worth a look are Women as Lovers and Greed. A fascinating novel on Austria as land of death is Die Kinder der Toten (I'm not sure there is an English translation available…roughly translated it's something like Children of the Dead)."
The New Life, by Orhan Pamuk
Prof. Duncan says:
"I recommend anything by the Turkish writer and 2006 Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. My favorite is The New Life-a "road novel" Pamuk-style. Also wonderful are The Black Book and My Name is Red, a sophisticated sixteenth-century murder mystery."
The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor
Prof. Estrin says:
"Trevor takes a familiar plot, that of the literary lost child, and makes something totally new and yet imaginably plausible out of it, so this is a familiar story of missed connections and implausible forgiveness, of coming too early and too late, of perfectly understandable assumptions and remarkable reconciliations. The reader knows everything and yet not quite enough."
Classics
Middlemarch, by George Eliot
Prof. Gracombe says:
"One of the defining novels of the nineteenth-century, Middlemarch explores with a critical but sympathetic eye the life of a small town (Middlemarch). Infiltrated by outsiders, expanded by railroads, undermined by gossip, Middlemarch is a microcosm of England itself.
Eliot knits together in what she called her "web" a variety of characters and offers a rare look at their intellectual as well as romantic ambitions. In particular, her protagonist, Dorothea, must consider whether there really is no place like home. Yes, it's long. Yes, it's worth it."
Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner
Prof. Scales says:
"A black man is arrested for murder; a white teenager goes to dig up the body and prove his innocence. This lesser-known Faulkner novel is a stream-of- consciousness Mississippi murder mystery--a bit more accessible than his other novels, but an equally intricate social and cultural portrait."
Graham Greene's The Quiet American
Prof. Piggford says:
"In Greene's The Quiet American (1955) the French Indochina of the 1950s is well on its way to becoming the Vietnam familiar to us from the conflict of the 1960s. The French and British are ineffectual and incompetent, Vietnamese communists and warlords vie for power, and the Americans blow things up. In the 1958 film version, Greene's anti-Americanism becomes pro-American propaganda; the 2002 adaptation restores Greene's original ending and explicitly connects the narrative to the Vietnam War."
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf
Prof. Piggford says:
"Woolf's Orlando (1928) is the fictional and satirical 'biography' of a man born in the Elizabethan era who lives into the twentieth century. As British ambassador in the East, Orlando abruptly and inexplicably becomes a she and must cope with the consequences of this change. Sally Potter's 1992 film of the book, starring Tilda Swinton, riffs on the novel's cross-dressing and appends a postmodern coda."
The Sons, by Franz Kafka
Recommended by Prof. Green
From the back cover of the Schocken Kafka Library edition: " 'I have only one request,' Kafka wrote to his publisher Kurt Wolff in 1913. "'The Stoker,' 'The Metamorphosis,' and 'The Judgment' belong together, both inwardly and outwardly. There is an obvious connection among the three, and, even more important, a secret one, for which reason I would be reluctant to forego the chance of having them published together in a book, which might be called The Sons."
Seventy-five years later, Kafka's request is-granted, in a volume including these three classic stories of filial revolt as well as his own poignant "Letter to His Father," another "son story" located between fiction and autobiography. A devastating indictment of the modern family, The Sons represents Kafka's most concentrated literary achievement as well as the story of his own domestic tragedy."
King John and Pericles, by William Shakespeare
Prof. Duncan says:
"More traditional are my next recommendations, a few less frequently read plays by Shakespeare, King John (which is actually quite wonderful, beloved by the Victorians) and Pericles."
Poetry
Sonnets for Michelangelo, by Vittoria Colonna
Prof. Duncan recommends the 2005 edition of this 16th-century text by the University of Chicago Press.
The publisher describes this volume: "This book presents for the very first time a body of Colonna's verse that reveals much about her poetic aims and outlook, while also casting new light on one of the most famous friendships of the age. Sonnets for Michelangelo, originally presented in manuscript form to her close friend Michelangelo Buonarroti as a personal gift, illustrates the striking beauty and originality of Colonna's mature lyric voice and distinguishes her as a poetic innovator who would be widely imitated by female writers in Italy and Europe in the sixteenth century. After three centuries of relative neglect, this new edition promises to restore Colonna to her rightful place at the forefront of female cultural production in the Renaissance."
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, by Wallace Stevens
Prof. Estrin says:
"I always have my edition of The Collected Poems on my desk (where I sit daily if only to do emails). The edition is more than forty-five years old and I remember inscribing my name in it with such pride of ownership in 1962. The book is tattered and worn and the last poem is somehow missing but it doesn't matter because I've memorized it (been mesmerized by it) for so many years now, 'Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.' The last line of that poem is 'It was like a new knowledge of reality.'
Reading Stevens always gives me comfort: the cadence of the lines, the elegance of the words, apart from the fact that there is something new and something very real to be found there."
Non-Fiction
My Dog Tulip, by J. R. Ackerley
Prof. Itzkovitz says:
"One of the greatest love stories of all time." The New York Times says: "In recalling his shared life with an elegant German shepherd, Ackerley, a British writer and editor, unsentimentally portrays two distinct personalities and two species. 'It is also a love story, with all the hard truths, anguish and heightened sensibility that such is likely to contain,' Gene Baro wrote in these pages in 1965. 'A masterpiece of empathy, this book is likely to be read again and again.'
The Looming Tower, by Lawerence Wright
Prof. Itzkovitz says:
"For beach readers looking for something politically and historically relevant, The Looming Tower tells the story of how Al-Qaeda was born."
Complications, by Atul Gawande
Provost Conboy says:
"If you read The New Yorker you'll recognize Gawande as a frequent contributor. But whether you've read him before or not, you'll be under his spell (and happily not under his knife) in this beautiful book about the work of surgeons.
A general surgeon at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital as well as a writer and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, Gawande describes the training and work of surgeons, asking intricate questions along the way: "Is it acceptable to 'practice' on human subjects?" "Should machine-like perfection be the gold-standard of medical care?" "Should superstitions be taken seriously in medicine?" "Should doctors take away-surgically-people's ability to blush? Their nausea? Their appetite (with bypass surgery)?"
Complications takes on these complicated topics and invites the reader to enjoy the ethical and practical questions that emerge."
In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
Recommended by Prof. Green
In her review in The New York Times, Janet Maslin says: "In this lively, invaluable book… [Pollan] assails some of the most fundamental tenets of nutritionism: that food is simply the sum of its parts, that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice... Some of this reasoning turned up in Mr. Pollan's best-selling Omnivore's Dilemma. But In Defense of Food is a simpler, blunter and more pragmatic book, one that really lives up to the "manifesto" in its subtitle.
Although he is not in the business of dispensing self-help rules, he incorporates a few McNuggets of plain-spoken advice: Don't eat things that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize. Avoid anything that trumpets the word "healthy." Be as vitamin-conscious as the person who takes supplements, but don't actually take them. And in the soon to be exhaustively quoted words on the book's cover: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."