During the summer of 2023, we posted a series on social media about books our faculty, graduate students and staff were reading, and also some of our favorite books. This page is a consolidation of those posts.
June 9, 2023
This week’s book pick is by Professor Sara Butler. She recommends, “Cyclettes” by Tree Abraham. “A weird and wonderful book about a woman’s relationship with her bicycle. This book is a series of cycling vignettes about all of the various bicycles in her past and how they helped her to discover a meaningful life. Chock full of lists, drawings, photos, brain-storming charts, and vivid memories, there is no other book like Abraham’s “Cyclettes.” The perfect summer read for those who love to ride.”
June 23, 2023
This week’s book is “A Black Women’s History of the United States” by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, recommended by Sierra Phillips, “This book is a great “introduction” (in the words of the authors) to understanding the United States in general, but Black women in particular. I enjoyed this book because it does a great job at emphasizing the fact that one cannot fully understand the history of the U.S. without highlighting the contributions of Black women.”
June 30, 2023
This week’s book is “Gravel Heart” by Adbulrazak Gurnah, recommended by Thomas McDow. He says, “This is a novel with a historical grounding, telling the story about a young man from Zanzibar’s immigration to the UK. While decolonization and the Zanzibar Revolution seem to provide a background to the story, in the end they play a far greater role in shaping the racial, religious, and gender politics that shape the story. As someone who has spent a lot of time in Zanzibar and speaks Swahili, I appreciated so much about this book, but I also think that any reader would be drawn to the themes of family history, displacement, and belonging. The novel helps us see both postcolonial Britain and Tanzania in new ways. Gurnah is a fantastic storyteller and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021.”
July 7, 2023
“The Magician” by Colm Tóibín is this week’s book, recommended by Theodora Dragostinova. She says it “tells the story of Thomas Mann, the German author and Nobel prize winner for literature in 1929. A fictionalized biography, it narrates the life of a man dealing with the aftermath of the Great War, the Nazis’ rise to power, the panicked exile of German cultural elites, and their life in the USA. At the same time, we learn about his family’s complicated life, the idiosyncratic choices of his six children, as well as his own sexual fantasies. It truly is a marvelous book!”
July 14, 2023
This week’s book is “The Family Upstairs” by Lisa Jewell, recommended by Laura Seeger. She says, “It’s a page-turner you can’t put down!” At 25, Libby Jones is astounded to learn of her inheritance of a gorgeous, dilapidated townhouse in one of London’s poshest neighborhoods. As she investigates the story of her birth parents’ murder and the dark legacy of her new home, siblings are headed her way to uncover, and possibly protect, secrets of their own.
July 21, 2023
This week’s book is “Act of Oblivion” by Robert Harris, recommended by John Brooke. He says it is, “a tale of intrigue and survival on two continents in the seventeenth century – and a bit subversive in this age of ‘coronation’.”
July 28, 2023
This week’s book is “They Didn’t See Us Coming, The Hidden History of Feminism in the Nineties” by Lisa Levenstein, recommended by Clay Howard. Historian Lisa Levenstein tracks this time [1990s] of intense and international coalition building, one that centered on the growing influence of lesbians, women of color, and activists from the global South. Their work laid the foundation for the feminist energy seen in today’s movements, including the 2017 Women’s March and #MeToo campaigns.
August 4, 2023
This week’s book is, “The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720,” by Dagomar Degroot, recommended by Jim Harris. He says, “It offers a fascinating new perspective on how civilizations were impacted by the coldest period in recent climate history. Whereas most states suffered severely during the Little Ice Age, Degroot demonstrates that the fledgling Dutch Republic thrived in the realms of commerce, military conflict and high culture despite the hardships of the cold.”
August 11, 2023
This week’s book is, “Bitter Bonds,” by Leonard Blussé, recommended by Prof. Geoffrey Parker. He says, “The title is a pun: Cornelia van Nijenroode married Johan Bitter in ‘Batavia,’ capital of the Dutch East Indies (now Jakarta), in 1676 after a brief courtship, and spent rest of her life trying unsuccessfully to break the bonds of matrimony, first in Indonesia and when that failed in the Netherlands. The story is such a page-turner because Leonard Blussé, the foremost living expert on Dutch colonial history, has linked Dutch sources in both Indonesia and the Netherlands with documents in Japanese (Cornelia was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a Dutch father) and with a striking family portrait done in 1663. [In the painting] she stands beside her first husband, a prosperous official, their two daughters (left), and two of their forty household enslaved people (right). Blussé’s book tells her astonishing life story from penury (as an orphan) to wealth and then (thanks to her Bitter experience) back to penury.”
August 18, 2023
This week’s book is “Small Things Like These” by Claire Keegan, recommended by Birgitte Søland. “In this short and tightly written novel, Claire Keegan explores life in a small Irish village in the 1980s. Discovering the treatment of young, unmarried pregnant women at a local Catholic convent, the main character must choose between protecting his family and following his conscience.”
