Welcome to the English Department's 11th annual summer reading recommendations. Once you've explored this list, you can click on "summer reading" to see recommendations from previous years. Stay tuned for recommendations from members of the Student Advisory Council.
Megan Quigley
This summer I’m excited to return to a favorite, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, which includes the classic and yet urgent “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” and to Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender.
Craig Carpenter
This summer, partly in conjunction with preparation for a course on echoes in texts and film, I am going to be re-reading a number of recognized "classic" works from Shakespeare (Macbeth) and Austen (Persuasion) to Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway) and McCarthy (No Country for Old Men). These are authors and texts that never fail to generate from me a heavy exhale when I finish, which is one way that I tell if something is both aesthetically pleasing and literarily significant. Simultaneously, I plan to explore some of the Celtic/Welsh literature that has long interested me but that I have not always had time to study and enjoy. The Mabinogi, for instance, are medieval Welsh mythological prose tales. Finally, although not originally penned in English, for some time I have been meaning to read Mohamed Kheir's Slipping, which, in a way different from The Mabinogi, offers windows into the spaces between the real and the fantastic given the cracks in reality as we experience it.
Travis Foster
I’ve got three reading projects in mind for this summer. For immersion in big character- and plot-driven novels, I’m turning to Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Little Dorrit, and Great Expectations. On the shorter end of the spectrum, I’ve read most of James Baldwin’s novels several times (especially my favorite, Just Above My Head), so I’m going to use this summer to read his 1965 collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man. Finally, I’ve had my eyes on three recently published anthologies of poetry, and I’m finally going to make time for them: Queer Nature, edited by Michael Walsh; Neplanta: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, edited by Christopher Soto; and 100 Queer Poems, edited by Andrew McMillan and Mary Jean Chan.
Recently I went on a reading spree of John Wyndham’s 1950s and 1960s science fiction, having long admired his 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids. Among the other novels I read by him, including The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), the one I was most fascinated by was The Kraken Wakes. What is most compelling to me in this text is Wyndham’s elaborate vision of how the news media would respond to a global catastrophe. Though the novel was published in 1953, it offers an eerily contemporary vision of how news cycles might ebb and flow around an ongoing and mysterious series of events that point toward humanity’s collective doom.
I also want to mention two other, more recent novels I read recently and recommend: T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth (2000), and Blue Skies (2023). Both novels are sharp, poignant, and highly readable. They provide a wide range of ways to think about environmental crises like species extinction and climate change—concerns Boyle has been writing about for decades.
Kimberly Takahata
This summer, I'm looking forward to reading Daniel Heath Justice's The Way of Thorn and Thunder. This fantasy trilogy (The Kynship Chronicles) was republished as a one-volume work and tells the story of a place resembling North America in the eighteenth-century called Everland. Justice has written elsewhere about how fantasy shows readers what can be possible, especially with Indigenous characters who challenge what is deemed real and acceptable by working outside of colonial binaries and categories. I'm only a few chapters in, but the way that Justice builds these worlds and the Kyn (and others) who live within them has drawn me in, and I'm looking forward to all this book promises.
I’m a few chapters into Paul Yoon’s beautiful short novel Snow Hunters (2013) which opens with a journey that Yohan, who is a refugee, makes from Korea to Brazil at the end of the Korean War. His only connection in Brazil is Kiyoshi, a tailor and his employer. Yoon’s prose is haunting and lyrical. I’m looking forward to completing this novel.
Late Migrations (2019) by Margaret Renkl is also on my to-read list, I’ve read a few of the short essays and fragments in this memoir/collection of essays braiding family history, childhood memories, and observations of the birds, butterflies, and even rattlesnakes in her backyard. It’s a great book for shorter train rides because you know you can complete a few pieces on your journey. The book has stunning art by Billy Renkl.
Adrienne Perry
Our beloved Cathy Staples recently gave me a copy of Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit. I devoured this book in a matter of days, and it led to a minor obsession with both Solnit and George Orwell. As of now, I plan to start my summer reading by gobbling up as much Orwell as I can. I have a copy of 1984, which my spouse Christian and I plan to read together, and a collection of Orwell's essays. The Road to Wigan Pier awaits me at Falvey. Given Orwell's attention to politics and to the powers of language and ideas, especially when in nefarious hands, I suspect he will have some news I can use.
