Recommended by Elizabeth Anderson

I read this novel on the back porch of my childhood home in a sleepy  suburb of the Pacific Northwest over the summer, and was struck by the nearby history that I had never learned. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is based on and takes place during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle; its take on the historical facts of the event is painted by Yapa’s poignant, lyrical phrasing.…

Recommended by Jordan Waterwash

Christopher Moore’s ability to transform history into fantastical comedies completely mystifies me every time I read one of his books. Sacré Bleu is no exception. I’ve always been a fan of art, so it seemed natural for me to read what I thought would be an interesting tale about the lives of made-up artists during the Impressionist period.…

Recommended by Anna Davies

I’m always fascinated by how childhood, adolescence and the transition to the workforce is viewed in different cultures, and I’ve wanted to read Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha for quite some time. I picked up my copy for two pounds at an Oxfam shop while abroad, and finally had some time to read over break.…

Recommended by Catharine Boyle

I recently read The Kite Runner. People have been recommending it to me since I was in high school so I finally read it and found it has become one of my favorite books. It tells the story of two very close friends named Amir and Hassan.…

Recommended by Professor Allison

In his dystopian novel The Circle (2013), Dave Eggers casts a skeptical eye on Silicon Valley messianism. The breathless self-importance, the self-satisfied (and superficial) cosmopolitanism, the naïve faith in a technological fix for humankind’s every ill—Eggers knows his target, and his criticisms are as thought-provoking as they are funny.…

Recommended by Professor Carpenter

What we know for the first third of this wonderful novel is that the narrator’s life has been scarred by a cataclysmic event that destroyed her family and left her struggling to relate to people and react appropriately to everyday occurrences around her. I won’t spoil the surprise, but the novel’s slow revelation of what has gone wrong in this young woman’s life is beautifully crafted and compelling.…

Recommended by Professor Ford

Wild Nights by Joyce Carol Oates is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read – a collection of stories about the last days of certain luminaries from the American literary canon (Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway). The stories are all in some way fantastic, dark and harrowing.…

Recommended by Professor Long

During the semester I don’t have the long-term memory for novels, so I tend to read nonfiction for pleasure, and my greatest non-literary pleasure is music. This book by Jack Hamilton examines the period of popular music I am listening to the most right now (1960s rock, pop, and soul), with an emphasis on collaboration and musical inspiration between black and white artists.…

Recommended by Professor Hipsky

This sci-fi classic appeals to the pimply-faced sixteen-year-old nerd in me.  Set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, it chronicles the existential angst of organic androids who are treated as chattel, and rise up against their makers.  Both an action-packed detective story and a philosophical exploration of what it means to be human, the novel was adapted into the cult film Blade Runner, together with which it stands as “exhibit A” in the gallery of postmodernity.…

Recommended by Professor Comorau

I picked up Trevor Noah’s memoir expecting a light read. What I discovered was a series of episodes in which Noah traces a life in and through South Africa’s complicated political, legal, and social imaginations of race. Noah retains the warmth and sense of humor that he displays on The Daily Show while working to pick apart the absurdities of the constructions of race in South Africa and the horrors of Apartheid and violence around him.…