Summer Reading
Christie A.
Miller's story of her obsession with the fascinating and problematic taxonomist David Starr Jordan explores the messiness of life and the human desire to make sense of a chaotic world. As Miller navigates a personal crisis, she finds solace in Jordan's resilience in the face of losing his life's work in an earthquake.
A deeply layered story about the Vietnam War told through the lens of a communist double agent. The novel depicts the war and its aftermath from various Vietnamese perspectives and explores love, friendship, betrayal, and the stories that get told about war. The novel makes the case that refugee stories must be understood as war stories.
Why are 1.5 million people per year dying of a treatable disease? Because they aren't really dying of a bacterial illness—they're dying from systemic failures of our medical and social systems. We can live in a world without tuberculosis, Green writes, we've just chosen not to. His book will make you care while learning lots of fascinating history, such as how TB led John B. Stetson to invent the cowboy hat.
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Joseph B.
What is the world, such that mystical experience is possible? How could there be both philosophers and mystics? As the 13th-century philosopher Bonaventure tracks the footsteps of the mystic Francis of Assisi up Mt. Averna, he suggests a rational structure of reality that can allow genuine insight into what lies beyond rationality. A key work in the deep conservative idea of coherence and the unity of truth.
Poetry from the 1940s that contemplates history in this awful and wonderful world that somehow includes both beauty and war. Eliot gives us a clear example of the power of art to draw together deep thought on God, the human condition, and the experience of time—theology, philosophy, and psychology yoked by poetry to express the coherencies and incoherencies that underlie reality.
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Paul D.
Great reflections on human psychological limitations grounded in accessible insights into the problems of inference, causality, probability, and forecasting.
The best companion to the second-most great book of all time, Plato's Republic.
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Iskra F.
A remarkably prescient sci-fi novella. Forster is better known as the author of such novels as A Passage to India, Howard's End, and A Room with a View, but he also wrote what is likely the first dystopian science fiction work.
A beautifully written book by physicist Carlo Rovelli on one of the most elusive aspects of reality: time. Rovelli challenges our preconceptions and suggests that at a fundamental physical level, time may not exist at all. The book has an audio version narrated by actor Benedict Cumberbatch.
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Marissa G.
You'd think that everything there is to say about Captain James Cook has been said, but this book manages to make well-traveled territory fresh and invigorating. Cook was an endlessly fascinating character, and Sides captures not only the personal drama of Cook's fatal Third Voyage, but also discusses the cultural and historical context around first contact between Europeans and Polynesian peoples in the Hawaiian Isles and elsewhere. (Available in both print and audiobook—both formats work beautifully.)
A deeply layered, strange, lyrical, and unsettling novel rich with ideas—many drawn from Taoism—that will keep resonating after you put it down. Le Guin's prose is odd and initially confusing in a way that might test your patience, but the novel rewards that patience many times over. (This one is dense enough to recommend reading on paper; you may want to dwell with individual sentences for a while.)
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Arne H.
A well-researched and entertainingly written critical history of Palo Alto. Starting from Leland Stanford's involvement in building the Central Pacific Railroad and the founding of the university in his name, Harris's book provides a comprehensive history of Silicon Valley marked by continuous corruption, exploitation, and violence.
A very short novel about the extraordinarily ordinary life of a millennial couple living in Berlin in the decade before the pandemic. A clinical depiction of the promises, hopes, and severe disappointments of life under the conditions of digital culture and economy.
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Lila J.
A fun and accessible history of 20th-century existentialism full of rich biographical details of its key characters, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Martin Heidegger.
A spare, post-apocalyptic novel that considers our capacity for human agency amid near total deprivation.
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Taylor J.
A tour of the history of Western culture through contemporary neuroscience. An exploration of what it means to be human, how this has changed over time, and the challenges our minds face in navigating and organizing an increasingly complicated world.
Through the internet, social media, and now artificial intelligence we seemingly know more about our fellow human beings than ever before. Sontag's book about photography in war is a reminder that knowing about them and caring about them are not the same thing.
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Andrea K.
A philosophical crime novel that deals with questions about free will and responsibility, suffering, rationalism, and God.
Postman argues that modern society has deified technology, allowing tools to dominate culture, traditional institutions, and human judgment. He describes a state where efficiency is prioritized over meaning, and technocratic experts replace social, religious, and moral structures.
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Michelangelo L.
The authors walk the reader through every major technological and social issue that humans will need to solve in order to colonize Mars and the rest of outer space—going in depth on everything from childbearing in space to space governance.
As Latinos become a larger voting bloc within the GOP, more research has become focused on understanding conservative Latinos. This book is unique in that it doesn't pre-judge Latino conservatives or treat them as an anomaly. Instead, it traces the philosophical and social roots of Latino conservatism back to the early 20th century.
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Joseph P.
A beautiful retelling of the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche.
An incisive overview of the thought of Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, and other realist political theorists.
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Alex P.
Though the work as a whole is large, it consists of short, independently readable biographies of some of the most important political figures in ancient Greek and Roman history. Want to learn more about the laws and ways of ancient Sparta? Read the life of Lycurgus, its legendary founder. Want a mix of juicy gossip and political intrigue? Read the life of the wild and cunning Alcibiades, with a special guest appearance by Socrates. The lives of Coriolanus and Julius Caesar are also fascinating in their own right—and are fruitfully read alongside the corresponding Shakespeare plays.
Set during the Risorgimento, or Unification of Italy, the novel tells the story of the decline of a Sicilian aristocratic family amid the rise of science and the transfer of land and wealth to the rising bourgeois class. A subtle analysis of what is gained and lost during this historical moment, The Leopard is extremely readable—light and weighty in turn—with many beautiful passages that reward careful reflection and discussion. Widely considered the greatest Italian novel of the 20th century. (Pick up the handsome Everyman's Library edition!)
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Derek V.
McCarthy's final two books (published within a few months of each other in 2022, shortly before his death) are the intertwined stories of two siblings: one working as a salvage diver, the other a literal genius of mathematics who checks herself into an asylum. If you've read any of McCarthy's other books and wondered what he gleaned from all that time among the physicists and mathematicians at the Santa Fe Institute, you won't be disappointed. (Read The Passenger first.)
His last novel encompasses seemingly everything: not just the military, university, and religious vocations of the three brothers, but also the vagaries, dramas, and tragedies that make up life. This was the first book to stun its recommender by beautifully, and repeatedly, articulating something about the world that he thought only he had just noticed.