Faculty Recommends Vacation Reading
Monica Ali: Brick Lane
A Bangladeshi village girl is brought to London to marry an older man, lives a conventional ife, then falls in love with a younger man involved in the Islamist movement. [Mary Trull]
Neal Bascomb: The Perfect Mile
A fascinating account of the international competition among three men, an Australian, an American, and a Brit, to run the first four-minute mile in history. The book was written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this achievement. Soon to be a major motion picture. [David Wee]
Robert Olen Butler: Fair Warning
A trashy but fascinating look at issues of collecting and gender, featuring a woman auctioneer. It's in the same (extended) family as John Fowles' The Collector, and A.S. Byatt's Possession. [Mary Titus]
Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason: The Rule of Four
An intelligent Da Vinci Code especially for 221 students, this murder mystery is set in Princeton and turns upon a rare 15th century book. [Rich DuRocher]
Charles Dickens: Little Dorrit
This is the real Dickens, though it may take you two Christmases to read all 900 pages. [Jonathan Hill]
Anne Donovan: Buddha Da
Written entirely in a broad Scottish dialect (Glaswegian), this touching and funny novel documents the life of a family whose dad ("da") suddently decides to become a Buddhist. [Jan Allister]
Dave Eggers: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Fast, sad, postmodern, metafictional, pop cultural, funny. [Eliot Wilson]
Cornelia Funke: Inkheart
A fairy tale as good as Harry Potter, this children's story was written by a German author whose books have been international bestsellers. And here it is in English. [Karen Marsalek]
Stephen Greenblatt: Will in the World
Shakespeare, who gave form and voice to so many mysteries, has remained a mystery himself. We know a great deal about his professional life but almost nothing about the man. Greenblatt's book is the latest attempt to bring him to life. A bestseller and a finalist for the Naitonal Book Award for Non-Fiction, this biography deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it. Greenblatt is a rarity: an eminent scholar who is also a master of style and story. [Eric Nelson]
Kate Grenville: The Idea of Perfection
Perfect vacation reading, this novel by an Australian writer is a love story with a point. It features laugh-outloud scenes, one of them in a cow pasture, an awkward and endearing couple, and a woman named Felicity Porcelline. [Mary Steen]
Thich Nhat Hanh: The Miracles of Mindfulness
A gentle introduction to Buddhist mindfulness practice that makes you want to go wash your dishes or peel a tangerine just to try experiencing everyday activities with love and serenity. It is impossible to read this book without becoming almost instantly more peaceful. [Jan Allister]
Kent Haruf: Plainsong
This is the favorite book--among five well-loved novels--in my section of GE 111. It's much shorter than Moby Dick, which unfortunately nobody reads any more, but I recommend that, too. [Carol Holly]
Denis Johnson: Jesus' Son: Stories
Minimalist, not particularly pretty stories, but a quick-reading book that fits into a stocking (though it would be a strange gift); converted into a 1999 movie of the same name. [Eliot Wilson]
Erik Larson: The Devil in the White City
This book chronicles the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 from the perspectives of David Burnham, the city's great architect, and of Dr. H. H. Holmes, the man who used the Columbian Exposition to commit serial murder. A fine work of popular history for any one interested in architectural history or the invention of Columbus Day. [Karen Cherewatuk]
David Maraniss: They Marched Into Sunlight
A nonfiction book that won many of the major awards in history writing and general nonfiction in 2003. Maraniss juxtaposes two stories from Oct 17-18, 1967: one, an elite army company who marched into an ambush in Vietnam and lost most of its men; and two, the protests at the University of Wisconsin against Dow Chemical, the makers of napalm. Gripping stories, and the intertwining gives a deep understanding of the impacts of war abroad and at home. [Mark Allister]
Cynthia Ozick, Heir to the Glimmering World
One of America's greatest living writers channels Jane Austen and Winnie the Pooh's Christopher Robin (really!), in this marvelous tale of a family of Jewish refugees in New York during the 1930s. [Diana Postlethwaite]
Marcel Proust: Remembrance of Things Past
It's never too early to begin reading this multi-volume work. It can take Proust 95 pages to cover two minutes of conversation in a salon, but it's worth every page. [Jonathan Hill]
Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves
A hilarious and sometimes cynical field guide to the punctuation marks of the English sentence. And beneath the humor, a clear, logical guide to punctuation for anyone who occasionally agonizes over when (or whether) to use a dash or semi-colon, and entertaining reading for anyone who likes language. [Jan Allister]
Tom Wolfe: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
A "fictional novel" of the Beat generation, this book turns a cross country bus trip into a kind of Forrest Gump saga in which they come into contact with various historical figures like, for example, the Beatles. It's better than Beat literature, because Wolfe gives us the back story. [Colin Wells]
