Fiction
The Chalk Artist by Allegra GoodmanTrying to get a better understanding of artificial intelligence and virtual reality? This novel, set in contemporary Massachusetts, features an all-encompassing reality game, a young man who makes an Alice-in-Wonderland journey into that alternate world, and the consequences for him and others in both realms. It’s a new kind of fantasy for the digital age. (Think Ender’s Game, but without the cosmic issues.)
House of Names by Colm Toibin
Perhaps best-known for his novel-made-into-film Brooklyn, Toibin has now moved to the House of Atreus and the return of Agamemnon from the Trojan War. He writes persuasively in the voices of Clytemnestra and her children, without indulging in archaisms. Pair this book with Madeline Miller’s Circe, which expands the familiar Odyssey episode with a number of lesser references to the sorceress. In the end, though, Miller creates an almost wholly new character for a feminist age. See below for a return to the original.
The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson
Highly praised, and for good reason, this first translation of Homer by a woman needs no qualification—it is a brilliant re-creation. Its 100-page introduction makes it a valuable teaching edition as well as a reintroduction to the classic. Wilson makes you wonder if writers, from Samuel Butler and Robert Graves, to contemporary scholars who’ve claimed the book was written by a woman, were on to something.
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
Another world-shift—this time between the spirit world of African deities and our familiar American DSM categorization of psychological disorders. Its main narrator is the inhabiting divinity of a young multiracial woman, who endures the torments of being possessed in a world that has only clinical explanations for a metaphysical condition. Readers of Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down will find this a harrowing companion piece to that book.
Measuring the World: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann
For last year’s summer reading, I recommended The Invention of Nature, a substantial biography of Alexander von Humboldt by Andrea Wulf. This year brings a fictive reconstruction of Humboldt’s 1828 encounter with the greatest mathematician of his, and perhaps any age, Christian Gauss. From this event, Kehlmann imagines the lives of two men of equal prestige but diametrically opposed characters and destinies. (For those who want to leap for the stars, Irish novelist and mystery writer John Banville invites Kepler, Copernicus, and Newton into his “Revolutions” trilogy.)
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Scientist/novelist C.P. Snow once wrote about the divide between his two cultures. Powers has repeatedly demonstrated that gulf can be bridged, with award-winning novels treating neurology, genetics, and artificial intelligence, among other themes. Even more ambitious than his past work, The Overstory introduces multiple human characters, from botanists to intellectual property lawyers, as they interact below, and eventually on behalf of, Earth’s largest living creatures, the trees. (For a nonfiction examination of trees, try The Long, Long Life of Trees by Fiona Stafford, or the photo-essay Seeing Trees by Nancy Ross Lewis.)
Memoir and Biography
The Wine Lover’s Daughter by Anne FadimanThe wine lover was Clifton Fadiman, perhaps the leading middlebrow literary pundit of the past century, and his daughter is the author of the aforementioned The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Here, Anne Fadiman reveals a unique American life of a man enchanting readers across a broad spectrum, from The New Yorker and the National Book Awards to the Book-of-the-Month Club and Cricket, as he strove to escape his class roots through erudition and oenophilia. (One Drop, Bliss Broyard’s story of his father, critic and journalist Anatole Broyard, tells how a Brooklyn near-contemporary of Fadiman worked even harder not only to escape, but to obliterate, his own origins.)
Grant by Ron Chernow
After elevating Alexander Hamilton in the eyes of the 21st century (with a big boost from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton), Chernow has turned to the controversial Ulysses S. Grant. Drawing on the general-president’s memoir, generally viewed by its relatively few readers as the best book by any former president, Chernow has humanized him as a successful general whose later life has often been misjudged. (Grant’s memoir was simultaneously re-issued by Harvard University Press in the first annotated edition.)
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Madness, and Character by Kay Redfield
Jamison
Uniquely qualified to write the life of Robert Lowell, Jamison is a victim of bipolar disorder, a leading medical specialist in that field, and a gifted writer. She has produced no ordinary biography, but rather a multilayered testament to the talents, affliction, and ultimate triumph of the writer and sufferer, who inspired fierce loyalty even in those most subject to his manias. (If writer biographies and mental travails appeal, Peter Conradi’s Iris Murdoch and John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris depict another literary giant whose intellect was ultimately ravaged by Alzheimer’s.)
Rumi’s Secret by Brad Gooch
Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Conner was a penetrating and rich depiction of an author whose work was rooted in the spiritual. It is therefore hardly surprising to find that, despite the distance in time, culture, and faith, Gooch has also been able to help us envision this most beloved of Muslim poets and his milieu. Rumi’s own biographical writing, plus the literary and intellectual documents of Islam’s “Golden Age,” tell us far more than we might expect about a writer who lived 800 years ago. (Translator and scholar Paul Smith has written a trilogy on the other great Sufi poet, Hafez, Hafez-of-Shiraz.)
Politics and Society
Free Speech by Timothy Garton AshFor educators in particular, the vexed questions of public discourse, intellectual freedom, and fidelity to truth have gained unprecedented significance in recent years. As a British scholar of international politics, Ash is exceptionally well-qualified as a guide, providing a balanced, thoughtful, and rational set of principles to help us manage the conflicts between freedom, truth, and civility, whether on campus or in the public sphere.
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder and Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright
It’s a sign of the times that two such different authors should be expressing similar concerns. Snyder is a Midwestern child of the late ‘60s. Albright, three decades older, is a scholar of Eastern European politics and lived much of the history Snyder writes about. She was driven out of Czechoslovakia first by Hitler, then by Stalin, a refugee in England, then in America, and persevered to become the United States’ top diplomat at the United Nations and later secretary of state, while Snyder was still studying for his doctoral degree. Yet to both, the present moment seems like such a repetition of history that urgently requires a serious examination of the relevant past.
Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It by Richard V. Reeves
Are you concerned about growing inequality in our society? Reeves suggests that Americans need to question their upper and upper middle-class privilege alongside white and male privilege. (One father interviewed admits, “I never wanted to keep up with the Joneses. But, like many Americans, I wanted my children to keep up with the Joneses’ children.) Does multiplying the advantages of birth with privileges, such as SAT tutoring, private college counseling, attractive internships summer opportunities, and, yes, independent education, pull up the ladder by which others might join the Joneses?
Girl at the Baggage Claim by Gish Jen
Starting with a remarkable story of a Chinese student at a New England independent school, novelist Jen, herself a parent at such schools, offers a personal and lucid study of the differing values of individualism and collectivism that often lead to mutual incomprehension between Westerners and others, and between immigrant families and their Western-born descendants.
Science, Religion, Philosophy—and Drugs
How the Body Knows Its Mind by Sian BeilockPhilosopher, psychologist, and educator William James was among the first to argue that our bodily responses prompt our emotional states rather than the other way around. Beilock’s fascinating summary of mind-body interactions update that insight through extensive contemporary experiments, revealing, for example, that gestures unconsciously echo our handedness, as we use our dominant hand for positive statements and our nondominant hand for negative ones. (Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error provides a more theoretical analysis of the effect of the body on the mind, and of emotion on our perhaps overrated rationality.)
At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell and American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag
Even those of us who may once have been enchanted by Sartre, Camus, and the existentialism of the mid-20th century usually hit a wall when trying to penetrate the obscurities of Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. Bakewell makes their ideas clearer than anyone I’ve ever read, and she also humanizes them as she recounts her own exploration of their works and lives. Similarly, Kaag tells his discovery of the half-forgotten William Ernest Hocking—successor to the American pragmatists—Hocking’s vast library in a remote New England retreat, and a reinvigoration of his enthusiasm for philosophy and his personal life as well.
What the Qur’an Meant: and Why It Matters by Garry Wills
Whether the subject is religion or politics, Wills is one of the great explicators of our time, treating subjects as varied as the Gospels and the Gettysburg Address. In this book, he has taken a big step away from his topics to offer a clear-eyed reading of the seminal document of Islam, and to counter the numerous misconceptions that stand in the way of interreligious and intercultural understanding.
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler
As we fight the opioid epidemic America, Blitzed reveals the amphetamines, opioids, and other drugs that drove soldiers and workers in tireless labor on behalf of Hitler’s Germany. The irony of teetotalist, anti-smoking Hitler’s free use of a cocktail of drugs is not lost on Ohler. As he points out, Germany was a powerhouse in the growth of pharmaceuticals and gave the world drugs from aspirin to oxycodone, often from pharmaceutical companies still in existence, such as Bayer and Merck & Company. (The late mystery writer Philip Kerr uses the Nazi drug culture as a significant plot device in his recent Prussian Blue, being used both by the military and by construction crews rushing to complete Hitler’s Alpine retreat, the Berghof.)
What’s on your reading list? Tell us in the comments.