Chiara Shah, Mathematics Department Chair | Computer Science and Mathematics Instructor

I recently read None of This is True by Lisa Jewell. If you like mysteries like Girl on the Train and Gone Girl you’ll like this. It leaves you guessing until the very end. Another one in a similar vein that I read recently is The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware.

I also just finished a romance by Rebecca Yarros (not one of the dragon romantasy books, but just a regular romance). It was called Variation, and featured ballet.

 

 

Emily Carton, Director of Student & Community Life

I've read the following books this summer: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, and Life after Life by Kate Atkinson. I'm currently re-reading Bel Canto, which I fell in love with when I first read it about 20 years ago.

I would recommend all of these books for different reasons, but my favorite so far is I Who Have Never Known Men. Although it's definitely dystopian, I found it surprisingly empowering; it demonstrates how strong and resilient women can be, even when faced with unimaginable circumstances.

 

 

Megan Labbate, Science Instructor, Sara Lee Schupf Family Chair in Curriculum Excellence And Innovation

Tilt, by Emma Pattee

Written by a climate journalist as a way to cope with her own feelings of climate anxiety, Tilt tells the story of Annie, a woman who is 37-weeks pregnant and has just experienced a massive earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. The story alternates between Annie navigating the aftermath and looking back at key moments that define Annie's life. This story seeks to find balance between fiction writing and sharing the realities of a disaster driven by climate change. After hearing an interview by Emma Pattee, I immediately went to the local bookstore to purchase this. The bookseller told me to block out a day to read this in one sitting, and I am so grateful she shared this piece of advice. Tilt is gripping and hard to put down!

 

 

Esther Dettmar, Dean of Academics

I recently finished The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, recommended to me by Director of Student & Community Life Emily Carton. It's a long read, but worth it, and it's especially good as an audiobook (I admit it: I switched halfway through!) since different sections are narrated by different characters, which can be a little hard to keep track of initially. It's a family tragicomedy that is very hard to distill, but it explores the butterfly effect and how every person's unique perspective shapes their experience of events.

 

 

Kristen Mariotti, Head of Enrollment Management

My first read is The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong. Ocean is a Vietnamese American writer who actually grew up a few towns away from me! I have read all of his books and this is his new offering. It is excellent so far, showing the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness are ever-present in human life. 

Next up is How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter's Memoir, by Molly Jong-Fast. This memoir is written by Erica Jong's (author of Fear of Flying) only daughter and I am eager to dig in. Having lost my own mother 6 years ago, I am always interested in how women process this significant milestone. 

Finally, I am going to check out What Kind of Paradise by Janell Brown. This novel is about a young woman on a journey to understand herself. It is a mediation on the relationships between parents and children, nature and technology, and how our experiences play a role in who we become. 

 

 

Manon Sabatier, French Instructor

For summer reading:

Our all-school read: All We Can Save (one of the editors is coming to campus on September 19) and also, Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Happy reading!

 

 

Rob Matera, Latin Instructor

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

This is a beautiful fantasy about hope, imagination, and flying to the sky. It's told in multiple narratives centered on a figure from a fictional work by a 2nd-century Greek author, which itself draws on the (real) play Birds by Aristophanes. The characters are dreamers from across time whose worlds are under siege. The tale is of their resilience and their pursuit of stories and learning. I am loving every page.

 

Theaetetus by Plato along with Reading Plato's Theaetetus by Timothy Chappell and Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays by Gail Fine

As a teacher, and also as a person living in a world filled with disagreements about what facts are, I thought it would be helpful to understand epistemology better. I read one of the Very Short Introduction books a little while ago, and it gave a nice overview of some contemporary ideas in epistemology, but I wanted a broader picture of this millennia-old discussion. Plato seemed like a good place to start. In his Theaetetus, he explores what knowledge is. His usual humor, beautiful prose, and close attention to words are all here. Chappell's commentary and Fine's essays are helping me think through and contextualize the arguments in the Theaetetus. Chappell's book also includes an English translation, but I would recommend Levett's translation revised by Burnyeat. 

 

Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome by Anthony Corbeill

Corbeill explores what ancient Romans thought about the relationship between grammatical gender and anatomical sex in their language. He argues that, whether or not there was any such relationship in the prehistory of Latin or Proto-Indo-European, Romans of the historical period mostly believed that grammatical gender originated from the anatomical sexes of the referents of nouns for people, whose genders the Romans considered obvious, and then it (grammatical gender) spread to other nouns by analogy with the forms of the now-gendered nouns for people. He then argues that the Romans mapped this gendering of nouns back onto the nouns' referents and so came to view objects and ideas, such as tables and liberty (feminine) or books and honor (masculine), as gendered. The chapters I have left to read will discuss how, with this gendering of nouns and their referents, the Romans heterosexualized their world and how they negotiated the figure of Hermaphroditus, who was both male and female. I have been particularly interested to read that Roman scholars viewed poets as authoritative in the gendering of nouns -- so authoritative that they could sometimes even make masculine nouns feminine or vice-versa. Apparently Vergil, right at the start of the Empire, was the apex of this authority, though, and a swift drop-off followed him. Thus, another interesting argument that seems to be developing over the course of the book is that, as Rome transitioned from Republic to Empire, there came to be less and less room in Roman thinking for uncertainty or ambiguity in the grammatical genders of nouns and the gendering of their referents. Corbeill is a wonderful scholar and writer, and the prose is lighter than anything so densely and precisely argued has a right to be. I am learning a lot and enjoying it very much. I am also glad to have richer, more up-to-date answers for students' perennial questions about why nouns have genders and what those genders mean.

 

 

Abbey Massoud-Tastor, Senior Associate Director of College Counseling, 12th Grade Class Dean

I just finished Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray. It was a wonderful story of a Black Woman fighting for her voice, her dreams, and her accomplishments.

 

 

Jon Calos, Experiential Learning Department Chair, Signature Director, Homer L. Dodge Instructor in Science

An excellent read about the power of the mind body connection!

 

 

Alexandra Schmidt, Henry L. Thompson Chair in Mathematics

A long time ago I learned about an old Vermont maple-syruping tradition: boiling down maple syrup until very thick, dipping a plain donut in it and taking a bite, then taking a bite of a dill pickle. Alternating back and forth, with constant re-sharpening of the palate, it becomes possible (I am told) to eat an astonishingly large quantity of donuts and syrup.

I have been reminded of this while simultaneously reading Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight and Aleeza Ben Shalom's Matchmaker Matchmaker. Fuller's book is about growing up in a struggling British family subsistence farming in the waning days of colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). It is not a happy read in many ways--mental illness, alcoholism, violence, and tragedy overlay the casually entitled racism of the Fuller family's life in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. But Fuller is such a gifted writer, able to overlay a child's perceptions with the perspective of an adult now living in the USA, that she has me simultaneously thinking about (and researching) 20th-century African history, as well as the ways in which children normalize their experiences.

In contrast, Matchmaker Matchmaker is just a plain fun read. Ben Shalom is a professional relationship coach and matchmaker. I am not exactly in the market myself, but as a teacher I do think a lot about relationships. Good relationships pave the way for good learning, and vice versa. Ben Shalom's advice, "date 'em until you hate 'em" isn't intended literally, but her explanation that no one is at their best on a first date is subversively deep. We live in an era of quick judgments and short attention spans. She observes that connection takes time, and that good relationships begin with making yourself better, not magically finding another person who is perfect for you. 

 

 

Katie Myer, Director of Admissions and Recruitment

I am reading James by Percival Everett. It is a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim. I love how this novel takes something old and gives it new life. I have not finished the book yet, but so far, it is proving to be beautifully written while ambitiously tackling profound themes. Everett’s version now feels like an essential part of the original story. 

 

 

Rachael Robison, Technical Theatre Director and Audio Visual Coordinator

I’m reading The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Goenichec. So far it is really good! It explores love, family, motherhood and protection of yourself all through the of the ups and downs of life. I love it. The time skips are a bit awkward to juggle, but once you get used to the author’s writing style, it is very enjoyable (and sticks pretty close to the mythology).

 

 

Kaitlin Resler, Associate Director of Content Marketing

A Memoir of my Former Self: A Life in Writing, Hilary Mantel

I already had my annual re-read the Wolf Hall series earlier in the spring and as usual, was struggling to let go of Mantel’s voice and writing style. This is a collection of her essays, articles, and movie reviews from the 90s on to her death in 2022. Some are, of course, more engaging than others but overall it’s been really enjoyable–especially as we get closer to the end of the book and her articles/essays focus on topics more related to writing historical fiction, and how the cultural conception and conversation about monarchy has evolved. The collection includes most of her published shorter-form writing and it’s interesting to see how she talks to herself throughout, and sometimes uses ideas or phrases in slightly different contexts. “What might she have written next? I don’t know, but I will miss it,” wrote Margaret Atwood on Mantel, and I find myself thinking the same and feeling melancholy over it. 

 

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, Sarah Wynn-Williams

I picked this up partly because of the reports that Meta sued to prevent Wynn-Williams from promoting the book (this ended up creating a kind of Streisand-Effect that boosted sales and made it popular especially among tech-journalists and social media managers), and out of wondering if things are just as rotten at Meta as one senses they are. The writing quality itself is pretty thin, but overall the content does support critiques of Meta and its internal culture. Nothing in it is revelatory for anyone working in the social media sphere, although there are some interesting alleged confirmations re: how algorithms are manipulated for sociopolitical gain. My overarching impression is that the author refuses to acknowledge that she was just as careless and cruel as the rest of the internal team at Facebook, and I found that bothersome. Worth a read if you don’t interact much with social platforms, or are interested in tech news just to know what the conversations around it are!

 

The Antidote, Karen Russell

I started this in the spring when it first came out but spring is not a good time to start something new and I hadn’t finished it! Karen Russell is one of my favorite short story writers, so I grabbed The Antidote the day it came out. It’s strange, and visceral, and sort of magical in the way her prose tends to be, but it’s also not particularly fast-paced so that’s been fun to read.The novel centers around the fictional town of Uz, dustbowl-era, and uses the real events of the ‘Black Sunday’ dust storm and the Republican River Flood of 1935 as its book-end axis points. It has a sort of The Wizard of Oz meets Paper Moon feel, but through a lens that grapples with the land grabs and racial hierarchies of the era that reverberate through our present day.  My full disclosure is I haven’t finished this one, but I’ll always recommend her books! 

 

 

Evangeline Delgado, Associate Director of Student Life for READY

I'm reading Womb: The Inside Story of Where We All Began by Leah Hazard. As a sex-ed teacher, no one is surprised that I'd pick up a book all about uteruses for my summer enjoyment, but I am thrilled I found this. This is an intensely thoughtful book that offers both incredible research and information, as well as emotionally poignant stories about the mystery, magnificence, and (still) medically misunderstood uterus.