With winter break coming up, who doesn’t love to grab their favorite hot beverage, sit down with a blanket, and lose themselves in a good book? Not only could you explore the suggestions from our previous list, but we have some more suggestions for you!
Professor Victoria Karre gave us two recommendations! The first is a non fiction book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb. It’s written from Lori’s perspective as a mental health therapist who is also pursuing her own psychotherapy. As she processes her break-up with the help of her therapist, Lori shares what takes place in those sessions with her clients. The book offers comedic relief while normalizing psychotherapy in society. For those that love psychological thrillers, Victoria recommends Local Woman Missing by Mary Kubica. In this book, two women and a child go missing soon after one another. As the search continues, a connection is made between the cases which leads to more confusion. After 11 years, the child returns but the truth isn’t what it seems.
Professor Alexey Ignatchenko recommended a must read for instructors called, Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence by David Keirsey. The book has provided insight to allow Alexey to better understand the people around him. This has included the motivations and behaviors behind his students, colleagues, friends, and family!
Dr. Todd Sodano has quite the stack of books he has been reading lately. First on his list is The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher, which is a follow-up novel in her series about Professor Jay Fitger, an English department chair of the fictional Payne University, who is trying to juggle the chainsaws of saving the humanities while tending to his faculty.
It’s a great follow-up to Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, where we first met Fitger. A few months ago, Schumacher published The English Experience, in which we follow Fitger to England on a trip with his students. Also on his list is from Upstate New York’s own Richard Russo’s latest novel, Somebody’s Fool, his follow-up to Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool. The final book on his currently reading list is, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska by Warren Zanes, who happens to be a UR Ph.D. Nebraska is a classic Bruce album, released just before his Born in the USA record; by classic, Dr. Sodano is paraphrasing Mark Twain, in that it’s an album that everyone wants to own but no one wants to listen to.
