Who else is always looking for a new book to read? While your “to read” list may be giving you a side eye, we wanted to give you a few new recommendations that our faculty members have been reading.
Our first recommendation comes from Dr. Tim Madigan. “Thanks to [my attendance at the Society for Italian Philosophy] I’m reading a book I shamefully must admit I’d never previously heard of, Alassandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed.” Tim graciously provided a synopsis of The Betrothed, and it can be found on The New Yorker.
Dr. Mark Rice gave us not one, but two books! “Two books that have really stuck out to me in my summer reading are the novel, Trust, by Hernan Diaz, and the nonfiction book, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius Scott. In very different ways, both books deal with one of my favorite topics: how do we know things? In Trust (winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for fiction) we get a multi-faceted story about a fictional financial tycoon whose life story gets peeled back in layers revealing what may or may not be the real truth of his success. In The Common Wind, Scott’s deep and innovative archival research reveals the multiple channels through which men and women of the African diaspora communicated with each other about what was happening on their own and different islands through the Caribbean: colonial unrest, slave rebellions, and the possibilities of freedom.”
Dr. Deb Vanderbilt greatly enjoyed a book series during the summer months. “…I read the 3 volumes of The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. It is a science fiction sensation that is currently being filmed for a netflix series. I can’t pretend I understood all the physics it involved (help, Kris Green!) but that did not get in the way of my total enjoyment of this trilogy.”
If anyone would like to submit what they’re currently reading, feel free to email me at: cfischer@sjf.edu. We look forward to hearing your suggestions!
