What You're Recommending (and Reading) This Summer
Sandie Liacouras
Retired; Former WSSD Librarian, NPE and SHHS
Media
BEST BOOKS
(F) Deacon King Kong, by James McBride. McBride outdoes himself interweaving the stories of Sportcoat, Hot Sausage, mysterious cheese deliveries, the Mob, and an ancient valuable artifact, set in the Brooklyn Causeway Housing Projects in the ‘60s.
(F) The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel. Money, scandal, survival, and corruption are just some of the elements of this globe-trotting thriller. A Ponzi scheme à la Madoff is the catalyst.
(F) The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, by V. E. Schwab. Addie makes a deal with the devil to avoid an unhappy marriage in the 1700s. Why is she still alive 300 years later? Read this work of historical fiction/fantasy/romance to find out.
(F) The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. Imagine you are unhappy, and your life is so bad that you are contemplating suicide. Instead, you end up in the Midnight Library, where you can test out a myriad of other lives that you could have led.
(F) My Year Abroad, by Chang-Rae Lee. This is NOT about your traditional junior year abroad. Tiller, a college student, joins a Chinese businessman on a wild and crazy trip across Asia. Prepare for ups and downs, surprises, and even an insider’s guide to the witness protection program.
(F) The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman. Residents of an English retirement community become sleuths in this delightfully funny whodunnit.
SUMMER READING
(NF) Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, by Anonymous.
(F) Catch-22, by Joseph Heller.
(F) Early Morning Riser, by Katherine Heiny.
(F) The Plot, by Jean Hanff Korelitz.
(NF) Philadelphia Builds: Essays on Architecture, by Michael J. Lewis.
George Huber
Retired music librarian, Swarthmore College
Swarthmore
BEST BOOKS
(F) Two for Trust, by Elle Brownlee. A cute American who is a British history nerd tries to buy a single two-week National Trust pass, and accidentally buys a two-person pass for one week. When he discovers his mistake at the first National Trust house he visits, he offers the other pass to another man. Together, they enjoy the rest of the week visiting trust sights, and at the end the American learns that his traveling companion is the lord of the manor of the first place he’d visited. The most perfect, satisfying gay romance novel! Available as an ebook via the public library’s hoopla service.
(F) Red, White & Royal Blue, by Casey McQuiston. “What happens when the American president’s son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?” This one garnered a mention in the Sunday New York Times Book Review’s romance column and made the bestseller list for a week. The public library has 10 copies (all currently out and with holds on them, as well as one audio book and four copies of the ebook—with seven holds).
(F) Playing the Palace, by Paul Rudnick. “When a lonely American event planner starts dating the gay Prince of Wales, a royal uproar ensues.” Rudnick is a great comic writer. The Queen of England makes a surprise visit to a Thanksgiving dinner in Secaucus, N.J.; Great Aunt Miriam instantly bonds with her and offers helpful hints on how to improve the British economy. Not in the public library database.
(F) Best Laid Plans: An LGBTQ Romance, by Roan Parrish. “A man who’s been moving his whole life finally finds a reason to stay put.” Roan Parrish is a Philadelphia author. A man inherits a rundown house in the country from his grandfather and keeps going to the hardware store to buy things, piquing the interest of the store owner, who can’t help but get involved. Two copies are in the public library database.
SUMMER READING
(NF) The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel. “From the author of Fun Home, this is a profoundly affecting graphic memoir of Bechdel’s lifelong love affair with exercise, set against a hilarious chronicle of the fitness fads of our times.” I have known Alison Bechdel for over 20 years, ever since I invited her to come to Swarthmore College to show her work and give a lecture. I now own three of her original works too. A must read. Seven copies in the public library system, all out with holds on them. Good luck with this one!
(F) The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, by Cat Sebastian.
(F) Hard Sell: An LGBTQ Romance by Hudson Lin.
Christine Gradel
Community Volunteer
Rutledge
BEST BOOKS
(F) Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell.
(NF) Spring Will Not be Canceled: David Hockney in Normandy, by David Hockney and Martin Gayford.
(NF) Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, by Lisa Genova.
(NF) Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over, by Nell Painter.
(NF) Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art, by Mary Gabriel.
SUMMER READING
Two big books that I received as gifts this spring, are not beach reading because of size, but I will enjoy and savor on my screened porch
(NF) Rosa: The Story of the Rose, by Peter E. Kukielski and Charles Phillips.
(NF) Tarot: The Library of Esoterica, by Jessica Hundley, Johannes Fiebig, and Marcella Kroll.
(NF) Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard.
(F) Still Alice, by Lisa Genova.
(F) The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams.
Carol Kennedy
Retired librarian who enjoys language-learning, gardening, and reading.
Swarthmore
BEST BOOKS
(F) A Crooked Tree, by Una Mannion. This coming-of-age novel is about 12-year-old Libby and her four siblings, being raised by a single mother who is herself more of a child than a parent. One night, in a fit of anger, Libby’s mom orders her to get out of the car, leaving her to find her own way home in the dark. What ensues comprises the remainder of this interesting glimpse of the last summer Libby spends living at home. The setting was of interest to me: it takes place in a tiny town near Valley Forge National Park and makes reference to many local places. And the characters are finely drawn, which always appeals to me in a novel. Suitable for older teens and adults.
(F) A Long Way from Chicago, by Richard Peck. Years ago, I had read this excellent middle-school novel, set in the Depression era, and I’ve just revisited it. Peck has a sense of humor reminiscent of Mark Twain’s—except that it is Grandmom who is the whippersnapper rather than her grandchildren. The first chapter, “Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Day Above Ground,” was originally a self-contained short story; it is not to be missed. I loved the book as an adult and highly recommend Richard Peck in general, for any age above ten or so.
(F) Beezus and Ramona, by Beverly Cleary. When I read that Cleary had died last March at the age of 104, I simply had to re-read my 1960 copy of this great children’s book about a nine-year-old girl and her annoying, imaginative, and incredibly funny younger sister Ramona. It is still a barrel of laughs after all these years, and I am currently reading the rest of the Ramona books.
(F) Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen. I actually took a class about this novel, offered by the Continuing Learning in Retirement group at DelVal University (delval.edu/center-learning-retirement). I had not known much about the book. It was written when Austen was just 22, as a spoof of the Gothic novel, which was a very popular genre in her day. It is rife with sarcastic comments about the standard Gothic-novel premise of a young, tragic heroine who must be rescued from evildoers by a handsome young man. The novel was a lot of fun, and the class was as well.
(NF) The View from Flyover Country, by Sarah Kendzior. The author wrote this collection of essays for the Al Jazeera news agency while she was working for it in 2013. The essays are interesting, thought-provoking, and very insightful about the less-than-ideal conditions under which many Americans live. A preface, added to a later edition after the 2016 election, puts many social, political and economic issues into perspective. The quality of the essays is a bit uneven, but some of them are very good.
(NF) The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. This critique of contemporary cultural norms is very interesting and thought-provoking—a real eye-opener.
SUMMER READING
As part of an effort to get rid of some of my books, I have set aside some that I will either read by May 2022 or get rid of. So this is the pile that I am going to attack first:
(F) Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, by Alfred Hitchcock.
(F) In the Stacks: Short Stories About Libraries and Librarians, edited by Michael Cart.
(NF) How To Resist Amazon and Why, by Danny Caine.
(F) Lovers of Their Time and Other Stories, by William Trevor.
(F) Old Filth, by Jane Gardam.
Martha Hodes
Professor of History, New York University
Swarthmore
Bruce Dorsey
Professor of History, Swarthmore College
Swarthmore
Thinking about the ways that former Swarthmorean editors Rachel Pastan and Satya Nelms connected our local community to issues of racial justice, we offer here our combined list of best books, all by writers of color, for summertime reading.
BEST BOOKS
(NF) The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge, by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Dunbar beautifully traces the life of an enslaved woman who escaped from President George Washington’s Philadelphia home to live as a free woman in New Hampshire. (You can visit the site of Washington’s Philadelphia home: it is next to the Liberty Bell.)
(F) Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid. This widely acclaimed novel, set in Philadelphia, moves back and forth between the points of view of a young African American woman and of the white woman whose child she babysits for. Reid’s talent is to make you laugh, even when the story is devastating.
(F) Real Life, by Brandon Taylor. This gorgeously written novel encompasses a single weekend in the life and mind of a biochemistry graduate student in the Midwest who is struggling with family, professors, and fellow students —the student is from Alabama, queer, and Black.
(NF) Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, by Martha Jones. This is a fresh perspective on the history of women’s suffrage in the United States—published on the centennial anniversary of its achievement—describing how Black women played a central role in transforming voting rights in America.
(F) The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead. Whitehead stunningly takes historical sources describing events at a boys’ school in the deep South just before the start of the civil rights movement, and transforms them into utterly absorbing historical fiction.
SUMMER READING
(NF) On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed.
(NF) Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong.
(NF) All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family’s Keepsake, by Tiya Miles.
(NF) How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith.
(NF) Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Natasha Tretheway.
Matthew Larsen
Elementary school librarian
Swarthmore
BEST BOOKS
(F) All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders. A spectacular, scintillating mashup of science fiction and fantasy, this story follows the lives of Patricia (a witch-in-training) and Laurence (a budding mad scientist) from their beginnings as childhood friends who may be more. When the societies of magic and technology go to war, Patricia and Laurence must find a way to save themselves, each other, and possibly the world. Anders fills this text to the brim with wordplay, nods to genre tropes, unexpected plot swerves, and legitimately affecting moments.
(F) The Ten Thousand Doors of January, by Alix E. Harrow. A richly imagined journey through a series of portals that delights in the power of words, stories, and the people who tell them. Harrow’s yarn stars January Scaller, a girl who can sometimes see doors where there shouldn’t be any. Doors that lead to upheaval, change, and maybe her long-lost father. Featuring an intricate plot that circles back upon itself multiple times, a phenomenally realized heroine, and an arrestingly beautiful tone and style, this text is an absolute must-read for those who like science fiction, fantasy, doors, and storytelling.
(F) The City and the City, by China Miéville. I count The City and the City among a tiny handful of books capable of breaking a reader’s brain (in the best possible way). One of my fervent wishes as a fan of fiction is to wipe away all recollection of this text so I could read it again for the first time. This is a murder mystery/police procedural, but also a brilliant piece of speculative fiction with an absolutely shattering Mobius strip of a surprise nestled at its heart, waiting for the reader to uncover it, pause, take a deep breath, and categorically rethink everything they’ve read.
(F) Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons: Stories, by Keith Rosson. How would the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse fare on a team-building cruise? What really motivates the Tooth Fairy? What curse torments the residents of the Orca Motor Inn? These and many other questions (most delightfully unasked) are answered throughout the course of Rosson’s dark, keen, often hilarious series of serrated short stories.
(NF) A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, by George Saunders. Ostensibly a work of literary criticism in which Saunders provides insight through examples from his decades of experience teaching graduate creative writing, this text serves as a literary Trojan horse to Saunder’s often profound observations about fiction, humanity, and storytelling, and how they avail a modern reader. This is simultaneously a professor-side unpacking of a series of classic stories and a hopeful look at what makes them enduring (and what that means about us).
SUMMER READING
(F) The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.
(F) Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir.
(NF) Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, by Mary Roach.
(F) Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells.
(F) Impostor Syndrome, by Kathy Wang.
Morgan McErlean
Strat Haven High School Student
Swarthmore
BEST BOOK
(F) Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout. A simplistic and understated glimpse into the lives of several individuals from the town of Crosby, Maine. Their only connectors lie in their location and interactions with Olive Kitteridge. Strout builds Olive and her life through short stories, each with different views and focusing on different people. It is simple, beautiful, and accompanied by outstanding characterization and writing.
SUMMER READING
(F) Emma, by Jane Austen.
(F) Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë.
(F) Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler.
(F) Persuasion, by Jane Austen.
(F) Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Virginia Brabender
Professor of clinical psychology at Widener University
Swarthmore
BEST BOOKS
(F) Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Intriguing, but perhaps less so than Never Let Me Go.
(NF) The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson. Eye-opening.
(NF) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann. Painfully illuminating.
(F) The Old Maid: (The ‘Fifties), by Edith Wharton. In her eloquent way, Wharton reminds us of the power of assigned family roles.
(F) The Henna Artist, by Alka Joshi. What an engaging debut novel!
SUMMER READING
(F) Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas.
(F) Machines Like Me, by Ian McEwan.
(F) Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr (author of All the Light We Cannot See).
(F) The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead.
(NF) In Defense of a Liberal Education, Fareed Zakaria.
Emily Farrell
Retired English teacher
Media
This summer’s list is about the memorable point of view. I enjoyed books that dealt with characters who were not like me in some way or another. The books on my list for the summer are enclosed, but I cannot vouch for them. Check out next year’s list to see if they were any good. And as usual, if you want my complete list of my favorite books of the year, message me on Facebook.
BEST BOOKS
(NF) Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy, by Ben Macintyre. Follows the story of a Russian spy. She works for the other side, but the reader roots for her.
(F) Florence of Arabia, by Christopher Buckley. Florence is working for the CIA, unbeknownst to her, but she is causing havoc in Saudi Arabia. You will laugh aloud on every page; a perfect antidote for Covid isolation.
(F) Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam. The story deals with people you can relate to. However, their predicament is something you will hopefully not experience.
(F) Rescue, by Anita Shreve. The book tells the story of an EMT, a job I will never have, and his rescue of a woman I would never want to be.
(F) American Dervish, by Ayad Akhtar. This book follows the story of a Pakistani immigrant and his family. I suspect it is somewhat autobiographical.
(F) Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo. A Booker Prize winner, Girl, Woman, Other is about Black women in England and is written in an unusual format which, nevertheless, gripped me.
SUMMER READING
(F) Secrets of Happiness, by Joan Silber.
(F) The Plot, by Jean Hanff Korelitz.
(F) Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead.
(F) The Fourth Child, by Jessica Winter.
George Mulford
Director, the Players Club of Swarthmore
‘Come to the Players Club in August!’
Swarthmore
BEST BOOKS
(NF) This Is Chance!: The Great Alaska Earthquake, Genie Chance, and the Shattered City She Held Together, by Jon Mooallem. A journalist who is also a crackerjack storyteller gives us a you-are-there account of the Anchorage earthquake of 1964, focusing on a local broadcaster, Genie Chance, who bravely stayed on the air during the aftermath, relaying bulletins and news of survivors to the public.
(NF) Toxic Man: the Melvin Wade Story, by Stefan Roots. Roots plugged his own book in these pages last year; Swarthmore Library can get a copy for you to borrow. Melvin Wade, a self-described Black millionaire and Black industrialist, is perhaps the most reviled man in the history of Chester, having been largely responsible for the toxic-fumes fire of 1978, which sickened hundreds of firefighters and residents. On some pages, Wade makes Donald Trump look like a choirboy, but Roots’s fascination with Wade’s life, which was representative of others’ lives in many ways, is infectious.
(NF) The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen. Instead of reading up on his subject and summarizing what he’s learned, Brannen drives around the country interviewing the professional and amateur paleontologists who know the most about it. I’m a sucker for this kind of account, which is in the tradition of Studs Terkel, John McPhee, and Sarah Dry. And I loved the humanizing trip through the geological eras that Brannen takes us on. I’d always wanted to get those straight.
(NF) Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, by Oliver Sacks. This one is a trip through the periodic table, with a pre-adolescent boy as your narrator-guide. Sacks never wrote a dull book!
(F) Transit, by Rachel Cusk. This is the second of the Outline trilogy of novels, and a good one to start with. Cusk has written non-fiction about the trauma of divorce, and her narrator here is a divorced woman, but what hooked me was her sly English humor. The more I read, the funnier it got, and I quickly gobbled up the other two books in the series.
SUMMER READING
(F) Second Place, by Rachel Cusk.
(NF) A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters, by Andrew H. Knoll.
John Morrison
Retired
Swarthmore
BEST BOOKS
(F) All American Boys, by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely.
(B) Mike Nichols: A Life, by Mark Harris.
(F) Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell.
(F) The Bad Muslim Discount, by Syed M. Masood.
(F) Ordinary Grace, by William Kent Krueger.
SUMMER READING
(F) Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.
Pat Beal
Retired
Swarthmore
BEST BOOKS
(F) The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman.
(F) The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner.
(F) The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See.
(F) All The Devils Are Here, by Louise Penny. 16th book in the Inspector Gamache series.
(NF) Mobituaries, by Mo Rocca.
SUMMER READING
(NF) The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson.
Robert Morbeck
Amateur historian/oxen driver
Rutledge
BEST BOOKS
(NF) To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976, by Bruce Kuklick. Mr. Kuklick weaves a compelling case that our hometown nine A’s “threw” the 1914 World Series to the “Miracle Braves” from Beantown. Watch your car, Mister?
(F) Tender Is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. A true classic that lifts you up and transports you to another world. A fascinating bevy of tragic characters mirror Scott and Zelda’s battles with alcohol and mental illness. A literary genius’s last novel.
(NF) Race and the Politics of Perception: The Making of an American City, by Christopher Mele. Fascinating political history of our oft maligned and beleaguered neighbor to the south, Chester. Institutional greed and avarice have spent a century sabotaging any improvements to what was once referred to as Philadelphia’s “Saloon Town.”
(NF) Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, by Neil Shubin. The author is able to explain basic concepts of paleontology in an easy-to-understand way. My anthropologist older sister recommended this one to me, and I was mesmerized. Now a PBS series, too!
(NF) The Fifth Risk, by Michael Lewis. The author of Moneyball tackles the 2016 Presidential Transition and details all the ways dedicated Federal employees protect us from some of our worst ideas. Reading The Fifth Risk was truly a life changing experience for me.
SUMMER READING
(NF) The Blood of Emmett Till, by Timothy B. Tyson. My wife and I have freshly returned from a visit to the Mississippi Delta Region, where we were lucky enough to receive a guided tour of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. A jury of 12 white men predictably found two murderers innocent in the 1955 lynching of a black youngster visiting from Chicago.
(NF) Underground Philadelphia: From Caves and Canals to Tunnels and Transit, by Harry Kyriakodis and Joel Spivak. Local authors take us on a subterranean jaunt under the City of Brotherly Love (and Sisterly Affection). What lies beneath our feet? Excited to find out!
(NF) The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, by Michael Lewis. Perhaps a sequel to The Fifth Risk. Lewis uses his unique talents to examine how the United States faltered in its reaction to the coronavirus, unnecessarily tearing the very fabric of American life. Can’t wait to read it.
(NF) The Cat Men of Gotham: Tales of Feline Friendships in Old New York, by Peggy Gavan. Been privy to three of the author’s pandemic webinars. She is an incredible story teller.
(NF) Man’s Forgotten Friend: A History of the Ox, by N. Stoppard-Rose. Highlight of my spring was an oxen training class at Colonial PA Plantation in Edgemont. Would love to learn more about these magnificent beasts!
Beth Fletcher
Swarthmore
BEST BOOKS
(F) The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich. Winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Erdrich’s historical novel is about the fight in the 1950s to stop the dispossessing and displacement of Native Americans. The main character’s experiences are based on the life of Erdrich’s grandfather, Patrick Gourneau (a member of the Turtle Mountain Band in North Dakota). This important novel sheds light on a little known aspect of our history. Erdrich’s writing is enthralling, as is the story. All of her novels are worth reading.
(F) Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. Winner of the Booker Women’s Prize for Fiction. A novel imagining what the life and death of Shakespeare’s son Hamnet might have been like. Often wrenching. Gorgeously written.
(NF) World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. All of the short nature essays that make up this collection are well-written and delightful — worth reading and rereading.
(NF) The Hidden World of the Fox, by Adele Brand. Often funny, charming, and fascinating.
(NF) Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl, by Jonathan C. Slaght. The author, an American, works for the Wildlife Conservation Society as their Russia and Northeast Asia coordinator. This is an account of the four years he spent in the remote forests of Primorye Province in Russia’s Far East, studying the endangered Blakiston’s fish owl. This rare and elusive owl has a six-foot wingspan and stands over two feet tall. Its habitat is under threat from logging activity. The book is both an exciting travel adventure and a conservation story.
SUMMER READING
(NF) Fox and I: An Uncommon Friendship, by Catherine Raven. A memoir of Raven’s personal encounters with a fox.
(F) The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, by Tom Lin. A different take on the classic Western genre—with magical realism added. The novel, set in the 1860s during the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the United States, is told through the eyes of Ming Tsu, an orphaned Chinese-American.
(F) The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller. Homer’s Iliad retold from the perspective of Achilles’ friend, Patroclus.
(F) The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. The main character, Nora Seed, finds a library at the edge of the universe with books that describe the multiple possible lives each person could have led.
(F) Sooley, by John Grisham. A South Sudanese basketball player, in the U.S. on a college scholarship, becomes determined to bring his family to America after a civil war breaks out in his homeland.
