Six Princeton professors talk about favorite books and share what’s on their summer reading lists — fiction, nonfiction, biography, science fiction, history, fantasy — including books by colleagues.
This summer’s mix includes some sci-fi and fantasy deep cuts, a Native botanist’s meditation on honoring nature (recommended by two professors), a mycologist’s celebration of fungi, novels set in France, Ireland, Sweden, the Swiss Alps and across Asia, a memoir from Cameroon, a book of letters by women in ancient Egypt, a cat behavior book and more.
Laura Kalin
Kalin is an associate professor of linguistics. She is working on a project on what’s known as “root and pattern morphology” — an unusual way words are formed in some languages that involves interweaving the parts of the word, rather than the more usual way of placing the parts next to one another.
Tell us about a particular book on your shelf.
“Universals in Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives, and the Structure of Words” by Jonathan David Bobaljik. Bobaljik compares how 300 languages express comparative and superlative meanings, like fast/faster/fastest. This book is a beautiful illustration of a fruitful methodology for making deep discoveries about human languages. I turn to this book again and again as a model for how to do meaningful linguistic work.
What’s on your summer reading list?
“A Deadly Education” by Naomi Novik. This is the first book in the Scholomance trilogy, which I reread with relish every summer. Fantasy is my favorite genre. The Scholomance is a magical, sentient school built to protect young wizards, whose blossoming abilities attract evil creatures. The books center on one girl’s journey coming to terms with her own extraordinarily powerful magic and taking on the problems of the magical community.
I also love science fiction. “Platform Decay” by Martha Wells is the eighth and newest book in the MurderBot Diaries. The series is exciting and fast-paced. Humans have created hybrid human-robots, called SecUnits, controlled by an implant that will destroy them if they go against orders. A SecUnit named MurderBot hacks its own implant and uses its new freedom to watch soap operas and, through many (mis)adventures, to grapple with the question, “What do I want out of life?”
“My Friends” by Fredrik Backman. This Swedish novel, by one of my favorite fiction writers, is about a young graffiti artist named Louisa in the foster system. For much of her adolescence she has been obsessed with a painting of three children on a pier. One day, she stumbles upon the artist, altering the trajectory of her life.
“Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York” by Ross Perlin. We give this book to all our linguistics majors and minors at graduation — to help our students think about how they might bring linguistics forward into their lives — but I have yet to read it. New York City, where many of our students end up after graduation, is the most linguistically diverse place on earth. The book is extremely accessible — anyone can enjoy it.
My ideal place to read is the wicker couch on my front porch, curled up with a cup of tea and our two cats — Chaos, who is 18, and Rigatoni, 6, newly adopted. But Rigatoni cannot peacefully co-exist with Chaos. So this summer I am going to read “Total Cat Mojo: The Ultimate Guide to Life with Your Cat” by Jackson Galaxy. This book helps you appreciate how recently cats were domesticated, how that affects their behavior and how we, as humans, can be good partners to our cats and (hopefully) help them get along with each other.
My girls — a 6-year-old and a 2-year-old — and I are devouring the graphic novel series “Zita the Spacegirl” by Ben Hatke, the “Junie B. Jones” series by Barbara Park, and “Sisters” by Raina Telgemeier, part of a delightful graphic novel series.
AnneMarie Luijendijk
Luijendijk is the William H. Danforth Professor of Religion and head of Huo College. She sometimes stays up way too late reading before bed, switching between nonfiction and fiction, most recently “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business” by Charles Duhigg, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth, “The Lost Baker of Vienna” by Sharon Kurtzman, a historical novel set in the aftermath of World War II, and “The Cairo Trilogy” by 1988 Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, a family saga of colonial Egypt.
Tell us about a particular book on your shelf.
I have two. Both tie into my interest in the everyday lives of people in late antiquity in Egypt:
- “Egypt in Late Antiquity” by Roger Bagnall. He is a papyrologist like me. Papyrology is the study of texts written on papyrus, which dates as far back as the third millennium before the Common Era. This book is a model for how you pull meaning from lots of mundane documents — that individually may not look very important, like receipts, letters, legal documents, orders of arrest — into larger narratives about economy, religion, social structures, politics.
- “Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800” by Roger Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore. I teach about early Christianity and use this book, a collection of about 1,000 letters, because it gives women’s voices and their perspective and we don’t often have that from this era. They have many of the same concerns we have: they are worried, they need their money back, they need clothes or food, they are craving connection.
What’s on your summer reading list?
“The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Volume LXXXVIII,” edited by A. Benaissa, W. B. Henry, et al. This one’s pretty nerdy. Most of my research is on a city called Oxyrhynchus, one of the most important cities in Egypt in antiquity. There was a time in Egypt when a substantial part of the population spoke Greek. We have a huge number of Greek texts that were found at garbage heaps there. This is Volume 88. The first volume was published in 1896. When I began my dissertation, I read all of them.
“Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages” by David Nirenberg, currently the director of the Institute for Advanced Study. I need to read this book, a theoretical historical perspective on violence against religious minorities, to finish a journal article I’m writing about inter-Christian religious violence in Oxyrhynchus.
“Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration” by Matthew D.C. Larsen, a former postdoctoral fellow in Princeton’s Society of Fellows, and Mark Letteney, a 2020 Princeton graduate alumnus who is joining the religion faculty this fall. This book would be of interest to anyone interested in the topic of incarceration. The previous concept was that there were no prisons in the ancient world and that Romans did not use incarceration as a form of punishment, but the authors gathered extensive written and material culture to support their findings that there were actual prisons.
As head of Huo College, I hold teatime at my house weekly. Students come by and we talk about what’s going on in their life, their studies and extracurriculars. We also talk about literature. A few books students have recommended:
- “Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I love this book. The author, a botanist and Indigenous scholar, gives deep lessons about how to find a way of living where you can honor nature and still get everything you need out of it. It’s so moving. I’m also crazy about her book “Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.”
- “The Overstory” by Richard Powers. This novel is about trees. The writing is so powerful and is like a tree: It begins with shorter stories, like roots, about different people, then comes together like a big, tall trunk and then branches out.
- “The House in Paris” by Elizabeth Bowen, published in 1935. I will be with my children in the Netherlands and Paris this summer and I always like to read novels set in a place before I go there. Before going to Naples, I read Elena Ferrante’s quartet “The Neapolitan Novels.”
- “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson, a book about two orphaned sisters being raised by a succession of female relatives. It evokes questions of what home and belonging, memory, and grief, are like.
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Okeke-Agulu is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies and director of the Africa World Initiative. He is curating the exhibition “El Anatsui: Prints and Play,” opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in December.
Tell us about a particular book on your shelf.
“El Anatsui: The Reinvention of Sculpture.” I co-wrote this book with Okwui Enwezor and use it all the time in my teaching. El Anatsui’s sculptures are made of aluminum bottle caps that he and his assistants cut and shape and stitch together with copper wire, like chain mail or a blanket. Each time one of his works is installed, it looks different — that is the artist’s mandate. One of his pieces is in the Princeton University Art Museum. I ask my students, what does it mean for an artwork to keep changing?
“Who Owns Beauty?” by Bénédicte Savoy. Savoy explores the histories of artworks that have traveled across time, across nations, even continents — through sometimes forced, sometimes diplomatic, sometimes commercial exchange. She asks: Who owns those objects, given that at some point they were in one location and valued there and then were moved to another location?
“Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe” by D. Vance Smith, professor of English at Princeton. This is a fascinating, well-researched, elegantly written book by my colleague, who grew up in Zimbabwe and Kenya. He shows how, long before colonialism, some of the fundamental ideas that Europeans held about themselves and the world drew from the work of African scholars during the medieval age.
“America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries” by Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton. On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the nation, this new book reflects on what it means to be in a celebratory mode at a time of overwhelming anxiety. Glaude starts the book with, “I don’t love America.” But as you read on, what you find is that this is someone who is so much in love with America, and he wants America to work for everybody, and he will not stop because only in the full accounting of our history can one decide what it means to be American today.
“Scale Boy: An African Childhood” by novelist Patrice Nganang. This memoir is about his childhood in the capital city of Yaoundé, Cameroon, when he worked as a scale boy, taking a German-made scale to people who wanted to check their weight. This allows him to meet people across classes and ethnicities and reflect on the politically turbulent Cameroon in the 1980s. It’s also about his love for his family — that even a young boy of very little means could have a very happy childhood.
Juri Seo
Seo is a professor of music and director of composition for graduate students. She is working on a new composition centered around fungi.
Tell us about a particular book on your shelf.
“An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us” by [2021 Pulitzer Prize winner] Ed Yong. This book is about how animals experience the world around them, based on their perceptual capacities. Making musical versions of birdsong is an old fascination for musicians. This book shifted my focus from birdsong as I hear it to birdsong as birds hear it and led to my 2023 piece “Birds, Bees, Electric Fish,” for flute/percussion quartet, about how these different species experience the world.
What’s on your summer reading list?
“Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures” by British biologist Merlin Sheldrake is about fungi and reads like a memoir of a mycophile. It inspired my work-in-progress for Sō Percussion, Princeton’s Edward T. Cone Performers-in-Residence, with the core idea is that everything is connected, like the root network of fungi. The audience is blindfolded, which heightens their senses. The performers move around them, which makes the music more magical. Mushroom tea is brewed to heighten smell. Radiant heaters, designed by my colleagues Jeff Snyder and Forrest Meggers can be programmed — when a low sound gets louder, for example, the heat increases. And a mushroom-based tasting at the end — an attempt at a more holistic, sensory approach to performance.
“Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music” by Derek Bailey. This introductory text on improvisation covers jazz, baroque, rock and other traditions through interviews with major improvisers talking about creativity, freedom, collaboration and how musicians think in real time. My graduate advisee Travis Laplante, who is combining his serious improvisation background with composed concert work for his dissertation, gave me this book. In my own composing, I’m interested in the opposite direction — moving from formal notation into improvisation — with this book as a starting point.
“Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime, A MusiComic Manifesto” by Ge Wang is included in the syllabus for a course I’m teaching in the fall called “Musical Instruments: Sound, Perception, and Creativity.” We consider not only the acoustics and function of instruments, but also the possibilities of connection between humans and instruments. This book offers a broader way of thinking about instruments as experiential systems. I love that it’s a comic book.
For fun, I’ll be reading “The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story” by [2018 Nobel laureate] Olga Tokarczuk. During a pre-concert talk I did with Canadian composer Allan Gordon Bell last year, I mentioned that my favorite novel is [1929 Nobel laureate] Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps before World War I. The way Mann deals with how time flows — sometimes very slowly, sometimes very fast — resonates with me as a composer. Allan recommended “The Empusium,” which reimagines Mann’s book.
Robert Spoo
Spoo is the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters, professor of English, co-director of the Fund for Irish Studies, a 1986 Princeton graduate alumnus and a lawyer.
Tell us about a particular book on your shelf.
“After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal” by Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde’s grandson. This is a fascinating book about what happened to the Wilde family after the tragedy of that great author, playwright and wit. After the trial, following his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde became bankrupt, and all of his goods, his books and paintings, even his copyrights were sold. Merlin spoke at the Fund for Irish Studies in April and said his book is about undoing the whitewashing of the truth of what Wilde’s family endured because of the scandal and its legal aftermath.
What’s on your summer reading list?
“Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney. I’ve taught other novels by this dynamic Irish writer in my Modern Irish Literature seminar and hope to add this one. Every Irish author who becomes significant has to grapple at some point with James Joyce and his experimental fiction. This book, I think, in part, is Rooney stepping up to explore that modernist technique.
“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media” by Walter Benjamin. I am rereading this fascinating Marxist theorist who had a gift for close reading. This edition is beautifully edited by three professors of German at Princeton — Brigid Doherty, Michael W. Jennings, Thomas Y. Levin.
“A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927)’’ by Marcel Proust, or in English, “Remembrance of Things Past.” It’s a novel about returning to things after years of being away. I’m rereading it slowly — as one should read Proust, in the French, taking in a page or a paragraph at a time. It’s good bedtime reading — it’s partly about bedtime reading and finding ways of falling asleep. It’s also about involuntary memory, when something unexpected stimulates a very vivid experience of the past (like the famous madeleine-dipped-in-tea scene). Here is the link to an in-print edition in French, recommended by André Benhaïm, a Proust scholar and professor of French at Princeton, but I’m reading the decades-old paperback edition I’ve had since I was an undergrad — there’s something comforting about that. It’s held together with rubber bands, as all my books are, that have broken and I’ve retied. You have your old self in the marginalia and it reminds you that you were once new to the text.
I wrote the foreword for “James Joyce: A Political Life” by Frank Callanan, just published in April. It’s so rich and rewarding, I’m rereading it for my undergraduate seminar on Joyce this fall. The political fall and then death in 1891 of the parliamentary leader Charles Stewart Parnell affected Ireland and very much affected Joyce’s family, in particular his father, when Joyce was a boy of 8 or 9. The book is a kind of witnessing of a paternal crisis that helped shape Joyce’s political outlook on life.
Ben Xinzi Zhang
Zhang, a 2022 Princeton graduate alumnus, is a lecturer in the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and manager and co-instructor of the Integrated Science Curriculum for first-year students. He currently serves as the faculty-in-residence of Huo College.
Tell us about a particular book on your shelf.
“Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. So many of the ideas in this book — the gift economy, reciprocity and the sense of place that permeates Indigenous wisdom — are ideas that I use with students.
Kimmerer talks about the meaning of harvest and what it means to grow in symbiosis with nature. As scientists, our “harvest” is the observations we make in the world and the knowledge we produce for the benefit of humanity. Kimmerer discusses the concept of an honorable harvest. I ask my students: What is our place, as aspiring scientists, in that process, and what makes our harvest honorable? We talk about not just the end product of science but about the humility and enrichment you gain in the process of collaboration and discovery.
What’s on your summer reading list?
“Wendell Berry and Higher Education: Cultivating Virtues of Place” by Jack R. Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro. Each chapter expands on one of Berry’s works — poetry, fiction, essays — in the context of higher ed, such as focusing not just on degrees and one’s career, but on finding community wherever you are, in and after college, and putting down roots and engaging with that community.
“Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique” by Jonathan Gienapp. I immigrated to this country from China for college and I’m fascinated by the historical and social underpinnings of national states, especially the United States. Who shaped the institutional norms we inhabit and what were their motivations? This is one of the books I decided to read to provide some historical context to the debates and fissures I see around me.
“The Stolen Bicycle” by Wu Ming-Yi. This historical novel by a Taiwanese writer is many stories, set in Taiwan — from the time of Japanese colonization in 1895 to now — and across Asia, woven together with bicycles and bike references. The author is fascinated by bicycles but it’s also so much more than that.
“What Remains: Coming to Terms With Civil War in 19th Century China” by Tobie Meyer-Fong. I grew up in Yangzhou, which experienced periods of great prosperity but has fallen from prominence since the early 18th century. This book is about the Taiping Rebellion, which befell my home region in the 1850s and ’60s, one of the largest civil wars in the world around that time. I think more than 20 million people died. By reflecting on that war, the author broaches difficult topics around human suffering and political struggle. It will also give me a new lens on my city’s history.
