Looking for a page-turner to curl up with over the winter break? Look no further. Emory faculty give the scoop on favorite books they read for pleasure this year and what made them so enthralling.
Julio Medina, assistant professor, Dance and Movement Studies Program
“Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
“Mexican Gothic” is a lush, suspenseful novel that blends eerie horror with glamorous 1950’s style. It follows Noemí Taboada, a sharp, rebellious socialite who travels to a remote mansion in the Mexican countryside after receiving a disturbing letter from her newly married cousin. What begins as a simple family concern quickly spirals into a chilling mystery involving a strange, oppressive household, unsettling dreams and secrets buried deep within the decaying estate.
Combining atmospheric tension with rich historical and cultural detail, the book delivers a captivating read for anyone who enjoys haunting stories, strong heroines and gothic thrills. Moreno-Garcia hooks readers with vivid descriptions and a quick pace. I loved it so much that I kept reading it after my newborn’s birth, in the late hours and early mornings of autumn.
Didem Uca, assistant professor, German Studies
“Detective Aunty: a Novel” by Uzma Jalaluddin
Perhaps in a quest for the justice that often eludes us in real life, I have recently become obsessed with the “cozy mystery,” a genre in which an amateur sleuth somewhat haphazardly solves the whodunnit whilst baking scones or running a bookshop.
Uzma Jalaluddin’s “Detective Aunty” brings the coziness while also providing commentary on how society treats aging women. It is also an uplifting, yet realistic view of a family’s resilience in the face of grief.
Our gumshoe, Pakistani-Canadian grandmother and recent widow Kausar Khan, has been underestimated and overlooked, leading her to develop keen observational skills. When her daughter becomes the primary murder suspect after the victim’s body is found in her Toronto clothing boutique, Kausar will stop at nothing to find the true culprit. Funny, charming, and full of rich cultural details, Jalaluddin’s novel will keep you on your toes! I’m already looking forward to the sequel, “Moonlight Murder,” coming out next March.
“Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays” by Mary Oliver
Even the poetry skeptics among us can appreciate the singular thrill of a work by Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and National Book Award. This collection takes wing with Oliver’s famous poem “Wild Geese,” and continues with meditations on different species. Each piece, delivered with her signature lyrical gut punch and life-affirming style, leads us to wonder how much we understand, and are understood by, the natural world around us. My backyard is home to jays, woodpeckers, cardinals, owls and the occasional hawk, and when I look out and see them, whether perched or in flight, Oliver’s verses ring in my ears.
The final lines of the opening poem describes the act of writing and witnessing — and, in my view, the raison d'être for a liberal arts education:
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting––
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Jonathan Master, associate professor, Department of Classics and director, Emory’s Voluntary Core Curriculum Program
“Death Comes for the Archbishop” by Willa Cather
The book I most enjoyed reading in 2025 is Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” published in 1927. More than anything else, the novel’s description of the dry and rugged landscape of the Southwest absorbed me. Within that seemingly unchanging geography, Cather stages a confrontation of old and new world cultures, with the Catholic Church on the one hand and the Indigenous peoples, especially the Navajo, on the other.
Although the novel centers on a French priest sent to oversee a diocese in mid-to-late-19th-century New Mexico, Cather integrates many historical figures and events into the story. These include Kit Carson, a frontiersman of the West who, along with the railroad, symbolizes the relentless and indomitable expansion of the United States. There’s also Manuelito, the real-life Navajo chief who led the resistance to American expansion, and the horrific Long Walk of the Navajo to their brief but catastrophic stay at Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Though Cather wrote the novel nearly 100 years ago, she was already looking back on a West that no longer existed.
Sarah Higinbotham, associate professor, English, Oxford College
“Bleak House” by Charles Dickens
I reread Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House” this year. Then I brought 43 Oxford College first-year students overseas for the fall semester, the first group of students in our Oxford Launch: London program. There, I taught them Dickens’ opening chapter of this novel, including a famous passage describing fog: fog everywhere, fog in the eyes and throats, fog at the very heart of the law courts where justice ought to be.
Together, we walked the very same streets Dickens walked while writing his novel, and it changed how I understand what teaching is.
Teaching, it turns out, is mostly about time — the gift of it, and the luxury of sitting together long enough to wrestle with great sentences until they crack open. To read that fog passage aloud and then read it again, slower. To let Dickens’ syntax pile up like the fog itself until you feel the weight of it, the moral pressure of all that atmosphere. To have nowhere else to be but inside the question of how a writer turns weather into vision, how London’s air becomes an ethos.
When I was my Oxford students’ age, I had a teacher who gave me that kind of time. When I taught this fall, I felt my former teacher in the classroom with us: not as memory, but as method, a way of seeing that he’d planted so deeply within me, it felt like sight itself. “The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest,” Dickens wrote, and what my teacher taught me was to stand in that fog without rushing through it — not because clarity always comes, but because that patient attention, that willingness to contemplate what’s dense and difficult, is itself the teaching.