Emory faculty share their favorite summer reads

Whether your plans include travel or lazy weekends on a porch swing, these summer reading picks from Emory faculty encompass vivid worlds written to engross, entertain and make readers ponder the big questions.

Sarah Higinbotham, associate professor of English

“The Keeper” by Tana French

I spend the academic year helping students build and defend arguments and pursuing the same myself. But by May, something in me is ready to stop making sense of things and simply live inside them. Tana French knows exactly how to get you there.

Reading French means surrendering the urge to solve her mysteries. The pleasure comes not from figuring them out but from being subsumed in them and having them revealed alongside you. Ardnakelty, her fictional village in western Ireland, becomes a landscape for identity, belonging and the surprising ways women show up for each other. French has always cared about where power lives, and in “The Keeper,” it lives in women: the ways they move through a world that has underestimated them and the ways they find each other across that world’s indifference. 

“Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven” by Barry Lopez

This book came with me on a trip I took with nine students and Oxford College chaplain Brent Huckaby as we drove a 15-person passenger van through several Utah national parks. The immersive class was part of Oxford College’s annual Global Connections program. 

As we drove through those magnificent landscapes, I thought of how Barry Lopez explores our place in a world that preceded us and will outlast us. This series of short stories and nonfiction vignettes unfolds as a series of koans — Zen in their refusal to argue or conclude. “To understand the nature of silence,” he writes, “you must be able to see into this space between your shadows.” On the Colorado River, in a raft with five rising Emory juniors, a bald eagle looked right through us. A raven searched among the rocks for something we did not know and never looked up. Lopez would call that not loneliness but abundance.

Didem Uca, assistant professor of German studies

“Finding My Way: A Memoir” by Malala Yousafzai

You may think you know Malala Yousafzai’s story. At 17, she became the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate for her bravery speaking out against the Taliban. She then co-wrote her first autobiography, “I am Malala,” along with Christina Lamb. 

Her subsequent memoir, “Finding My Way,” doesn’t just portray a fearless advocate for the universal right to education and a symbol of feminist resistance — titles that the author certainly deserves. Rather, this intimate coming-of-age story reveals the fears, insecurities and, yes, hilarious hijinks of a young person discovering who she is in a world trying to define her. With its stunningly honest portrayal of the author’s mental health, academic and social struggles, as well as how she finds joy and fulfillment, this is required summer reading for every college student and educator.

“A Curious Beginning” by Deanna Raybourn 

The first book in Raybourn’s mystery series set in Victorian England introduces us to Veronica Speedwell, a formidable spinster sleuth with a yen for adventure, as she solves a murder and uncovers the truth of her own origins. Speedwell, a lepidopterist — someone who studies butterflies and moths — joins a zany cast of characters. These include Revelstoke “Stoker” Templeton-Vane, an irritable-yet-steadfast fellow natural scientist and aristo-outcast.

The delightful banter, detailed setting and references to historical figures and events kept me hooked till the end. Meanwhile, the quality of the prose, particularly when Veronica waxes poetic about collecting butterfly specimens, elevates this title above your average cozy. This would make for the perfect beach read and, if you enjoy it, you’re in luck: the series includes nine more books (and counting)!

“Valor: Stories” by Murathan Mungan, translated by Aron Aji and David Gramling

This lyrical translation of folklore-inspired tales by an acclaimed Turkish author will take you on a journey this summer. Drawing on the author’s multiethnic Turkish, Arab and Kurdish cultural background and his queer identity, the stories braid together rich storytelling traditions with contemporary contexts. 

Its central coming-of-age narrative is “Shahmaran’s Legs.” The story’s protagonist reflects on his apprenticeship to an artist creating depictions of Shahmaran, a mythical half-woman, half-snake from folklore across the Middle East. This story is particularly nostalgic for me, as a mixed-media painting of Shahmaran that I purchased 15 years ago with my father in his hometown of Mardin, Turkey, hangs in my home office. 

While the apprentice’s master regales him with stories of how Shahmaran was betrayed by humans, he begins learning to draw, and his artwork eventually contends with what it means to be an outsider “held captive inside an eccentric identity” that does “not fully belong either in the world of humans or in the world of snakes.” 

This collection maintains a fascinating tension between modern life and the heroic framing of myth. As Aji and Gramling write in their translators’ preface, “These stories each take a frozen, closed image and open it over and over and over, insisting on knowing what is yet to be found there.”

John Lysaker, director of Emory Center for Ethics and William R. Kenan University Professor

“On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays” by Emily Ogden

This collection of short essays offers pithy reflections that embrace the fact that we are limited beings. “A person can want a clear view and not get it,” Ogden writes. “A person can believe decisive action is required and yet not know how to begin.”

But that shouldn’t paralyze us or allow us to drift into skepticism. Nor should it become a cynical pose. “If there is a kind of unknowing that could serve now,” she writes, “it is not the defensiveness of willful ignorance but the defenselessness of not knowing yet.”

What does that mean, exactly? I think we need to find that in our own ways, but Ogden does show us her way. She keeps close to the concrete as she writes about minnows, swimming in the Aegean Sea, nursing infants, the words “ornery” and “riff,” raising small boys, sheering sheep and milking cows. In her words: “I try to resist the temptation to turn away from things as I find them — blurry, quicksilver, unhandsome.” 

These pages are graceful, fluid and they open onto scenes that surprise and instruct.

“The Unicorn” by Iris Murdoch

This novel tracks several characters who also want a clear view and decisive action, and dramatizes what happens when muddled people meddle in complex situations. 

The book is set in a rural, seaside estate where Marian, seeking some pattern or order for her life, is hired as companion and tutor for Hannah, the lady of the estate. But Hannah seems to be imprisoned at the request of her absent husband.

The situation seems like a perfect test for Marian to show her mettle. But neither she nor anyone else seems to have a handle on what is really going on or what Hannah actually wants — including Hannah herself. How do you do right by someone when their circumstances are blurry, perhaps even to themselves? 

“The Unicorn” is a fit companion for “On Not Knowing.” The latter is a book of observations about seeing the world lovingly. The former is about the perils of trying to change it. Where “On Not Knowing” skims, “The Unicorn” is relentless in its exposition of apparent insights encountering the difficulty of reality. Neither are light reads, but nor are they ever dull. I suppose you need to decide how much extra unclear reality you want in your life.