FAME Best Summer Reading

Professors and their book recommendations:

MC Bodden

  • Franny and Zooey (J. D. Salinger)
  • Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
  • All of Jane Austen's novels
  • Olive k\Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
  • Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
  • People of the Book (Geraldine Brooks)
  • Animal Dreams (Barbara Kingsolver)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
  • The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark)

John Boly

  • Welcome to the Monkey House and Other Stories (Kurt Vonnegut) 
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K. Dick) 
  • Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro) 
  • The Shell Game (Steve Alten) 
  • The Creature From Jekyll Island (G. Edward Griffin) 

Julia Chavez

  • Lady Audley's Secret (M.E. Braddon)
  • The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins)
  • The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
  • Derek Walcott's poetry
  • East, West  (Salman Rushdie)

Diane Hoeveler

  • Angels and Insects (A S Byatt) 
  • Possession (A S Byatt) 
  • The Complete Stories (Flannery O'Connor) 
  • The Collector of Hearts (Joyce Carol Oates)

Daniel Khalastchi

  • The Boat (Nam Le)
  • The House of Tomorrow (Peter Bognanni)
  • Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (Lydia Peelle)
  • Everything Is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer)
  • One More Year (Sana Krasikov)
  • Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri)
  • Lost City Radio (Daniel Alarcón)
  • Facts for Visitors (Srikanth Reddy)
  • The Irrationalist  (Suzanne Buffam)
  • The End (Salvatore Scibona)
  • In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Daniyal Mueenuddin)

Christine Krueger

  • All of Dorothy Sayers’s mystery novels (especially Gaudy Night) 
  • The Way We Live Now (Anthony Trollope,)

Jodi Melamed

  • Dog-Eaters (Jessica Hagedorn) 
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, ) 
  • A Mercy (Toni Morrison,)
  • Drowning in Fire (Craig Womack) 

Rebecca Nowacek

  • Paris to the Moon (Adam Gopnik)
  • Me Talk Pretty One Day (David Sedaris)
  • What the Dog Saw (or anything by Malcolm Gladwell)
  • Ragtime (E.L. Doctorow)

Dana Prodoehl

  • Kindred (Octavia Butler)
  • The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)
  • Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

Kris Ratcliffe

  • Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)
  • The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Sherman Alexie)
  • Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) 
  • Persuasion (Jane Austen) 

Angela Sorby

  • Crampton Hodnet (Barbara Pym)
  • Petropolis (Anya Ulinich) 

John Su

  • All the King's Men
  • Les Miserables
  • In an Ancient Land
  • A People's History of American Empire (graphic novel)

Sarah Wadsworth

  • Anything by Margaret Drabble (e.g., The Radiant Way and The Seven Sisters) 
  • Anything by A. S. Byatt (e.g., Still Life and The Children's Book)
  • Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon)