Wondering what to read this summer? Need a beach book? Check out what the crew at The Journal and Catch & Release are reading (or planning on reading) this summer…
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Elina Mishuris
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Vladimir Nabokov
“The distinctive feature of everything extant is its monotony.” Not here, though.
Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson
“A woman looks into her bag and recognizes none of her belongings. She hurries home. But where is home? She follows the address written in her purse. She has never seen this house before and who are those ugly children wrecking the garden? Inside a fat man is waiting for his supper. She shoots him.”
The Associated Press Stylebook 2014 Edition
T-shirt or t-shirt? Slumlord? Slush fund? Petty Officer WHAT CLASS? Behold, the day of the Stylebook cometh, and thou wilt capitalize Hades, but keep it lowercase in hell.
Elina Mishuris is the Fiction Editor of Catch & Release. She has been cleared of all charges.
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John Gerace
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
I added this to my list on a friend’s recommendation. Hofstadter begins the preface to the 20th anniversary edition by wondering how it could be that nobody seems to understand what this book is about. Challenge accepted! Clocking in at nearly 750 pages, I suppose this is, for me, the non-fiction equivalent of Infinite Jest.
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Upon Marquez’s death, my friends kept on talking about how much they either loved or hated this book. Since this seems to be a giant gap in my literary education, I thought I would give it a whirl.
Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee
I saw Chang-Rae Lee speak at the Brooklyn Book Festival where I received a preview of the first few chapters of his latest novel, On Such a Full Sea, which I enjoyed. Since the book wasn’t released at the time, I instead decided to pick up his first novel, which has been sitting on my shelf for months, so this reading is long overdue
John Gerace is a fiction writer and the publisher for issue 53 of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art.
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Robert Henderson
The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner
This is a book about the great economists, recommended for me by Patty O’Toole. I’ve started it and it’s great.
The Nachman Stories by Leonard Michaels
Short fiction stories about a loner mathematician. Recommended to me by Phillip Lopate. I’ve started these and am enjoying them a lot.
The Night of the Gun by David Carr
A memoir I’ve heard good things about that I’ve been wanting to make time for.
Other things on an ambitious list: Don Quixote, How Proust Can Change Your Life, some of Brian Greene’s writings on quantum Mechanics, and A Self Made of Words (book on writing memoir by Carl Klaus)
Robert Henderson is a soon-to-be-second year MFA student in the nonfiction concentration, and sits on the nonfiction board of the Journal. He came to Columbia last fall after a 15-year career on Wall Street, preceded by a six-year stint in grad school getting a PhD in theoretical physics, which was preceded by two years as a systems engineer designing satellite communication systems for a defense contractor in L.A. Before that he was a student, and for a little while a photojournalist with the A.P.
