Welcome, incoming Cal students!

You're new to Berkeley, you're busy people, but at some point you may find yourself looking for a good book to read (or documentary to watch) – one that isn't an assignment for a class. When you are, we'd like to invite you to peruse this year's edition of the Summer Reading List for New Students, a list of great reads suggested just for you by your fellow Cal students, faculty, and staff.

This year, we've asked for suggestions around the theme “(Re)Writing the Rules,” and the Cal community didn't disappoint – their recommendations contributed to the biggest summer reading list yet. (“Quantity does not equal quality,” goes the old rule, but in this case it does.)

Read them this year, read them next, read them anytime by returning to this website (remember reading.berkeley.edu) to check out this list, or the archive of summer reading lists dating back to 1985, and we invite you to visit one of our amazing Library collections to find them on campus.

A warm welcome to Cal, and happy reading!

Michael Larkin (he/him)
Lecturer
College Writing Programs

Tim Dilworth (he/him)
First-Year Coordinator
UC Berkeley Library

Alison Wannamaker
Graphic Designer
UC Berkeley Library

Jesse Loesberg (he/him)
Web Developer
UC Berkeley Library

#CalSummerReading


Crip Camp

Nicole Newnham, Jim LeBrecht (directors)

Following a group of disabled teenagers from Camp Jened in New York to Berkeley, California, in the 1970s, this exuberant documentary chronicles a turning point in the disability rights movement and the fight for accessibility. Our student reviewers for the 2023 On the Same Page program described the documentary as “incredible,” “moving,” “full of fun, joy, and love,” and something that “everyone should see.” Another student reviewer appreciated the documentary’s portrayal of “disabled-centered happiness and accomplishments, one of the many ways it changed my perspective.” Crip Camp reminds us of the power of community and activism to rewrite the rules (literally!) and change the world.

AILEEN LIU
Director of Curricular Engagement Initiatives
College of Letters & Science

The Beadworkers: Stories

Beth Piatote

The featured read for the 2022-2023 LEP Global Book Club, Beth Piatote’s debut collection is rich, inventive, and altogether stunning. The very first words are written in nimipuutímt – the language of her Nez Perce heritage – a decision that, rather than being alienating as some publishers feared, invites readers to trust that their discomfort will be rewarded. Throughout the collection, she draws on Nez Perce history, aesthetics, and culture to provide a complex picture of modern Native American life that is as rooted in injustice as it is joy, community, and resilience. The stories she tells are at once a radical departure from dominant narratives while also deeply reflective of the human condition, giving all readers the opportunity to experience new ways of being while drawing connections to their own. From poetry to prose, board game rules to a reimagination of an ancient Greek tragedy, her varied use of form and genre make for a delightful read and re-read.

MAYA MAHAJAN
Coordinator
Language Exchange Program

Detransition, Baby: A Novel (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

Torrey Peters

What are the rules of motherhood, fatherhood, gender, love, and family? The characters in Detransition, Baby toss out and revise so many of these rules, and I thoroughly enjoyed being a witness to that!

Reese and Amy, two trans women, are in a relationship with each other until Amy de-transitions due to the transphobia she faces: It was just too difficult for her to live as a woman. Now going by Ames, he finds himself in a relationship(ish) with his boss, Katrina, a biracial, Chinese American, Jewish, cis woman. There is an unexpected pregnancy and some creative finagling, and Reese’s strong desire to be a mother – coupled with Ames’ desire to be a father-not-father – leads our characters to have a lot of dialogue about what family is, and in turn an unconventional family is “born.” There are some plot twists that I don't want to give away here, but know that Peters’ characters are just as dysfunctional, histrionic, and damaged as any of us. It is refreshing and delightful to read! Detransition, Baby is also among the first novels written by a trans woman to be issued by a major publishing house.

MICHAEL SHOLINBECK
Public Health Librarian & Interim Liaison to the School of Optometry

Sellout: The Major-Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore (1994-2007)

Dan Ozzi

The word “sellout” might not have the same integrity-shattering connotation as it used to in this age of get-famous-at-all-costs social media influencers. But it wasn’t always this way. As punk and alternative broke (again) in the 1990s, the music industry started to take notice and artists from the underground were confronted with a Faustian bargain: to stay true to the DIY, anti-corporate ethos of the scene, or to sign to a major label and face the music (and be tagged with the dreaded S-word). Getting shunned by the die-hards and banned from 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley, the East Bay epicenter of punk rock in the ’90s, might sound quaint today, but it was enough to threaten the clout and credibility of bands of the time.

Brimming with thorough reporting and illuminating interviews, Dan Ozzi’s Sellout follows the road to the major label debuts of artists such as Green Day, Jawbreaker, Jimmy Eat World, Blink-182, At the Drive-In, The Donnas, The Distillers, and My Chemical Romance. Some transcended the “sellout” tag, while others buckled under the weight of remorse and expectation, or were swept back into obscurity by the changing tides of popular music. But each band had a hand in rewriting the script for a new era of punk- and alternative-influenced pop music, and ushering in an age where the word “sellout” is no longer a nail in the coffin of an artist’s reputation. Put simply, these bands walked so Olivia Rodrigo and Machine Gun Kelly (and so many others) could run.

TOR HAUGAN
Multimedia Writer + Editor
Library Communications

The Swimmers

Julie Otsuka

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka rewrites the rules of novel-writing – if such rules exist. Hilarious at times, as the narrator assumes the first-person plural “we” from the POV of a diverse group of lap swimmers at a community pool, and poignantly heartbreaking later, as the voice shifts to the second-person “you” in the form of one of the swimmers’ daughters, a Japanese American novelist. Masterfully crafted, this novel delivers – in a slim 176 pages.

JOHN LEVINE
Lecturer
College Writing Programs

Twenty-Five Chickens and a Pig for a Bride

Evangeline Canonizado Buell

In Twenty-Five Chickens and a Pig for a Bride: Growing Up in a Filipino Immigrant Family, Buell recounts her experiences as one of the few Filipino families growing up in West Oakland during the 1930s and ’40s, detailing her and her family’s triumphant struggles over racial and gender discrimination in the Bay Area. This wonderfully written and engaging memoir gives us a firsthand window into Buell’s family life, starting in the early 1920s when her parents immigrated to the United States, into her adult life, two marriages, and numerous achievements, which include helping to co-found the East Bay Chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society. In addition to the engaging narrative, Buell welcomes us into her story through a series of family photographs.

Buell was recently interviewed on East Bay Yesterday, a great accompaniment to the book, and the Bancroft Library has an oral history with her, which is part of the Rosie the Riveter World War II American Homefront Oral History Project

.

The Filipino American National Historical Society. East Bay Chapter records, 1977-2010 are available at the Ethnic Studies Library.

KRIS KASIANOVITZ
UCB IGS Library Director

Americanah: A Novel (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Americanah is a novel that follows the story of Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who moves to the United States to pursue higher education. Her experiences in America allow her to gain firsthand insight into the complexities of racism and discrimination, prompting her to document her ideas on race and identity in a widely-read blog. However, after spending many years in the U.S., she begins to feel a sense of disconnection and a lack of belonging. This leads her to move back to Nigeria, where she seeks to rediscover her roots and reconnect with her cultural identity.

This novel is an excellent example of (Re)Writing the Rules, as it encourages readers to critically evaluate their views on race, identity, and the biases and prejudices they may have.

IMAAN NADIR
Intended Molecular and Cell Biology major
Class of 2025

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee

Pachinko is a compelling work of fiction that tells the story of a Korean family in Japan from the early 1900s to the 1980s. The novel explores the challenges faced by the family navigating life as Koreans in Japan during a time of political and social unrest. The family’s experiences are shaped by discrimination, poverty, war, and colonialism. Despite these struggles, they draw strength from their community and traditions. This novel fits the theme of (Re)Writing the Rules by exploring narratives of the human experience and challenging stereotypes about minority communities. It is a powerful story that highlights the importance of culture and identity and prompts readers to reflect on their biases and gives them an empathetic and nuanced way of understanding and relating to others.

IMAAN NADIR
Intended Molecular and Cell Biology major
Class of 2025

Ender’s Game

Orson Scott Card

An alien threat leads world leaders to recruit and train child geniuses as military commanders using a series of increasingly complex and morally ambiguous war games. Ender Wiggin’s gradual mastery of each of these games leads him to see beyond the structures imposed by their rules, and confronts readers with challenging questions about the rules of childhood, warfare, and survival.

SAM PIMENTEL
Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics

A Children’s Bible

Lydia Millet

In a not-too-distant future America plagued by climate change and government dysfunction, a divide grows between children and parents living together in a rural commune. The children recognize and adapt to a changing world that their myopic parents cannot fully understand, reshaping familial rules and roles.

SAM PIMENTEL
Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics

The Ornament of the World

María Rosa Menocal

In her history of the vibrant Islamic state that governed Spain during the Dark Ages and its far-reaching cultural influence, Menocal shows us a very different set of rules for worship, war, and art than we typically associate with medieval Europe. The emergence of a society so steeped in learning and religious and linguistic diversity, and the mutual rewriting of rules brought about as it rubbed shoulders with its neighbors, make an eye-opening story.

SAM PIMENTEL
Assistant Professor
Department of Statistics

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson

Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson, really opened a new perspective into how I view race, particularly in the United States. It goes beyond the understanding of class and addresses a deeper issue of “caste” that underlies much of how we see race and class in this country.

COLETTE JACKSON
Information Systems Analyst
Berkeley IT

The Fifth Season (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

N.K. Jemisin

The Broken Earth Series by N. K. Jemisin fits the theme, is an engaging and thought-provoking piece of fantasy, and has incredible world building that I constantly envy. I think incoming students would enjoy it and I’d recommend starting with the first in the series, The Fifth Season.

JACK ESPINOZA
Film and Media Studies Major
Class of 2023

Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

Alysia Abbott

Two decades after her father’s death from AIDS-related complications, Alysia Abbott wrote Fairyland, a memoir of her father in San Francisco in the 1970s and ’80s. She recounts their lives together as her father raises her as a single, gay parent after Abbott’s mother suddenly dies in a car accident. They move from apartment to apartment in Haight Ashbury, surrounded by a community of people including poets, drag queens, boyfriends, and roommates. Her father’s parenting skills are unconventional and imperfect, their community eccentric and chaotic; but through this instability and loneliness, her life is interspersed with abiding love, creativity, and responsibility. By reading her father’s journals after his death, and in the process of writing this book, she learns of unexpected truths, one that has helped her to reconstruct her own truth and “rules” of what family, parenting, and love should look like.

CHISAKO COLE
Lecturer
College Writing Programs

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

Adam Grant

Grant’s book discusses how we can go about defining ourselves by values which could give us the flexibility to rethink and update our plans and practices based on ongoing new evidence. It encourages you to reexamine and challenge your own beliefs and assumptions.

LOIS WAREHAM
Manager
IT Client Services
Special Operations and Security Response

The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber and David Wengrow

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. It puts forth a dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution — from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality — and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. I recommend this book because it causes us to reevaluate the “rules” of human society, and gives us a more hopeful vision of the creativity that characterizes our species.

CAROLINE M. WILLIAMS
Associate Professor
Department of Integrative Biology

Solito

Javier Zamora

In this book, Javier Zamora tells his story as an undocumented child emigrating from El Salvador to the U.S. He captures his view of the world as a 9-year-old and takes you with him as he leaves his grandparents, is led by coyotes, and meets fellow migrants on the journey. I was so immersed in the book and his experiences that by the time he reaches the U.S. border, I was shocked by the starkness and strangeness of this new country and its people. An agua fresca and chilaquiles will never taste the same.

NANCY H. LIU
Director, UC Berkeley Psychology Clinic & Center for Assessment
Associate Clinical Professor
Department of Psychology

Chip War

Chris Miller

What do old graphing calculators, a small island nation, and the fight for global dominance have in common? Semiconductor chips. In Chip War, Chris Miller, history faculty member at Tufts, tells the gripping account of the rise of this technology over the past few decades and the new global arms race. Elegantly weaving the stories of early Silicon Valley personalities with Texas technology (rather than oil) tycoons and ultimately landing in Taiwan, this book will make you understand current geopolitics (like the war in Ukraine) in a new light – I now cannot unsee the importance of these chips.

NANCY H. LIU
Director, UC Berkeley Psychology Clinic & Center for Assessment
Associate Clinical Professor
Department of Psychology

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

Cathy O’Neil

An examination of different algorithmic systems and how they structure our education, finances, career opportunities, and more, often amplifying biases or creating unintended consequences. O’Neil gives us insight into the semi-opaque rules that define our lives in an era where statistical principles are (mis)used to shape our world, and what we can/should do to understand, revise, or fight those rules. This book will keep you reading because you’ll get madder and madder, but you’ll appreciate the insight into things we don’t always know about.

CATHERINE CRONQUIST BROWNING
Assistant Dean
Academic Programs, Equity & Inclusion
School of Information

Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

Lea Ypi

This memoir by an Albanian political scientist who now lives and works in Britain is a very interesting personal window into a little-studied country that had a very closed, Soviet-style socialist government until much later than its neighbors. Ypi discovers the rules that structured her life as she was growing up and has the opportunity to contrast them with different kinds of rules and social structures later in life. Ypi’s book is compelling and HIGHLY readable; I could not put it down. It’s also a book that doesn’t shy away from difficult things, but it’s not so heavy that it’s hard to get through.

CATHERINE CRONQUIST BROWNING
Assistant Dean
Academic Programs, Equity & Inclusion
School of Information

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law

Mary Roach

Fuzz is a fun, pop-science book, like much of Roach’s work. The premise is: What happens when animals transgress on human society in different ways and how do different places handle that. Human rules meet the natural world with sometimes funny, sad, or concerning results.

CATHERINE CRONQUIST BROWNING
Assistant Dean
Academic Programs, Equity & Inclusion
School of Information

The Magical Language of Others: A Memoir

E. J. Koh

As a young girl growing up in California, author E. J. Koh’s life is upended when her parents decide to return to their home country of South Korea, leaving her and her older brother behind to benefit from a life in America. Moving freely through time and space, Koh revisits this period of her life and beyond, building her memoir around the process of translating the (always unanswered) letters her mother would write to her. Through this literal process of “rewriting” her mother’s words, and the rules that hold a family together across generations, the book invites readers to embrace the imperfect but necessary role that language plays in enabling us to truly understand one another.

BEN SPANBOCK
Lecturer
College Writing Programs

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain’s Most Notorious Media Baron

John Preston

Ian Robert Maxwell (born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch) was a Czechoslovak-born British media proprietor, member of Parliament (MP), suspected spy, and fraudster. He is a larger-than-life character whose triumphs, crimes, and human flaws are now notoriously documented.

Part of me appreciates this multifaceted and detailed analysis of Maxwell, but part of me is irritated at what sounds like tacitly absolving him of his worst crimes. All and all, this book by John Preston is breathtaking – you will gasp and choke on your emotions throughout it.

ELENA ZASLAVSKY
Metadata Creation Professional, Metadata Creation Unit
Collection Services Division — Metadata Services

Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America

Dahlia Lithwick

Dahlia Lithwick profiles several women who used their legal expertise in various ways to challenge the excesses of the Trump administration. One thread that runs through the chapters (which cover topics like immigrant rights, reproductive rights, #MeToo in the federal judiciary, and protecting the vote) is the different perspectives on transformation from those who see themselves working inside versus outside the system.

KATHLEEN MCCARTHY
Professor
Ancient Greek and Roman Studies

Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor

Kim Kelly

I am reading Kim Kelly’s Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor and would recommend it for anyone coming to Cal.

Kelly came to national attention for rewriting rules when she shattered common expectations for Teen Vogue with her hard-hitting labor reporting. In Fight Like Hell, she offers a celebratory yet critical history of American labor movements and activists who rewrote the rules of work in America. It is an accessible survey of labor history that honors the positive efforts of the past while outlining how bias and prejudice have hampered American labor activism from its earliest origins to the movements of today. Fight Like Hell provides a great foundation for understanding Berkeley’s and the Bay Area’s history of activism.

ABBY SCHEEL
Head, Arts & Humanities Division
Doe Memorial Library

The Terraformers

Annalee Newitz

It’s thousands of years in the future in this novel by Annalee Newitz, and humanity has completely rewritten the rules of what it means to be sentient. We find ourselves on a planet that is owned by a corporation and yet being terraformed with humility and understanding of the intelligence of all life. This novel explores bio- and geoengineering, gender, evolution, capitalism, and more, with an uplifting tone and creative approach that makes us question pretty much everything about what it means to live a meaningful life.

JENNIFER CALESHU
Continuing Lecturer
Haas School of Business

Klara and the Sun (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

Kazuo Ishiguro

This is a story about bending the boundaries of life, love, and the in/ability to change. Klara is an “artificial friend” – an emotional support type of robot – and the story unfolds from her perspective as she is purchased and taken to her new home. It is dark and dystopian and also light as air.

LOTTA WECKSTRÖM
Language Program Coordinator
Lecturer, Finnish Studies

The Just City

Jo Walton

The Just City by Jo Walton is sci-fi/fantasy about a social experiment involving an attempt to “(re)write the rules” to implement a version of Plato’s Republic, but grappling with issues of sexual consent, the rights of slaves or robots in this proposed new society, etc., all done with a focus on Socratic debate. Highly readable. It’s the first of three volumes in Walton’s “Thessaly” series.

ETHAN LIGON
Professor
Agricultural & Resource Economics

The Mountain in the Sea

Ray Nayler

This book is a gem – an entrancing page-turner taking place in the near future, where the existence of a society of highly intelligent and communicative octopuses comes into contact with humans. In narrating this encounter, the author explores deep questions on the nature of mind – the meaning of and requirements for sentience, and how mind, body, and world are intertwined. All of this in the context of a near-future world continuing to be plagued by environmental catastrophe and extreme human suffering. How might such an intimate meeting with the alien consciousness of cephalopods with a very different lens on the world inform our capacity to rewrite the rules?

DAVID PRESTI
Teaching Professor
Neurobiology and Psychology

White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India

William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple shares the remarkable and true story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, an English East India Company officer, and his wife, Khair-un-Nissa, an Indian Muslim noblewoman. Their love story serves as a powerful reminder of the cultural amalgamations that thrived during 18th-century India, building bridges between India and the West through the intermingling of languages, art, religion, and politics.

However, this historical perspective seems unusual and ironic in contrast to the narrative that exists in the world’s consciousness of today, given the oppressive practices of cultural separation spurred on by racism and colonialism in 19th- and early 20th-century India. These practices led to the burning of the aforementioned bridges and the collective social awakening of a country seeking freedom and justice. In the shifting shadows of these opposing ideologies, Dalrymple provides new perspectives on the mechanisms of racism, colonialism, and globalization. He encourages the reader to examine the sociocultural fabric of our current existence and reconsider how the legacies of our past weave our future.

This book is well-researched and beautifully written, and has everything one could want: memorable characters, adventure, romance, espionage, betrayal, tragedy, and curated pictures that offer a glimpse into this forgotten world!

VINEETA RAM
Disability Specialist
Disabled Students Program

Seveneves

Neal Stephenson

What would happen if the moon exploded? All the rules that govern our solar system would change – or rather, because the rules of physics would still be followed, everything about life on Earth would change irreversibly. This novel imagines in stunning detail a multicentury history of human life after the moon shatters, and the central role that women would play in it. Stephenson creates a rigorously science-based alternate reality peopled with compelling characters on complex adventures.

MICHELE RABKIN
Associate Director
Berkeley Connect

The Politics and the Constitution of Athens

Aristotle

An oldie but a goodie, Aristotle’s account of the political machine of fourth-century Athens is a fundamental tool for understanding the origins of political thought and how states formed institutions to order their state. Although Aristotle is attributed with some 158 accounts of other Greek constitutions, this is the only extant version of these works, which we only have by chance, as papyri containing portions of the text surfaced within the last century and a half and were pieced together by scholars.

ANDY HOGAN
Postdoctoral Fellow
The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri
The Bancroft Library

Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

Francesca Wade

In 1928, when Virginia Woolf gave her lectures at Cambridge University titled A Room of One’s Own, Cambridge still did not give degrees to women, and would not until 1948. For women in Britain in the decades between the world wars, forging an independent life, let alone one of the mind, was a daunting challenge and almost impossible to achieve. Yet, a decade later, Woolf was living in London’s Mecklenburgh Square, writing a biography of the painter Roger Fry, with her husband operating a literary press in the basement.

Actually, a number of women, defying societal pressures and the odds, similarly managed to pursue their intellectual ideals in this same leafy, quiet square (which also saw some pretty festive partying). This book is a poignant and beautifully written account of the square hauntings of five of the women who lived there between 1918 and 1945: Woolf, novelist-theologian Dorothy Sayers, poet HD (Hilda Doolittle), economist Eileen Power, and classicist Jane Ellen Harrison. In its bohemian Bloomsbury setting, the residents “lived in squares, painted in circles, loved in triangles,” and this book is a fitting and fascinating tribute to their vibrant and revolutionary pursuit of autonomy, and ideas of their own.

ANN GLUSKER
Librarian for Sociology, Demography, & Research Methods;
Interim Librarian for Public Policy, Anthropology

The Hands of the Emperor

Victoria Goddard

In the aftermath of a worlds-shattering magical cataclysm, Cliopher Mdang works tirelessly to reform a bloated and broken bureaucracy into something that serves its people. He works side by side with the god-emperor of the old empire, literally untouchable, whose humanity has been denied for a thousand years. In a story about compassion, identity, and making the world a better place, Cliopher goes against millennia of tradition and taboo to extend a hand in friendship when he invites the Sun-on-Earth to come home with him on holiday. The mere suggestion could see him executed for blasphemy. Instead, it upends the world.

ANITA BROWN
Serials Processing Assistant
Bioscience, Natural Resources, & Public Health Library

A Heart That Works

Rob Delaney

A memoir about the death of a 2-year-old from brain cancer should not make you laugh out loud. Yet actor, comedian, and writer Rob Delaney does just that in this loving account of his son Henry, who died before reaching his third birthday. In addition to sharing tender memories of Henry’s bright spirit even in the face of a brutal illness and an even more brutal treatment, this book is a love letter to Delaney’s family. It’s also an homage to the many professionals in the medical and care community who touched Henry’s life — from surgeons and nurses to healthcare assistants and hospice care workers; not to mention the volunteers who gave so much joy to Henry, including Lola the therapy dog and Singing Hands, the musical duo who use a special sign language to help teach non-verbal children how to communicate.

The other lesson in this book: The NHS – the U.K.’s much-beloved national health care service – is a “glorious institution” that enabled the Delaneys, transplants from the U.S., to maximize time spent with their very sick child rather than dealing with the bureaucracy of a multibillion dollar, publicly traded insurance bureaucracy.

MARGARET PHILLIPS
Librarian
Social Sciences Division

The Society of the Spectacle (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

Guy Debord

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

Guy Debord’s La société du spectacle, written in the wake of the student riots in Paris in 1967, is one of the most influential philosophical texts of the latter half of the 20th century that is as relevant today as when it was first published. Like one of his major influences, Karl Marx, Debord critiques our entire society: e.g., our consumption of commodities. But he goes beyond that to consider what predominates our consciousness in our daily lives. Because of the scope of his project, this is a challenging, often confounding, read.

The Society of the Spectacle consists of 221 passages, paragraphs, contained within nine chapters. I had to reread many of these several times before I even got close to something like an understanding of what Debord was trying to say. But this is worth the effort for an ultimately rewarding, no-holds-barred text that will make you rethink your daily experience.

MIKE PALMER
Enrollment Manager
College Writing Programs

Bartleby, the Scrivener (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

Herman Melville

I recommend Bartleby, the Scrivener, written by Melville in 1853. In this short story, Bartleby is a new, quiet clerk in a lawyer’s (the narrator’s) office, who soon ends up not doing any of the work, for inexplicable, impenetrable reasons. He adamantly resists answering any questions or to go along with accommodations his baffled employer tries to make for him. The lawyer and we readers can only guess at what kind of an anarchic (maybe?) inner life he lives. Another part of the joy of the story is the lawyer’s inability to do anything about Bartleby, not even to fire him, so that Bartleby’s inscrutable life has found a perfect partner in his employer’s avoidance. Bartleby is THE classic character of passive inexorability in the face of the rules. His short reply to all probing is one of the most well-known quotes in American literature: “I would prefer not to.”

JEAN DICKINSON
Slavic and E. European Cataloging & Metadata Librarian

Header image: digitally altered from the original image.