Stanford Humanities Center
Our Book Picks for 2022
Enjoy this list of book recommendations for the winter break. From the fellows and staff at the Center, happy holidays, happy reading, and best wishes for the year ahead.
I recommend Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, a compulsively readable and stylishly (and slyly!)-written novel that shades the ordinary into the extraordinary to show that sometimes feminism and witchery go hand and hand.
I also recently read and loved Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. It’s a reimagining of the classical tradition through a poetry-prose fusion that blew my socks off for its originality and gorgeous writing.
—Monique Allewaert
External Faculty Fellow
Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
I came to recommend two slim (but richly expansive) books: Julie Otsuka’s 2022 novel The Swimmers and Jane Hirshfield’s Given Sugar, Given Salt: Poems (2001). Otsuka moves us across narrative voices from an anonymous chorus of obsessive swimmers sharing an underground pool, to the unraveling of a mind and family by dementia. Hirshfield’s poems similarly refract enduring questions of memory and meaning through quotidian objects—ladders, buttons, cups, clay. Both books offer exquisitely observed meditations on routines and voice, and how these tether us to our sense of self.
—Kelda Jamison
Fellowship Program Manager, Stanford Humanities Center
A book I enjoyed recently is Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, a biography written by Pratchett's assistant of 15 years, Rob Wilkins. Pratchett's career was cut short after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2007, although he lived until 2015. This biography covers both his career and his trajectory through the disease. It also offers much for those interested in bestseller culture (85 million of his novels have been sold to date) and in thinking about biography and critical distance, as this story of his life was written by someone who knew Pratchett extremely well. Readers who are familiar with Prachett's work will probably get the most out of this book, but you certainly don't have to have read his entire oeuvre to enjoy it!
—Jessica Jordan
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of English, Stanford University
I propose Burmese Days, George Orwell's first novel. In retrospect, it makes sense that the author of 1984 and Animal Farm wrote this novel. Reading it makes one realize that of course colonialism foreshadowed totalitarianism. Closer to home for me, the book made me reckon with just how much everything I took for "normal" growing up was colored by the British Raj.
—Radhika Koul
Career Launch Fellow
Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
From the cremation of Shelley on the beach at Viareggio (1822) to a Damien Hirst show at the Punta della Dogana in Venice (2017), Robert Holland's The Warm South: How the Mediterranean Shaped the British Imagination is a fine and carefully etched story—by turns amusing, poignant, and absurd—of how Greece and Italy (and to a lesser extent southern France and Egypt) lured generations of dour northerners, changing their art and literature for good. Best read under olive trees near the sea.
—Richard Martin
Donald Andrews Whittier Internal Fellow
Department of Classics, Stanford University
Each one of these short stories in Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (as well as the ones in Chiang's newest collection Exhalation) is a quiet marvel of imagination, empathy, time and space travel, and new possibilities for what it means—or could possibly mean—to be human.
—Eve Oishi
Marta Sutton Weeks External Fellow
Department of Cultural Studies, Claremont Graduate University
I recommend The Living by Annie Dillard. Maybe it's my homesickness for the deep dark woods of the Pacific Northwest, but this novel about brutal and romantic 19th century life on Bellingham Bay is an intricate and character-driven joy.
—Eric Plemons
External Faculty Fellow
Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona
The best in global history: In God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World, Alan Mikhail (chair of the Department of History at Yale University) makes the audacious case that Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to encircle the Ottomans from the East—and that much of our global history has been far too Eurocentric. This book is studded with amazing stories and provocative hypotheses. A really great read.
—Robert N. Proctor
Violet Andrews Whittier Internal Fellow
Department of History, Stanford University
Two of my favorite novels of recent years have been Shola von Reinhold's LOTE and Jordy Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox. Both of are wickedly smart and funny works of speculative historical fiction about a gender-expansive past, attuned to our gender-expansive present.
—Susan Stryker
Marta Sutton Weeks External Fellow
Department of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona
I happily recommend Ellen Ullman’s book Close to the Machine, which is about to be re-released in a 25th anniversary edition. If you’ve ever wondered how computer scientists feel as they program high-end computers, manage technical teams, and try to keep track of their organic, embodied lives, this is the book for you.
—Fred Turner
Donald Andrews Whittier Internal Fellow
Department of Communication, Stanford University
Poet Luis Felipe Fabre’s Writing with Caca (translated by JD Pluecker) is a genre-bending bilingual exploration of iconic Mexican writer Salvador Novo whose fame never quite reached that of his contemporaries Octavio Paz and Carlos Monsiváis. Why has Novo been overlooked? Perhaps because of his loquacious queerness, which Fabre interrogates alongside his own. Fabre is known for his imaginative reclamation of all that is transgressive in Mexican history and culture. This time, he reads Novo for a poetics of the body. Writing with Caca is edgy and funny, a worthy follow-up to Sor Juana and Other Monsters, which I also recommend. It is certain to catch the eye of strangers on the plane, train, or subway.
—Heather Vrana
External Faculty Fellow
Department of History, University of Florida
I recommend Mississippi Witness: The Photographs of Florence Mars, a book of remarkable photographs, edited by my Stanford colleague Jim Campbell. These scenes were captured, between 1954 and 1964, in a rural county that would be the setting for one of the most notorious crimes of the Civil Rights era. All proceeds from the sale of the book go to a local nonprofit working for racial justice.
—Kären Wigen
Director, Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities
Shannon Chakraborty’s The City of Brass (part of The Daevabad Trilogy) is a fascinating novel that brings to life the myths and stories told of jinns in the ancient Near East and South Asia, creating a fantasy world of supernatural beings. It explores questions of self-discovery, belonging, and life’s meaning in an enchanted world far removed from our own but reflecting journeys we all take.
—Adnan A. Zulfiqar
External Faculty Fellow
Law School, Rutgers University
Four essays on the question of freedom from the perspective of arts, drugs, sex, and climate change from a writer gifted with an agile mind and flowing prose. In On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint, Maggie Nelson manages to do justice to the competing demands of freedom in the private and public spheres with grace and generosity. Her thinking resists easy political categorizations and renders ideas in all their complexity and vitality.
—Victoria Zurita
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
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