Holiday Reading from the Stanford Humanities Center

Our Picks for 2025

Dec 9, 2025

Dive into a good book (or two) over the winter break. Fellows and staff from the Stanford Humanities Center offer their year-end recommendations. From all of us at the SHC, happy holidays, happy reading, and best wishes for the new year.

My Name Is Red

By Orhan Pamuk

This is one of my all-time favorites, a novel about the 16th-century Ottoman miniature painters, with ample reflections on the affinity between the visual and the textual, authorship and murder, artistic jealousy and solidarity, and the transformative tensions between different visual traditions. It is a detective, love, and philosophical novel told through the voice of multiple human, animal, plant, inanimate, and dead characters.

Esra Akcan
Marta Sutton Weeks External Fellow
Department of Architecture, Cornell University

The Arsonists’ City

By Hala Alyan

The Arsonists’ City is an emotionally layered family saga that follows the Nasr family across Beirut, Damascus, and the United States, and asks what it truly means to belong. Alyan explores displacement, memory, and the weight of personal and political history with nuance, giving each character a complex inner life and a past that refuses to stay buried. The timeline continues to shift, revealing how secrets, trauma, and love shape generations, creating a story that feels both intimate and expansive. If you’re drawn to character-driven fiction that confronts the legacies of war and migration while still offering deep empathy and insight, this is a book that will stay with you long after you finish it.

Nora Barakat
Internal Faculty Fellow
Department of History, Stanford University

Mother Mary Comes to Me

By Arundhati Roy

If you’re looking for something tender and meaningful to read this winter, I highly recommend Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy. It’s a beautifully crafted and courageous memoir about her relationship with her mother and the complicated love that shaped her into the writer she is today. It lingers long after you’ve turned the final page.

Farah Bazzi
Next Generation Scholar
Department of History, Stanford University

Sounds

By Wassily Kandinsky, trans. and intro. by Elizabeth R. Napier

This collection defies definition: it features brief texts written in prose but considered by many as poetry; each text evokes not only hearing but all senses; each text is accompanied by images—colorful and black-and-white, figurative and abstract, engraving and watercolor. It's a treat for anyone interested in Gesamtkunstwerk and open to a work that represents a foundational step in the path toward abstract contemporary art, of which Kandinsky was a forefather.

Erica Camisa Morale
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University

The Last Pomegranate Tree

By Bachtyar Ali

We were honored to host acclaimed author Bachtyar Ali and translator Kareem Abdurahman for a month-long residency last April. Ali’s 2008 novel, I Stared at the Night of the City, was a bestseller in Iraqi Kurdistan; Abdurahman’s translation in 2016 made it the first ever novel translated from Kurdish into English. Their second shared endeavor, The Last Pomegranate Tree, is a mesmerizing, gorgeously composed and translated tale of what it means to search for home, truth, and family amid the wreckage of war and the uncertain reliabilities of memory. The prose shimmers and turns, plucks your attention and pierces your heart.

Also, allow me to echo Farah Bazzi's recommendation above. The bewildering, incandescent tenderness of Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me floored me, with its fiercely clear-eyed description of how we wreck and redeem those we love. I rarely listen to audiobooks, but in this case I toggled between the physical book and Roy’s narration, and I urge you to do the same. The intimacy of her voice, with its occasional, barely-suppressed chuckle or tremor, adds even more power to her astonishing prose.

Kelda Jamison
Fellowship Program Senior Manager, Stanford Humanities Center

Mother of Strangers

By Suad Amiry

I first read Mother of Strangers on a train to Yafa, its very setting, and was immediately struck by how vividly it brings the city and its people to life. Later, walking through Yafa with a friend who pointed out where the real individuals behind the novel’s characters once lived, the story felt even more urgent. It’s a captivating, deeply human portrait of a place and its history, one that lingers long after you turn the last page. Also, the author, Suad Amiry, is the wife of a former SHC fellow, Salim Tamari.

Marina Johnson
SHC Dissertation Prize Fellow
Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University

How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster

By Muriel Leung

My pick will have to be the 2025 Lambda Literary Award winner for Best Bisexual fiction, How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster by my partner in crime and poetry, Professor Muriel Leung. Set in a public housing project loosely based on the real-life first Asian American residential public housing project in the U.S.: specifically, Manhattan's Chinatown, How To Fall in Love asks what we'll do to survive our own love stories. It's well known that queers love ghosts (fact!) and doomed romances (also fact!) which makes this one especially enjoyable.

AJ Kim
External Faculty Fellow
Department of City Planning, San Diego State University

The Coddling of the American Mind

By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what is happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live, work, and cooperate across party lines.

Helen Malko
Executive Director, Stanford Humanities Center

The Trickster Trilogy Series

By Eden Robinson

I recommend Eden Robinson's Trickster Trilogy (Son of the Trickster, Return of The Trickster, Trickster Drift). The three novels together are an extremely fun read and engage some very serious issues about family, indigenous heritage, and the vagaries of growing up. Part of the pleasure is watching our engaging young protagonist make choices in a world that seems stacked against him—even as there are some people who show him a great deal of love.

Paula Moya
Ellen Andrews Wright Internal Fellow
Department of English, Stanford University

We Contain Landscapes

By Patrycja Humienik

This wonderful debut poetry collection by Patrycja Humienik is titled We Contain Landscapes. She writes about time, memory, borders, immigrant identity, longing, desire, to name just a few themes. I loved the voice in these poems: so full of life and love for life, in all its contradiction and pain. There are many sudden, intimate insights, and images of rivers, and one poem in the shape of a spiral. “Each moment risks proximity to childhood,” she writes in one of my favorite poems in the collection, “Saint Hyacinth Basilica.”

Orbital

By Samantha Harvey

I also loved Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which won the Booker Prize in 2024. The novel is set on the International Space Station and we get to know six international astronauts as they circle the Earth 16 times. It is hard to describe this unusual, beautiful book for there is no plot, no dramatic twist, no conflict. Yet, I could not put it down and did not want it to end. The stories the astronauts share with each other, their thoughts, questions about the meaning of it all, and the pull of the Earth for each of them—all deeply moving.

Svetlana Turetskaya
International and Academic Programs Manager, Stanford Humanities Center

Angel Down

By Daniel Kraus

Angel Down by Daniel Kraus is a very recent novel on World War I that takes on issues of violence, guilt, and redemption in a style that remains readable but connects to Joyce or Céline. An angel appears in the barbed wire amidst the chaos of war. The whole novel is one sentence, an accumulation of emotion and scenery. But readable, I will say that again!

Laura Wittman
Internal Faculty Fellow
Department of French and Italian, Stanford University