Summer reading recommendations

In the late 1980s, Craig Thorn, Instructor in English, began collecting and sharing recommendations for summer reading. Since Craig’s death at age 47 in 2006, various PA teachers have continued the tradition in his honor. 

This year, though, we tried something a bit different. I asked and people responded:

Which books really mean something to us?

Below is the selection for summer 2026. Happy reading!

David Fox is the Director of Studies and an Instructor in English and Art History

Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

—Yasmine Allen

Karen Russell, The Antidote

David Mitchell, Utopia Avenue

NK Jemisin, The Broken Earth Trilogy

Kelly Link, The Book of Love

Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

—Andrea Bailey

Eleanor Arnason, Ring of Swords

Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang

Patricia McKillip, The Riddle-Master Trilogy

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

—Natalya Baldyga

Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Only Loved Numbers

Gino Segré, Bettine Hoerlin, The Pope of Physics

Anthony Doerr, All the Light You Cannot See

Jan-Phillips Sandker, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

Usama Al Shahmani, In Foreign Lands, Trees Speak Arabic

—Clyfe Beckwith

Omri Boehm, Radical Univeralism: Beyond Identity

Andre Breton, Nadja [new translation]

Alexander Douglas, Against Identity: the Wisdom of Escaping the Self

Richard Hell, Godlike

Luke Kemp, Goliath's Curse: the History and Future of Societal Collapse

—John Bird

Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A Multicultural History of America

Bettina Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

Li-Young Lee, The City in Which I Love You

—Latasha Boyd

Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles - All These Years Volume 1

John Hersey, Hiroshima

Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

Zander Hollander, The Complete Handbook of Baseball 1972

Kelly Wise, English Competence Handbook

—Robert Briggs

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment

Edward Thomas, The Complete Poems of Edward Thomas

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

—Leo Calleja

Buzz Bissinger, Friday Night Lights

Dan Shaughnessy, One Strike Away: The Story of the 1986 Red Sox

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

Peter Gammons, Beyond the Sixth Game

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

—Chris Capano

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Larry McMurtrey, Lonesome Dove

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Arthur Ashe, Days of Grace: A Memoir

Kara Kootstra, The Boy in Number Four

—Deb Chase

Cheryl Strayed, Wild

Kevin Fedarko, A Walk in the Park

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Ole Risom (illustrated by Richard Scarry), I Am A Bunny

—Lauren Conoscenti

Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

Malinda Lo, Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings

—Lorena Corbelli

Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History

Frances Moore Lappé, Diet for a Small Planet

—Stephanie Curci

Robert Caro, The Powerbroker

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Sarah Winman, Still Life

Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

—Grace Curley

Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale

C. W. Huntington Jr., What I Don't Know About Death

Abraham Verghese, Cutting For Stone

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child

—Eliot Davenport

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five

—Eric Denby

John Guy, Hunting the Falcon

Lauren Johnson, Margaret Beaufort

Clare Jackson, Devil-Land

—Marcelle Doheny

Luo Guanzhong, Romance of the Three Kingdoms

J.R.R. Tolkien, all the books

George Orwell, 1984

—Joe Donnelly

Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth

E.M. Forster, Maurice

Edward Said, Orientalism

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Mohammad el Kurd, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal

—Joshua Donovan

Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones' Diary

Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

—Elena Dugan

Kristin Hannah, The Women

—Caitlin Duncan

Doris Lessing, The Diaries of Jane Somers

Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living

Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be?

Alice Munro, The Lives of Girls and Women

Edna O'Brien, The Country Girls Trilogy

—Sara Erdmann

James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom

James Oakes, Freedom National

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals

Richard P. Feynman, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman

Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton

—Brian Faulk

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Miguel Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

E. L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

—David Fox

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Toni Morrison, Beloved

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room

David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

—David Gardner

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead

Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Billy Collins, Questions About Angels

—Katie Gayman

Margaret Pope Trask, Three For Treasure

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Alix E. Harrow, The Everlasting

—Anna Gesing

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Ray Bradbury, Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Fred Pierce, The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will be Nature's Salvation

—Jeremiah Hagler

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad & The Candy House

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Ian McEwan, Atonement

—Sherri Hallgren

Coach John Wooden with Steve Jamison, Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

Frank Herbert, Dune

James S. A. Corey, The Expanse Series

James Nestor, Breath

Peter Liljedahl, Building Thinking Classrooms

—Scott Hoenig

Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped

Kiese Laymon, Heavy

Jeanette Walls, The Glass Castle

Lily King, Heart the Lover

—Jessica Hoffman

Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

Pierre Lamaitre, The Great Swindle

Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes

Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achille

—Emilie Cliquet Hughes

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

—Chris Ishizuka-Wade

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

Philip Fisher, Wonder, The Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences

Louise Erdrich, Tracks

Miguel de Unamuno, Niebla/The Fog

—Tom Kane

Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

Laurie Frankel, This is How it Always Is

Peter Mayle, A Year In Provence

—Nancy Kashanek

Lisa Ridzen, When Cranes Fly South

Jeff Hobbs, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

Sara Pennypacker, Pax

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

Sy Montgomery, The Hummingbirds' Gift

—Hillary Kavanagh

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These

Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin

Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says / Omeros

Prachi Gupta, They Called Us Exceptional and Other Lies That Raised Us

—Raynard Kington

Shigehiro Oishi, Life in Three Dimensions

Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization

David Ragland, The Human Renaissance

Tracy Kidder, Rough Sleepers

Maureen Dunne, The Neurodiversity Edge

—Christina Landolt

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

Jeffrey Selingo, Who Gets Into College And Why

Belle Burden, Strangers

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms

Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain

—Winston Leong

Emet North, In Universes

N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

Giannina Braschi, Yo-Yo Boing

Gina María Balibrera, The Volcano Daughters

Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

—Brigitte Leschhorn

Laurie King, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

Christopher McDougall, Born to Run

Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By

Susan Cain, Quiet

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

—Kate Lewellen

James Patterson / Viola Davis, Judge Stone

Simu Liu, We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story

Stephen King, The Long Walk

Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere

Cristina Henríquez, The Book of Unknown Americans

—Anthony Lopez

Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

Laura Anthony, The Women on Platform Two

John Green, Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

—Amy Mabley

Neil Postman, Technopoly

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance

—Joe Maurais

Tim O'Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Alice Low, The Witch Who Was Afraid of Witches

—Kate McQuade

Mark Sanborn, The Fred Factor

Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, The ONE Thing

Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad

Jeannette Wells, The Glass Castle

—Caroline Meizen

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Natasha Trethewey, Native Guard

Niall Williams, Time of the Child

Wendy MacNaughton, How to Say Goodbye

Joan Reardon, editor, As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto

—Wendy Mellin

John Knowles, A Separate Peace

David Sedaris, Calypso

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones

Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth

Allison Roman, Something from Nothing

—Jill Meyer

Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

—Kerin Miller

Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

Carolyn Parkhurst, The Dogs of Babel

—Lauren Mondi

Dr. Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed

Dr. Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture

Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

—Santi Morgan

Julie Lythcott-Haims, Real American: A Memoir

Jon Chu, Viewfinder: A Memoir of Seeing and Being Seen

Lisa Genova, Still Alice

Kip Fulbeck, Part Asian, 100% Hapa

—Aya Murata

Theodore Deppe, Liminal Blue

Ross Gay, Inciting Joy: Essays

Aram Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear

Shannon Reed, Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out

Sarah Winman, Still Life

—Angela Parker

Octavia E. Butler, Dawn

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

Julie Lythcott-Haims, Real American: A Memoir

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Asha Bandele, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

Roberto G. Gonzales, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America

—José Peralta

Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men

Ryszard Kapucinski, Travels With Herodotus

—Colin Phelan

Stephen Markley, The Deluge

Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

Lewis Nordan, The All-Girl Football Team

—Garrett Richie

George Eliot, Middlemarch

William Wordsworth, The Prelude

Derek Walcott, Omeros

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

—Patrick Rielly

Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain

Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists

Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

—Paige Roberts

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

William Cronon, Changes in the Land

Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

—John Rogers

Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

Sasha Velour, The Big Reveal

—Allie Ross

Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Ibram X Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half

—Sarah Scherini

Fredrik Backman, Beartown

David Nicholls, One day

Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies

Belle Burden, Strangers

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

—Ei Smith

Ben Montgomery, Grandma Gatewood's Walk

Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days

Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road

Max Frisch, The Fire Raisers

—Lisa Johnson Svec

Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

Meg Anderson, The Memory of Borrowed Books

Marissa Mullen, That Cheese Plate Will Change Your Life

—Tracy Sweet

Kate DiCamillo, The Tale of Despereaux

Jennifer Egan, Manhattan Beach

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Princess Ben

—Abigail Taylor

Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Barbara Kingsolver, Prodigal Summer

Octavia Butler, The Parable of the Sower

—Laura Warner

Stephen Levine, A Year to Live

Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Mary Oliver, Upstream

John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us

—Helen Yang

Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl

Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon

Houshang Golshiri, Prince Ehtejab

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

—Maryam Zehtabi