There are still a few weeks of summer remaining, and that means there is still time to enjoy a great book. Members of the HDS community recently shared what they’ve been reading for class and for pleasure.
Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor of Divinity Emeritus
Wearied of the obsessive daily coverage of this year’s presidential marathon, I thought back to the spring of 1968 when I worked in Robert Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic nomination, before he was killed in Los Angeles in early June. So I took down from my shelf C. David Heymann’s RFK: A Candid Biography, published in 1998. It helped transport me back to what were heady days for me, and for many of us. It includes Bobby’s time at Harvard in the late 1940s, his close but complex relationship with Jack and the many different political races they ran, his experience as senator from New York, his work at attorney general, and–yes–his affair with Marilyn Monroe, and his presidential bid. It ends with that awful June day in Los Angeles when, after he had won the California primary that I worked in, he was murdered by Sirhan Sirhan.
Bobby was a committed, brilliant, enormously energetic, and flawed person. My involvement in that campaign remains one of the high points of my life, and this book brought it all back, vividly and painfully.
Stephanie Paulsell, Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies
This summer I’m reading Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems 1950-2012, with an introduction by the poet Claudia Rankine. At more than 1,100 pages, I expect to spend all summer with these poems—I am trying to read them slowly, to savor each one. The collection is a record of devotion to an engaged poetry that not only longed for change, but worked for it, interrogating our destructive dreams of innocence and offering visions of an intimacy with the power to undo and remake us. Rich’s own poetic forms changed and opened over the years, shaped by her uncompromising attention to sexuality and politics, love and silence, race and power, language and the lives of women. Her poems document both “the damage that was done” and “the treasures that prevail.” In these violent days, her voice remains essential.
David Waters, MDiv candidate
I read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf years ago (and have read it more recently for class) for a women’s literature course. I’d forgotten most of the details, so encountering it again this summer was like reading it again for the first time. If you haven’t read Woolf before, this is a good place to start. (I’d also very much recommend Mrs. Dalloway, but that’s a tougher read.) To the Lighthouse is fantastic—literary, not a page-turner … it’s a novel that you settle into and spend some quality time with. It’s a novel to savor.
A personal favorite and a treasure of short stories is Unaccustomed Earth by Indian-American Jhumpa Lahiri. She writes of Bengali expatriates in places from Seattle to Cambridge to London, and her stories are so evocative that there were many times where I simply had to put the book down after finishing one. The people and the places are diverse and individual, and yet the themes are universal.
Natasha DuMerville, Diversity and Inclusion Administrative Fellow
This summer I've been reading Blindspot, along with approximately 20 other HDS staff members, as a part of a summer staff reading/discussion group I'm facilitating. The book explores the idea of unconscious bias and how these hidden biases influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I am also reading Saving Alex, a story of a teenager's experience with conversion therapy.
Leslie MacPherson Artinian, Departmental Administrator, Office of Ministry Studies
This summer, I told myself that I need to get some good, old-fashioned escapist fiction. In the last few months, I have read primarily journals and essays, but when I go up to New Hampshire on vacation, I am taking two books with me.
One is the final book written by Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist and author who died last August. The book is called Gratitude, and it is a collection of four essays on his feelings about coming to terms with his own mortality.
The second book is, yes, a good (hopefully) beach paperback called Rainwater by Sandra Brown. The story takes place during the Great Depression and is about a single mother who runs a boarding house. When I did some research on what others thought of it, I found this review: “There I was, trying to find a nice trashy [sort of oxymoronic, that] book to read, so I thought Sandra Brown would be reliable in that department, and she goes and writes this lovely piece of literary/historical fiction instead. This is the second time I’ve been thwarted in trying to find a trashy book! [Clearly, I need more practice.] It also provoked yet another instance of The Sobbing-in-Public Reader as I finished it on the plane.”