This week in Summer Reading

Book cover for Solito

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

 

Book cover for Chip War

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


This week in Summer Reading

Book cover for Think Again

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
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

 

 

Book cover for The Dawn of Everything

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


This week in Summer Reading

Book cover for The Fifth Season

The Fifth Season
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

 

 

 

Book cover for Fairyland

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


This week in Summer Reading

Book cover for The Ornament of the World

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

 

Book cover for Caste

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


This week in Summer Reading

Book cover for Enders Game

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

 

 

Book cover for A Children's Bible

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


This week in Summer Reading

Book cover for Americanah

Americanah: A Novel
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

 

Book cover for Pachinko

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


This week in Summer Reading

Book cover for The Swimmers

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

 

Book cover for Twenty Five Chickens

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.

KRIS KASIANOVITZ
UCB IGS Library Director


This week in Summer Reading

Book cover for Detransition, Baby

Detransition, Baby: A Novel
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.

MAYA MAHAJAN
Coordinator
Language Exchange Program

Book cover for Sellout

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


This week in summer reading

Crimp Camp movie posterCrip 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 book coverThe 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


Summer reading: Turn the Ship Around!

Book cover for Turn the Ship Around Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders
L. David Marquet

WHY–We live in a world filled with anger and grievance over conflicting notions about the relationship between individuals and communities. That relationship is defined by notions of liberty, a word that is not a synonym for freedom, for liberty requires duties. But “liberty” is not the same in time. In classical antiquity, fascism, and post-communist autocracies, the individual is subordinate to a community, so liberty reflects the collective’s freedom from impurity or attack. In modern times, commerce supersedes violence as a way of allocating goods, so liberty is defined by the actions and desires of individuals. Give too much leave to individuals, and you get nihilism and fragmentation. Give too much leave to community, and you get stultification and totalitarianism. Thus, we must learn to live within a dialectical tension. And you will need to understand its contradictions so as to cut its Gordian knots. To that end, two readings on theory and one on practice.

YIN–A liberal comparison of ancient versus modern liberty: Benjamin Constant’s 15-page essay titled “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns” (1819).

YANG–A deeply conservative version of the same: Leo Strauss’ 49-page essay titled “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy” (1959.) (electronic copy requires CalNet authentication)

BANG–A book about how a commander on a nuclear submarine changed a top-down martinet culture into a community of leaders: L. David Marquet’s 274-page book titled Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (2013).

ARTURO PEREZ-REYES
Professional Faculty
Haas School of Business

That’s it for this year’s Summer Reading! Tune in again next year!