Summer reading: Becoming

Book cover for BecomingBecoming
Michelle Obama

This book is all about connection — Michelle Obama writes about her upbringing and how connections to her family and to her South Side Chicago neighborhood shaped her and her worldview; she writes about how her connection to her husband, Barack, changed her life and shaped it in a completely different way than she expected; and, finally, how her years in the White House connected her to America and its peoples in new and important ways (for her and for us). It’s a great read, and she’s an insightful, honest, funny, and courageous person. Five stars!

ANN GLUSKER
Sociology, Demography, & Quantitative Research Librarian

This book is part of the 2020 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!


Summer reading: Exit West

Book cover for Exit WestExit West
Mohsin Hamid

What if there were secret doors connecting your country to others? What if we stopped guarding those doors? Exit West by Mohsin Hamid tells the story of two independent people, Nadia and Saeed, who make a connection in night school and fall in love. But their city descends into war, and soon they find themselves passing through one of the secret doors. Their story is about what it feels like to be uprooted and forced to “exit” your home to face the unknown. Will their connection survive in these new circumstances? Set against the backdrop of migrant lives and guided by compassionate intelligence, this beautiful novel inspires big thinking about what it means to be a global citizen. Exit West is the featured text for On the Same Page 2020: Our faculty and all new students will receive copies to read over the summer, and all are welcome to attend Hamid’s keynote address on Aug. 20, 2020.

ESTELLE TARICA
Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese

This book is part of the 2020 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!


Feb 10 – 14: Love Data Week 2020

Love Data Week 2020

Berkeleyites have loved data for a long time now.  Way back in 2000 (20 years ago is EONS in the dataverse!), the American Association for Public Opinion Research gave an award to the Berkeley creators of what became SDA, or Survey Data Analysis, an early online data tool still used today, and the best thing since sliced bread if you are a data geek. In 2010, Berkeley researchers teamed with Alice Waters from Chez Panisse, using data to show how kids make better choices about nutrition if they grow their own food.  And check out this 2014 book review from the School of Information’s Data Science program, on the book Data: A Love Story, in which an enterprising online dater applies data science to her quest and (spoiler!) finds a lasting match.

So, it’s not at all surprising that UC Berkeley has an affection connection with the annual event Love Data Week, which has been a growing worldwide phenomenon since it started in 2016.  Love Data Week (LDW) began, as the site mentions, “to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services.” Berkeley has always offered a range of events and chances for participation during LDW, and this year is no exception.

On Monday, there will be an “Introduction to Savio” workshop, introducing you to the campus Linux high-performance computing cluster.  On Tuesday, there will be a session on Security Incident Handling (titled, tellingly, “Not If, When: Data + Information Security”).  Wednesday brings an introduction to the venerable and vast social science data repository, ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research), and Thursday’s offering is a talk by Daniella Lowenberg, Product Manager for the open data publishing platform Dryad (which allows all UC Berkeley researchers to archive and publish their data).

More information about each of these sessions is available on Berkeley’s Love Data Week 2020 page; note that all UC Berkeley staff, students and faculty are welcome, and refreshments will be provided at all sessions!

As you see, there’s something for everyone, and it’s totally OK if you don’t love data— YET! As they say on the Love Data Week site, “We believe research data are the foundation of the scholarly record and crucial for advancing our knowledge of the world around us. If you care about research data, please join us!”


February 6: Art for your Apartment

Art for your Apartment

Wednesday, February 6
5:00 – 6:00 p.m.
Morrison Library

The best way to appreciate art is to live with it!

Come see and learn about the Graphic Arts Loan Collection. This is framed art prints you can bring home and hang on your wall for the school year.

Event takes place in the historic Morrison Room (housed within the Doe Library). A brief presentation will be followed by ample time to browse representative works and initiate the borrowing process.

Prints comprise a survey of movements and artists – from Impressionism to Cubism, and from Rembrandt to Miro.


December 5: Lunch Poems with Margaret Ross

Margaret RossThursday, December 5
12:10 p.m. – 12:50 p.m.
Morrison Library in Doe Library
Admission Free

Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare. Her poems and translations appear in The New Republic, The Paris Review, and POETRY. Her honors include a Fulbright arts grant, a VSC/Luce Chinese Poetry & Translation Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. She currently teaches at Stanford University where she is a Jones Lecturer.


November 7: Lunch Poems with Monica Youn

Monica YounThursday, April 4
12:10 p.m. – 12:50 p.m.
Morrison Library in Doe Library
Admission Free

Monica Youn is the author of three books of poems, most recently BLACKACRE (2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award. Her book IGNATZ (2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship, among other awards. She teaches at Princeton and in the MFA programs at NYU and Columbia. She is a former lawyer, a daughter of Korean immigrants, and a member of the curatorial collective The Racial Imaginary Institute.


Summer reading: The Towers of Trebizond

Book cover for The Towers of Trebizond
The Towers of Trebizond
Rose Macaulay

The main character, Laurie; her plump, adventuresome, intellectual Aunt Dot; her somewhat objectionable Anglican Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg; and a white Ruwallah camel embark from England on a missionary reconnaissance–or an Anglican spying expedition, as Laurie comically refers to it–to the unconverted peoples of the Black Sea region. (Part of Aunt Dot’s purpose in going is that of “…sizing up the situation and the possibilities, and telling women about the Anglican Church…and about what a good time Christian women had, wearing hats and talking to men, not having to carry the loads, and being free to go about and have fun like men, and sometimes ride donkeys instead of walking.”)

As Laurie narrates their travels through Turkey and Syria, intertwined are her observations of the peculiar ways of organized religion and her musings on her own spirituality. Adding to the truly great appeal found in the language and witty voice of the book, Laurie’s and the other characters’ vast classical knowledge of literary and ancient history also shines through all their adventures.

JEAN DICKINSON
Slavic & E. European Cataloging Librarian

That’s it for the 2019 Summer Reading List! See you next summer!


Summer reading: Miles: The Autobiography

Book cover for Miles: The Autobiography
Miles: The Autobiography
Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe

Music majors might want to read this book, which I consider to be the best book on jazz history despite it being an autobiography.

Miles Davis was one of the towering figures in popular music of the 20th century. From a middle class family in East St. Louis, his father sent him to NYC to study music at Juilliard. He dropped out, bored out of his mind, and decided to chase his hero Charlie Parker around town to learn the latest Bebop craze. That act of defiance gave birth to a legendary career and gave us some of the best jazz recordings in history.

Davis always managed to stay on top of the many shifts in the music industry and rarely rested on his laurels. His legendary temper, his women, and his fleet of Ferraris are only side notes to a grand career that spanned almost fifty years. Kind Of Blue, the album that made him world famous, is the best testimony of a man who knew how to incorporate materials from different worlds and create classic American music.

ALVARO LÓPEZ-PIEDRA
Library Assistant III/Receiving Specialist (Spanish/Italian/French/Portuguese/Catalan Collections)
Ordering & Monographs Receiving Unit

This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!


Summer reading: Angle of Repose

Book cover for angle of repose
Angle of Repose
Wallace Stegner

Stegner’s novel, one of my all-time favorites, is relevant to the “Between Worlds” theme because, while it is set in the recent modern day, the main character, a history professor at UC Berkeley, is writing a book about his grandparents’ westward migration along the American frontier, where they often must reconcile civilized east and wild west. I read this during my junior year as an undergraduate and did not want it to end.

SARA QUIGLEY
Senior Data Visualization Analyst
Office of Planning and Analysis

This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!

 


Summer reading: The 57 Bus

Book cover for The 57 Bus
The 57 Bus: A true story of two teenagers and the crime that changed their lives
Dashka Slater

This gripping read explores the different worlds of race, gender, class, and privilege and how they explosively collide on a bus traveling from Berkeley to Oakland.

SUSAN EDWARDS
Head, Social Sciences Division & Social Welfare Librarian
Social Research Library

This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!