Tag: library communications
Summer reading: My Year of Rest and Relaxation
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Ottessa Moshfegh
The narrator of this novel, after some difficulties in her personal and professional life, decides that she is tired, and needs more sleep. What makes her unique, however, is she decides to spend a whole year doing nothing but sleeping. What follows is a whirlwind of theory, thought, and adventure, all while the narrator is barely conscious.
This is a fantastic story that made me think, and has stuck with me for some time. I especially like the concept of going through a cleansing period to a state of rebirth. A must read!
GABRIELLE PRINDLE
Class of ‘21
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research major
This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!
Summer reading: Disgrace
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
Disgrace is a novel set in post-apartheid South Africa and narrated by an unfavorable man who is unseated from his job as a professor due to an affair he has been having with (his assault of) a vulnerable student in his class. He then moves to live on the farm of his daughter Lucy, where the tensions of a society that has been unbalanced play out around him. Disgrace carefully explores how shifting power dynamics in the strict racial hierarchy of a racist society can intimately affect and alter individuals’ lives. From a writer’s perspective, Disgrace is absolutely fascinating in the way it depicts the blurring of lines between what is right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust, and also in its portrayal of characters who are difficult to like but equally difficult to condemn.
ASMAA AHMED
Class of 2020
Double major in English and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures
This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!
Summer reading: Passing
Passing
Nella Larsen
Passing is a short and insightful novel centering around two black women, one who passes for white in wealthy white society while the other does not by virtue of her more visibly black family. Larsen herself was a mixed-race woman who lived during the first half of the 20th century and struggled for most of her life with the fact that she couldn’t easily belong in white or black society. Passing is thoughtful and strange and, I felt, powerfully emotional in a way that leaves you thinking about the book after you’ve finished reading.
ASMAA AHMED
Class of 2020
Double major in English and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures
This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!
Staff appreciation: Library benefits
In honor of Staff Appreciation Week, we’d like to remind you of some of your Library benefits. As UCB staff, you can:
- check out items, up to 100 at a time.
- access scholarly articles, journals, and databases, both on campus and remotely.
- take a break from your cubicle and visit the North Reading Room in Doe Library, or the cozy Morrison Library.
- access 30,000 documentaries, classic movies, and independent films on Kanopy.
- take a course for free on web development, photography, business management, and many other subjects on Lynda.com.
- access the collections of other major university libraries through interlibrary loans.
- borrow framed, original lithographs, etchings, and woodblock prints by major artists through the Graphic Arts Loan Collection.
And there’s so much more! Your Library is here for you!
Summer reading: The Sympathizer
The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Sympathizer is a fast-paced, action-packed novel that follows the path of “The Captain,” an undercover agent for the Viet Cong, who has spent years as a General’s assistant in the South Vietnamese army. His journey takes him from a life fighting on both sides of the Vietnamese conflict to a life as refugee in the United States, then back to Vietnam once again. Nguyen explores the difficult subject of the Vietnam War with masterful storytelling that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Nguyen strikes a delicate balance of telling the story of “The American War,” as the Vietnamese refer to it, from both sides of the conflict.
PETER VAHLE
Lecturer
College Writing Programs
This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!
Summer reading: So You Want to Talk About Race
So You Want to Talk About Race
Ijeoma Oluo
It’s a fantastic read because (1) she is skilled at breaking down both the overt and covert systems that have influenced difficult race conversations in this country, and because (2) it’s quite readable where other books sometimes can be too academic-feeling for some readers.
In terms of matching the theme of Between Worlds: it’s kind of on the nose. The world of white people in the USA, and the discussions of race that white people have been taught to have over the past centuries, are often extraordinarily separate from those of people of color in this country. This book is a wonderful tool for bridging those worlds.
TOREY BOOKSTEIN
College Adviser
College of Letters and Science
This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!
Summer reading: Cantora
Cantora
Silvia López-Medina
Cantora is a first novel by Sylvia López-Medina about four generations of Mexican (and later, Mexican-American) women as they make their way through life on both sides of the border. It was inspired by her own family history and shows their struggle between keeping traditions and adapting to their new home in California. Each generation overcomes a different set of problems. I loved it so much that I immediately read her second book, Seguiria, and was saddened to learn that her third remains unfinished because she died in a car accident.
DELLA PERETTI
Academic Coordinator (retired)
Graduate School of Education
This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!
Construction at the Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF)!
Please be advised that the NRLF building expansion project will commence at the end of May. The projected completion date of the fourth shelving module is fall of 2020.
Because the construction site is on the west side of the building complex, we expect minimal disruption to our daily operation. Library users will continue to have access to the reading room during our normal business hours, Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., except university holidays.
Noise: Construction noise should be moderate.
Traffic and Parking: All construction-related traffic to the Richmond Field Station (RFS) will be routed through an alternate access gate, so access to the RFS through the main entrance, as well as parking at NRLF, should not be affected.
Dust and Dirt: We anticipate minimal impact. The contractor will have dust control measures in place.
Security: The contractor will put up a fence that will demarcate the construction area, as well as signage in strategic places. Please be mindful and stay safe when you enter or leave NRLF or the field station.
Summer reading: Daughter of Fortune
Isabel Allende
In this novel the main character goes through a major transformation in who she is as she travels during the Gold Rush from Chile to California, which were essentially two different worlds. This is an amazing book that I have read many times and it covers an interesting time in California history from a woman’s perspective.
JENNA JACKSON
Privileges Desk Operations
Manager Doe Library
This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!
Summer reading: The Fifth Season
The Fifth Season
N.K. Jemisin
N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, the first installment of her Broken Earth trilogy, introduces us to a world much like our own but one in which society is constructed around surviving regular tectonic cataclysms, following a woman who has been forced to hide her identity across a broken land. As the earth cracks and shifts, humanity is forced to deal with both the physical catastrophe of a volcanic-induced climate disaster and the pressure to fall back on tribalism as survival becomes a struggle. Within this foreign yet familiar setting, Jemisin explores how people are trapped by and break down racial, sexual, geographical, and psychological barriers. There are parallels with our own world–humanity facing planetary climate disasters, discrimination based on otherness, increasing tribalism. However, the unique system of magic central to the story (which also teaches geology in the vivid way only fiction can) transports the reader to a new, fantastic place and helps the audience make sense of the people and forces at work in Jemisin’s world.
DAVID SKOLNICK
Lecturer
Summer English Language Studies
This book is part of the 2019 Berkeley Summer Reading List. Stay tuned for more weekly posts!