The Reading Corner – What We’re Reading This Month!
Welcome to the reading corner! Once a month we’ll feature a current student, alumni, and faculty member who will share what they’re reading and why they recommend it! If you would like to be featured in upcoming posts please fill out this form.
Anne Pritikin, Fiction ‘25
Book: The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle by Francisco Goldman
“Goldman weaves together Mexico City’s geography, politics, and history with personal passages of his time in CDMX and how he emerged from the grief of widowhood in this book that is part memoir and part biography of the author’s adopted home city.”
Why I Recommend It: Goldman writes about Mexico City with a familiarity that is both intimate and evidently thoroughly researched, combining his own personal history and anecdotes that are irrevocably intertwined with CDMX with the history of the city itself in all its glorious complexities and expansiveness. His love for the city is contagious, and he deftly demonstrates the nuances of this particularly fascinating and sprawling metropolis, providing a compelling personal and historical account of CDMX.
Reading Companion: If I’m at home, a blanket. If I’m away, hopefully a soft sweater.
María Elisa Schmidt, Poetry, ‘24
Book: Residence on Earth by Pablo Neruda
“A vortex of time and being; of loneliness, cycles of the natural world, decay, destruction, silence, resurrection; of luminous solitude, blue oblivion, and of such deep melancholy that at one time Neruda considered renouncing the whole book and withdrawing it from circulation; of the erotic night, love’s impulse, and memory’s persistence; of odes to Lorca and lovers, elegies, songs, sonatas, and barcaroles; of the magnificent series of poems, Spain in Our Hearts, that Republican soldiers of the Spanish civil war printed at the eastern front; of sea waves, landslides, jellyfish, and a planet of swords––Residence on Earth is truly a work of intimate vastness, of lasting consummation.”
Why I Recommend It: The musicality and imagery of this book of poetry are simply delightful. Neruda takes the reader on a journey that recounts the joys and wonders of being alive on earth.
Reading Companion: N/A
Sidik Fofana, Faculty
Book: Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch
“Tells the story of how Haring went from aimless small town boy to NYC visual arts icon.”
Why I Recommend It: It shows how one-of-a-kinds don’t always have their ish together from jump.
Reading Companion: A set of noise-canceling earbuds and a cozy futon.