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.
Michelle Woods, Nonfiction, ‘26
Book: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
“The book follows a fictionalized Marcel, going through this childhood and coming of age, and all the people, gardens, and madeleines he encounters a long the way.”
Why I Recommend It: “We studied this in Honor Moore’s literature seminar on the uses of memory this semester. It has transformed the way I think about what’s possible on the page.”
Reading Companion: A beautiful botanical garden in New York — or Paris.
Chloe Cheimets, Fiction, ‘24
Book: Mother Doll by Katya Apekina
“Mother Doll has a crazy premise. Zhenia, a present day woman living in LA, gets a call from a pet psychic named Paul telling her that he has been communing in the spirit world with Zhenia’s great grandmother Irina. Irina, a Russian revolutionary who fled to America after being targeted by the Soviets, left her daughter, Zhenia’s grandmother, behind. This choice to abandon her daughter split Irina’s soul, and the soul fragment left behind in Russia seeks absolution (maybe?) from Zhenia.”
Why I Recommend It: “The book is hilarious, sad, sexy, well-written, wild. It’s about inheritance and motherhood and violence and revolution.”
Reading Companion: N/A
Honor Moore, Faculty
Book: Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
“Written as the memoir of a half Burmese queer Englishman, born in 1945…the son of a white English single mother, through Oxford, navigation of racism, great loves, life as an actor.”
Why I Recommend It: “If you read for story, if you read for language, if you read for beauty and to be transported, Our Evenings will stay with you. This is a book that takes place over 50 years but which manages to hold its reader in a present so vibratingly true and so meticulously rendered that you forget you’re reading. . .”
Reading Companion: N/A