Friday Reads: Olga Dies Dreaming

Happy first Friday of the Fall 2026 semester! We all deserve a break after making it through the first week of classes. Library Director Adam Pellman is here to tell us about a book from our fiction collection (yes, we have "fun books," too!), Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez.

This is a novel from our fiction collection that I’ve been meaning to read for a few years, and now I’ve made it a priority because the TV series adaptation will be hitting small screens soon, starring the incomparable Aubrey Plaza in the title role. Set in 2017, with snippets of letters written in years past to help fill in the characters’ history, the story centers on Nuyorican siblings Olga and Prieto Acevedo, who were abandoned by their mother decades ago when she migrated to Puerto Rico in support of a radical political cause. Olga is a successful wedding planner for Manhattan’s upper crust, while Prieto is a well-known congressman who splits his time between Washington D.C. and the Brooklyn neighborhood he represents. Their mother, Blanca, has kept tabs on them over the years, writing them letters but never attempting face-to-face contact. That is, until now, when Hurricane Maria’s catastrophic landfall in Puerto Rico has led Blanca back into her children’s lives.


The author is a Brooklyn native, and writes with equal parts affection and concern for her gentrifying hometown. The novel is brisk and full of humor, and even a little romance, all while tackling serious issues like class, injustice, corruption, race, identity, and colonialism. The Acevedos are an endearing bunch, even the complicated Blanca, whose hard choices hammer home the idea that the love of one’s family is foundational, but a life spent helping the oppressed is an expression of love, too.

Friday Reads - Run, Rose, Run

 Our Friday Reads are pretty sporadic these days, but Public Services Librarian Kelly Clever has a summer read to share: Run, Rose, Run by... Dolly Parton and James Patterson?!

 

My family visited Dollywood on our summer vacation, and while I've always considered myself a Dolly Parton fan, even I didn't realize that she had written a suspense novel with James Patterson! The public library had the novel and the companion music CD, so I checked out both. 

The novel follows the path of AnnieLee Keyes, a young woman who hitches her way to Nashville with nothing but a sleeping bag, a Colt revolver, and dreams of making it big as a country music star. She's definitely running from something or someone, but her past is mysterious. Another major player in the book is a "retired" country superstar, who shares more than a few characteristics with the great Dolly Parton, herself. 

Dolly's deep knowledge of the music industry and the dark undercurrents running beneath the spotlights is evident throughout the novel, and the album is a great pairing with the book. The tracks appear in the story as songs written by AnnieLee and those she meets, and it's a treat to get to hear them performed rather than having to just imagine them from type on a page.

Friday Reads - Marks of Excellence

Happy Friday! We hope that it's treating you well as we begin the final sprint to finals! Today, Library Director Adam Pellman tells us about one of his recent reads: Marks of Excellence: The History and Taxonomy of Trademarks by Per Mollerup.

Were it not for my Dewey Decimal Reading Challenge (where my goal is to read one book from each of the 100 divisions of the Dewey Decimal Classification system), a book about trademarks would almost certainly never have been on my radar. Which is a shame, because I’m so glad I found this book in our collection here at Seton Hill. Not only has it been illuminating to read about the history and different types of trademarks, along with key design principles and some foundational communication theory, but the book is a feast for the eyes, too. Much of it is composed of pictures, so it’s a fun book to just leaf through. The author is a working graphic designer who, in a bit of sly self-promotion, has included several of his own designs as examples.

One of the most interesting things to learn about was the way in which design elements from medieval heraldry continue to show up in modern logos and other trademarks (think the shield in the BP logo, or the Porsche coat of arms). The author also discusses earmarks on cattle and sheep, which I never would have thought of as a form of trademark, even though we use the term “branding” to describe another common practice for marking livestock. It’s also been interesting to learn about the histories of specific companies. For example, the company 3M, perhaps best known for making office supplies like Post-it Notes and Scotch Tape, started out as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, hence the three Ms. In this case, as in many others, simplicity is best.

Friday Reads: The Baseball 100

Happy Friday! My husband tells me (Kelly) that the Pirates have probably been "mathematically eliminated from the playoffs until 2029," but Library Director Adam Pellman has happier baseball topics to discuss today as he tells us about The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski. 

 

I used to read a lot of sports history books as a kid, especially books about baseball. I had a massive baseball encyclopedia that I pored over endlessly, and I even used it to teach myself how to keep score (although I've forgotten after so many years). This book has rekindled my interest in baseball's long and storied history. Posnanski selected those players he feels are the 100 greatest ever, and has devoted a chapter to each of them. This is no easy task, for sure, but Posnanski has managed it in dazzling fashion.

He is a tremendous writer. I appreciate the attention he gives to players from the Negro Leagues, and even to international players like the famous Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh. What makes this book truly great, though, is the way he goes beyond the statistics and standard biography to delve into the personalities, anecdotes, legends, and sometimes intangible qualities that have made these players such enduring figures in the sport's history. For example, there's the legend about famously swift-footed Negro Leagues player Cool Papa Bell, about whom it was said that he was "so fast that he could hit a line drive up the middle and beat the ball to second base." Or the way Posnanski frames his chapter on Ty Cobb by writing that Cobb "works best as an extreme. That is to say, he seems of little use to us if he wasn't the BIGGEST RACIST IN BASEBALL HISTORY or THE MOST MISUNDERSTOOD MAN EVER TO WEAR BASEBALL SPIKES." Or the way he celebrates Stan Musial as not just one of the greatest hitters of all time, but also as a profoundly good man who was devoted to making people happy. I also love that Posnanski included childhood favorites of mine like Larry Walker and Mike Mussina. It's a long book (well over 800 pages), and I've enjoyed reading it so much that I've paced myself in order to make it last as long as possible. I'll be genuinely sad when I've finished it.

Friday Reads: Back to Blood

Back to Friday Reads and Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe! Library Director Adam Pellman tells us about his current summer read. 

 

 

Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is considered by many to be the quintessential American novel of the 1980s, a big, sprawling NYC-set satire that sets its sights on the decade's materialism and excess, not to mention that city's racial and ethnic tensions. He tried to write another decade-defining novel in the 1990s with A Man in Full, another big, sprawling story about the foibles of a wealthy man. I thought both of those books were great, so I've decided belatedly to tackle Wolfe's novel of the 2010s, Back to Blood. It has many of the same hallmarks from his earlier novels (the satirical tone, the big cast of broadly-written characters, the thematic preoccupations with class, power, money, race, politics, and the press), but in this case, he's swapped Bonfire's NYC melting pot for the sun-baked, multicultural metropolis of Miami, Florida.

While the main character of Back to Blood is Cuban American Miami police officer Nestor Camacho, who ends up in hot water with both the Cuban and African American communities after two high-profile incidents on the job, Wolfe devotes plenty of attention to the many other characters who populate his story: WASP journalists; Cuban politicians; cops; Russian oligarchs; a Haitian college professor and his two children; and a fame-hungry psychiatrist and his Latina nurse, who also happens to be Nestor's ex-girlfriend. So far, it's highly entertaining, even if it doesn't quite reach the same heights as Bonfire.

Friday Reads: Bring Up the Bodies

Can one ever have too many retellings of Tudor drama? Of course not. This week Library Director Adam Pellman tells us about Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's take on how Thomas Cromwell worked to seal the fate of Anne Boleyn.

This is the second book in a trilogy of historical novels about the reign and successive marriages of King Henry VIII, centered on Henry's brilliant, ambitious, and savvy advisor, Master Secretary Thomas Cromwell. These characters, and this period in English history, have been the subject of countless novels, films, and plays, but it's hard to imagine they've ever been so richly imagined as in Hilary Mantel's books. The characterization, descriptive prose, and dialogue are all so beautifully executed (if you'll pardon my use of that term given the unfortunate fate of King Henry's wife in this novel, Anne Boleyn), that Tudor history and the inner life of Cromwell come to gripping, vivid life. The first novel in the trilogy, the prize-winning Wolf Hall, charted Cromwell's rise against the backdrop of King Henry's ongoing battle to end his marriage to his first wife, Katherine, and marry the young Anne Boleyn. In this sequel, Henry has become disillusioned with Anne after her failure to bear him a son, and growing gossip about her possible adultery and treason. Cromwell must navigate the complexities of power, politics, religion, family, morality, and his own precarious position as he works to bring about Anne's downfall.

Friday Reads: The Last Dragon

Just in time for Valentine’s day, a romance for the ages…with dragons. Our Metadata and E-Resources Librarian, Kathy Tobolewski, tells us about her recent read, The Last Dragon of the East by Katrina Kwan.

I’ve been long fascinated by tales of dragons. Especially dragons that are not as they
seem. From the Jay William’s picture book “Everyone knows what a dragon looks like”
that surely my mother must have been sick to death of reading to me, to more current
books such as One Good Knight by Mercedes Lackey and dragons in the Napoleonic
wars with Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, I’ve always been drawn to books where the
dragons serve as main characters. Most recently I found a review of The Last Dragon of
the East by Katrina Kwan and decided to give it a try.

Sai can see the magic red thread of soul mates for everyone but himself. The threads
of fate to his mate are gray and frayed in a way he has not seen with anyone else. He
makes matches and lives a quiet life with his mother while running their failing tea
house as endless war ravages the land. His search for a cure to heal his ailing mother
lands him in trouble with the emperor when dragon scales as medicine are found in his
possession. From there he is sent on a quest to hunt and kill the last dragon.

Along the way, he encounters Jyn and discovers that she is his soul mate. But Jyn is
not what she seems and is wary of him and his desire to know her and be with her.
What do you do when your soul mate may be a dragon? Why is she so unwilling to give
him a chance? Why is the emperor so determined to kill the last dragon in a relentless
and vicious hunt? How can two lovers really rebuild trust when thousands of years of
sorrow and dark forces have taken a toll on Jyn and her longing for her soul mate? Will
Jyn and Sai be able to overcome the past and find true love again?

Kwan combines love magic with the Asian dragon lore to create a sweeping romance.
Her lyrical prose and dialogue add to the feel of the tale as it kept me up long past my
bedtime. If you are looking for a dragon romance that is different from the standard
romantasy epic give this one a try.

Available in print from the Westmoreland County Libraries.

Friday Reads: The Underworld

Happy Friday! This week Adam tells us about broadening his horizons by going deep beneath them in The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean by Susan Casey. 

A few years ago, I started a Dewey Decimal reading challenge, where my goal is to read one book from each of the 100 divisions of the Dewey Decimal Classification system. There are ten divisions for each of the ten main Dewey classes (Religion, Social Sciences, Language, Literature, Technology, etc.), so it covers a very broad range of topics, many of which I might never engage with if not for this challenge. I'm working through it gradually, reading about ten books for the challenge each year. For the Earth Sciences & Geology division (Dewey numbers 550-559), I've selected Susan Casey's highly accessible book about oceanography and submarine geology, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.

Casey does a magnificent job of illustrating why the deep ocean continues to become the subject of fascination, exploration, and research for a growing number of people, and how vitally important this part of our world is for our climate and planetary health. It's a vast, dark expanse filled with creatures more alien than much of what we've imagined exists on other planets, and much of it has been explored and studied for the first time only in the last three or four decades. Casey's great skill is to bring this alien world to vivid life in the reader's mind through evocative descriptive prose:

"He could see mounds of black pillow lava, and rust-colored mineral deposits that signaled the presence of iron, and strands of bacteria waving lazily in the current. Jumbles of rocks glistened with volcanic glass. It was a landscape of stark Plutonian beauty."

Friday Reads: Don't Know Tough

F is for Fall and Football (and Friday Reads). This week, Library Director Adam Pellman discusses Don't Know Tough by Eli Cranor. 

While I no longer watch much football, it's that time of year, which made it an ideal time to read Don't Know Tough, a novel which is set against the backdrop of high school football in small-town Arkansas. The Denton Pirates have made the playoffs for the first time in many years, thanks mostly to the efforts of star running back Billy Lowe, whose explosive talents on the field are matched by his explosions of anger and violence off the field. Billy's troubled home life, where he suffers at the hands of his mom's abusive boyfriend, becomes the focus of the team's born-again Christian head coach, Trent Powers, who is intent on saving not just his team's winning season, but also Billy's soul. When the abusive boyfriend is found murdered, Billy becomes the prime suspect. This is a distinctly Southern noir, with a real feel for the insularity that can sometimes be found in small towns, but what ultimately makes the novel stand out is its examination of the ways that the bonds of family run deeper than anything else. I went into this novel expecting Friday Night Lights by way of Winter's Bone, but I think it's really the other way around.

Friday Reads: Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age

Happy Friday! This week, Interim Library Director Adam Pellman tells us about his current read, a nonfiction book about the era of World War I called Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins. 

It's always seemed to me that World War I has been overshadowed in American cultural memory by World War II. This is perhaps not surprising, given that our involvement in World War I was comparatively much shorter, and that, as time has gone by, veterans of World War II have been far more visible and celebrated in our culture as the "greatest generation." So I've been finding myself drawn more and more in recent years to books and films about World War I. This book distinguishes itself in that it's not a work of military history, but rather cultural history. It is a book about, as the author writes in the preface, "the emergence, in the first half of [the 20th] century, of our modern consciousness ... For our preoccupation with speed, newness, transience, and inwardness -- with life lived, as the jargon puts it, 'in the fast lane' -- to have taken hold, an entire scale of values and beliefs had to yield pride of place, and the Great War was ... the single most significant event in that development."

I'm only about halfway through the book, so the author is still focused on the events of the war itself, but he's already made some illuminating points. For example, he writes about the well-known Christmas truce that broke out along many parts of the western front in December of 1914, only a few months after the war began, when enemy soldiers openly fraternized, sharing food and drink and exchanging goods in a spirit of brotherhood and peace. Eksteins argues that such a widespread occurrence would have been unthinkable only a few years later, closer to the end of the war, as the shared values and "rules of war" (spoken or unspoken) had already changed so drastically. By 1917, this war, with its trenches and horrible new weapons, had become something new and different in the history of warfare. Eksteins attributes this change to Germany's initiative in altering the "methods, tactics, and instruments of war," and its position as the revolutionary power of Europe, with its willingness to "question western social, cultural, and political norms" even before the war began. "What was important above all for Germans," writes Eksteins, "was the overthrow of the old structures. That was the whole point of the war." He contrasts this with the British, whose more conservative aim in fighting the war was to restore and preserve their place as the dominant nation in western Europe, to retain the status quo. It's an interesting way to look at a country's military aims, not in relation to politics, or territory won or lost, but in relation to values. I'm looking forward to the rest of the book, to see how the author examines the war's influence on not just social and political developments, but also on literature and the arts.

Friday Reads, Special National Library Week Video Edition: Emily's Runaway Imagination

 Happy Friday, Happy National Library Week, and Happy D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything And Read) Day! This week's Friday Reads is a special video book talk about the origins of D.E.A.R. Day and of Kelly's favorite Beverly Cleary book, Emily's Runaway Imagination. 

Friday Reads: Normal People

Happy Friday, Griffins and friends! Interim Director Adam Pellman is reading a once-buzzy and once-new novel, Normal People by Sally Rooney. Read on for his thoughts!

I'm in an online book club that's themed around movies and TV. We alternate each month between nonfiction books that are about movies and TV, and fiction books that have been adapted into movies and/or TV series. This month, the selection was Sally Rooney's Normal People, a novel that received a lot of buzz when it was published, and was made into a limited series a few years back. This is the perfect time for me to read it, as I have a tendency to read buzzy new novels years after they've stopped being buzzy or new.

The novel follows Marianne and Connell, both from the same small town in Ireland, who forge a strong, short-lived, and very secret relationship in high school, then meet again the following year in Dublin, where they both attend Trinity College. They drift in and out of each other's romantic lives, always drawn magnetically back to one another. I'm about halfway through the book right now, and their increasingly self-destructive behaviors give me the growing sense that deep troubles lie ahead.

Stylistically, this book is different from anything I've read in quite some time. For one thing, Rooney writes her dialogue without any quotation marks, like Cormac McCarthy or Bryan Washington. For another, her prose is very spare. I'm usually a sucker for lush, descriptive language, but this novel doesn't have that. I think it's one of the things that lends the novel such a powerful sense of intimacy. It's almost like the stripped down prose strips away the barrier between me and the characters. It's a 180-degree turn from the last novel I read, a big, sprawling sci-fi epic.

Friday Reads: Midnight Sun

 Happy Friday, Griffins! As Friday Reads fans know, Kelly's literary tastes are quite highbrow, and this week's selection is no exception. Read on for sparkly vampire drama as she tells us about Midnight Sun by Stephanie Meyer. 

I was a bit busy when Twilight came out in the fall of 2006; I had just started working here at Seton Hill! Since I was a few years older than the target audience, it took me a while to get around to picking up a copy. When I did, I liked it enough to drag my then-boyfriend/now-husband to watch the film in the theater alongside a lot of squealing teenage girls. (He spent the whole movie slouched in his seat with his hat pulled low, apparently in pain, and would occasionally mumble "Bite her neck!")

Midnight Sun is the same story, but as seen and experienced by Edward. It turns out that he is every bit the tortured drama queen we always thought he was. It's a feature, not a bug, folks. 

I read an electronic copy, but the print edition runs 832 pages, compared to Twilight's 544. I guess when you are immortal and are awake 24 out of every 24 hours, you don't feel the need to be concise to save time or space. Edward's account of every event runs longer than Bella's because he spends even more time in self-loathing than she does. 

Edward also intersperses a lot more backstory, which is fun; we learn more about the Cullen family and how its members all found each other and embarked on their "vegetarian" lifestyle. Now I want a Twilight retelling from Carlisle's perspective... or Emmett's. I bet Emmett's version would be pamphlet-length. 

Friday Reads: The Woman in Me

 This week's Friday Reads is a bit predictable; Kelly tells us about her recent audiobook listen, The Woman in Me by Britney Spears. 

As a woman who was born in America in the 1980s, I am legally obligated to read Britney Spears' just-released memoir, The Woman in Me, and to give you my opinion about it. 

I grew up in the woods listening to country music, so I missed a lot of the Britney hype at its zenith, but I do have fond memories of bopping to "One More Time" in my Girl Scout leader's minivan. Even I, however, knew that Britney was a phenomenon; there was Britney Spears, and then there were all of the other female singers. Many of them would even make caustic references in their own songs and interviews about the impossibility of being held to her standard. 

Britney's memoir reveals that a lot of that image was smoke and mirrors, and that all of the pop-princess success came at an impossibly steep price. The book's juicy "reveals" that have made headlines are shocking and heartbreaking, but I was most saddened by the way she described her day-to-day life under her father's conservatorship. The monotony and degradation of that existence sounds unbearable, and I have so much respect for what she endured to maintain the "privilege" of time with her children. 

I don't have any formal psychology training, but it doesn't take any to recognize that she has been though a lot of trauma, beginning in her early childhood. While I believe that Britney is telling her truth, I'm not sure that all of it is the truth. And honestly, I'm not sure how much that matters. What is clear from public record is that, over and over again, the people closest to her viewed her as a meal ticket rather than as a person deserving of love and respect. I truly hope that she is getting the therapy, love, and support that she needs as she tries to pick up where she left off in her late teens and works on becoming her own woman.

Friday Reads: Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

Happy Friday! Interim Library Director Adam Pellman's book this week, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer, is about the real-life monsters who have been the creators of some of our most-loved works, and how we as fans struggle between our love of the art and our repulsion by the creators' other actions. 

Particularly since the advent of the #MeToo movement, and the rise of so-called "cancel culture," I think that many of us have found ourselves in a situation where we've learned that an artist (actor, singer, writer, director, painter, etc.) whose work we love has been accused, or even proven, to have committed some terrible act, and we've had to suddenly ask ourselves difficult questions about our relationship to that artist's work. Is it still okay for me to like this art, even if I now despise the artist? If I do still like it, does that make me a bad person? Is it truly possible to "separate the art from the artist," or is that just wishful thinking?

This book, by critic and memoirist Claire Dederer, dives deep into all of these questions, and more, embracing all of the complexity and nuance of this dilemma that many fans must face. At its core, the book addresses one question: How do you balance the greatness of the work against the badness of the deed? Dederer is clear right from the start that her goal is not to offer a definitive answer (as she notes, there's no magical calculator that lets you plug in one value for artistic greatness and another for deed heinousness, and then tells you which one trumps the other). Rather, her goal is to explore in depth what it's like, and what it means, to grapple with this dilemma. Each chapter focuses on a different facet of this issue, allowing Dederer to explore all the sticky elements that make this such a complex topic. Does our conception of what it means to be a "genius" lead us to be more forgiving of bad behavior among those artists who have earned that descriptor? How does gender play into this dilemma? Does a monstrous act later in an artist's career retroactively stain all of their earlier work? Dederer is a brilliant writer, and it's a real pleasure reading her insightful, funny, and sometimes self-critical examination of these questions.

Friday Reads: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear

 Happy Friday! This week, Public Services Librarian Kelly Clever wants to tell us about the audiobook she's been listening to recently: A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling.

This book sat on my Audible wishlist for a year or so before I finally decided to give it a listen. I don't remember howI first heard of it, but I do remember that the title made me laugh. In 2004, a group of libertarian-minded people identified the small town of Grafton, New Hampshire, as the perfect location for a libertarian society. They spread word of their plan through websites and message boards, and soon liberty-lovers from around the nation began moving there with the intent to vote out the existing local government and to install no government at all in its place. 

Unfortunately for the libertarian colonizers, however, Grafton was already home to an impressive population of particularly bold black bears. The bear situation was not improved by the sudden influx of people living in the woods and disposing of their garbage in any manner they chose. 

The book is filled with memorable characters, both human and ursine. In the audio version, the narrator's deadpan delivery adds to the drama and hilarity. We meet a woman known as Doughnut Lady who began feeding doughnuts to the bears several times a day. We learn about an eccentric preacher from decades gone by who built a towering outdoor pulpit to preach above the treetops. My personal favorite anecdote so far is about an old farmer and her guard-llama, who gave one cow-hunting black bear the butt-kicking of its life. 

I expect this book would be enjoyable for people from any political orientation who appreciate oddball history and dry humor. And bears. 

Friday Reads: Dandelion Wine

Most people have heard of Fahrenheit 451, but today Interim Library Director Adam Pellman tells us about one of Ray Bradbury's other books: Dandelion Wine.

 

I first encountered Ray Bradbury's stories as required reading in high school and college, and he's been a favorite of mine ever since. I've read most of his story collections, and novels like Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes still stand out as classics. For some reason, it's taken me this long to get to one of his most beloved books, Dandelion Wine, his semi-autobiographical novel about a childhood summer in a small town. This feels like the perfect time for me to read it. With school back in session, I need something to help me hold on to these last summer days, and this book fits the bill.

The novel takes place over the course of the summer of 1928, in fictional Green Town, Illinois (a setting modeled after Bradbury's own hometown of Waukegan). While the narrative returns time and again to the activities of twelve-year-old Douglas Spaulding and his brother Tom, many other townspeople get their time in the spotlight, and Bradbury does a marvelous job of fleshing out these characters, even if it's only for a single chapter. As much as he excels at capturing the rhythms and concerns of childhood, Bradbury is equally adept at fashioning the town's adult citizens, whose joy, sadness, fear, hope, and reminiscences create such an affecting collective portrait. As grounded as much of the novel is, there are still the darker elements and sense of magic that I often associate with Bradbury's work, whether it's the brothers' fascination with a fortune-telling arcade automaton, or the series of local murders thought to be carried out by an otherworldly creature known as the Lonely One. It's been a real treat to revisit Bradbury's work after such a long time away.

Friday Reads: Major Labels

Our newly-minted Interim Library Director, Adam Pellman, has a Friday Reads for this last Friday before Fall Workshop! Today he tells us about his experience reading Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres by Kelefa Sanneh.

I've been a casual music listener for most of my life, and my listening habits tended to be limited to classic rock or whatever happened to be on the radio in the car. It's only been over the past five years or so that I've made a conscious effort to expand my musical horizons, seeking out genres I had ignored in the past, and discovering new and old music by artists with whom I was previously unfamiliar. On the recommendation of a colleague, I even started a listening project using the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die album generator website, which randomly assigns an album each day for you to listen to, based on a list created by a panel of music critics. That's why this feels like the perfect time for me to read Sanneh's comprehensive and accessible book, which is essentially a history of American popular music since 1970. It's given me a lot of context to keep in mind as I listen to a new album from the list each day. Sanneh, a longtime music critic, draws heavily from contemporary criticism and journalism in music publications like Rolling Stone, Billboard, Source, and Creem, in addition to offering his own analysis and bits of autobiography, discussing, for example, how he fell in love with punk and hip-hop in his youth, or writing about his adoration of country music.

What I really love about this book is the way Sanneh dissects music culture, often drawing parallels between genres that might not seem obvious. As Sanneh writes, there's a sense of identity or culture associated with genres like punk and country, and terms like "rock 'n' roll" and "hip-hop" often evoke ideas of a certain lifestyle apart from the music itself. Musicians and fans embrace the distinctiveness of a particular genre and its cultural identity as part of its appeal, so when an artist or even a whole genre begins to have mainstream success or "crossover" appeal, that feeling of distinctiveness or specialness begins to fade. And yet, isn't greater success and broader appeal the goal of most musical artists? This tension is inherent in all of these genres, leading to constant evolution and the advent of new subgenres or strains like heavy metal, outlaw country, hardcore, trap, and house music. The book is a welcome reminder that music can be something we connect with on a deeply personal level, yet simultaneously something that can give us a real sense of community.

Friday Reads: To Kill a Mockingbird

This Friday, Dr. Stanley shares a book that is probably familiar to most of us and which always makes me (Kelly) think of summer: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. As with many classics, there is always something new to find with a re-read!

I like to spend some of my time during the summer re-reading books that I’ve read before. It doesn’t matter if I read it recently or many years ago. It doesn’t matter if I’ve read it just once before or more times than I can remember. It’s a great time to revisit old friends. One of my choices this summer has been To Kill a Mockingbird. This may have been one of the first novels I read growing up so it’s always held a special place for me. If you’ve seen the movie but not read the book, I think you’d be surprised how different they are. While the movie tells the general story the book is much more all-encompassing of the events that took place during that period in America. Granted there are some disturbing sections but it tells the story of the era. The past is not always pleasant as is pointed out in the plot. You get to learn more about Scout, Jem, and Dill; their personalities give you a more fleshed out perspective. Calpurnia is not just a background character; she interacts at a much deeper level and plays an active part in exploring the racial issues that arise. There are many subplots that are explored and they all work together to made this a difficult albeit excellent summer read.

Friday Reads: The Buried Giant

If you're looking for a misty, mysterious fantasy novel to read this summer, Adam's current book might fit the bill. Read on for his teaser of The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro!

Set in a mostly uncivilized post-Arthurian England, The Buried Giant tells the story of an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, who live in a small hillside village. The England of the novel is a land shrouded in mist, where ogres and dragons roam the land, and where everyone is experiencing a mysterious sort of collective amnesia. Some believe it is the constant mists that cloud their memories. With vague recollections occasionally gnawing at the corners of their minds, Axl and Beatrice set out on a journey to visit their barely remembered son, and along the way they are joined by a fierce Saxon warrior, an orphaned boy with a strange bite wound, and the aging Arthurian knight, Sir Gawain. Facing peril from human and non-human threats alike, they continue on their way, slowly piecing together the truths about their shared past.

This is a different kind of fantasy novel than I've read before, borrowing genre iconography like dragons and ogres, but with a very grounded storyline and language that reads more like historical fiction, despite its mythic trappings. It's also a highly allegorical novel, and its examination of collective responses to guilt and trauma feels sadly relevant. Kazuo Ishiguro also wrote two of my favorite novels, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both of which offer similarly slow, subtle builds to their respective story revelations. They're the kind of novels for which the phrase "quietly devastating" was coined, and The Buried Giant is another work that fits that description to a T.