Summer Reads 2022

Need something new on your nightstand? Looking for a summer escape? Or need your next book club selection? We've got you covered. It's all the pleasures of a reading list, without the book report.

We asked some of Duke's most admired faculty members to contribute to our popular Lifelong Learning summer reading list. Each book includes five questions to consider while reading, direct purchase links, and an introduction video from the author.

Brothers: A Novel

Fiction Literary

5 Questions to Consider While Reading

  1. In a celebrated address, the Nigerian writer Chimimanda Ngozi Adiche cautions against “the dangers of a single story” that readers demand of authors from the non-West. How does Brothers both conform to and challenge the presumed “single story” of modern China? 
  2. In contrast to the English edition, which was published in a single volume, the original Chinese version of Brothers was originally published in two volumes in consecutive years, separating the story of Baldy Li and Song Gang’s childhood from their later-in-life adventures. Do you think these different publication strategies would affect the way the reader understands the protagonists’ story?
  3. In a conversation about writing Brothers, Yu Hua said that he was tired of the cliché of the modern Chinese writer as an all-knowing expert—a doctor, diagnosing the ills of society. “I wanted to write as the mad patient in need of a cure,” he said. What do you think Yu Hua means, and how does this logic play out in the telling of Brothers?
  4. Brothers in some ways is about parents and children, and the lengths to which parents will go to protect their children from a world gone mad. For instance, Li Lan, the boys’ mother, makes some extreme choices throughout the story. Are her actions comprehensible?
  5. Beginning with the very first sentence, the novel repeatedly refers to “our Liu Town.” How do you understand this collective first-person “we/us” in the novel?

Biography

Eileen Cheng-yin Chow and Carlos Rojas teach modern Chinese cultural studies at Duke, in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Eileen is the Director of Graduate Studies of Duke’s Master’s Program in East Asian Studies, and Carlos is the founding co-director of the Humanities Research Center at DKU. In addition to translating Yu Hua’s Brothers, their other co-productions include two co-edited volumes (Rethinking Chinese Popular Culture: Cannibalizations of the Canon and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Cinemas); they are also co-editors of the ongoing Sinotheory book series for Duke University Press; and in 2015, they co-founded Story Lab at Duke. They also share three kids, ages 23, 17, and 12.

Double Trio

Fiction Poetry

5 Questions to Consider While Reading

  1. What is the significance of the title "Double Trio"?
  2. What is the significance of the title "Tej Bet"?
  3. What is the significance of the title "So's Notice"?
  4. What is the significance of the title "Nerve Church"?
  5. Who comprise the "we" referred to throughout DOUBLE TRIO?

Biography

Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of ongoing prose work, eleven chapbooks of poetry, and a three-volume boxed set collection of poetry, Double Trio: Tej Bet, So’s Notice, Nerve Church (New Directions, 2021). He is editor of the literary magazine Hambone, co-editor of the anthology Moment's Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and co-editor of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017).
 
His awards and honors include the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University in 2015, the William B. Hart Residency in Poetry at the American Academy in Rome in 2016, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress in 2017, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing.

The Intrigues of Jennie Lee

Fiction History

5 Questions to Consider While Reading

  1. If the real life Jennie Lee hadn't actually managed to do almost everything she does in the novel, would you believe it was even possible?
  2. What does that tell us about the role of individuals in history?
  3. Could the Duchess of York (later Elizabeth, the queen mum) have the kind of relation (a wholly fictional part of the novel) she had with Jennie Lee?
  4. Is Jennie's relationship with Oswald Mosely (future leader of the 1930's Union of British Fascists) an equal or exploitative one?  
  5. Can we learn things from counterfactual history, like the plot of this novel, about the real outcomes of history--in this case the way the world unfolds into World War Two?  

Biography

Alex has been a member of the Duke philosophy department for over 20 years. The author of hundreds of academic papers and a dozen books about the philosophy of science, he began writing more accessible works for general audiences ten years ago, including "The Atheist's Guide to Reality" and "How History Gets Things Wrong: The Neuroscience of our Addiction to Stories." More unusually he is the author of 4 historical novels, including the best seller, "The Girl From Krakow" and its sequel, "In the Shadow of Enigma." Like "The Intrigues of Jennie Lee," all of his novels connect the real dots of history into narratives about strong, resourceful, smart women.