We asked our authors to recommend a book they had read over the past couple of years. Here is what they said:
I have loved the Neopolitan novels by Elena Ferrante because they are powerful stories of resilience, about what it takes to become yourself in the face of poverty, hardship, and social constraint. It is about the role of education in providing new ways of seeing the world and yourself. And woven through it all is a raw, complicated portrait of a lifelong friendship between two women: their loyalties and fractures, their jealousies and tenderness, the ways the friendship both shapes them and tests them. The books stayed with me because they felt real, and because they honored the complicated forces that make us who we are. —Laura Dunham
I appreciated the way Holland brilliantly recovers the two-thousand-year story of how the moral imagination of the Western mind was utterly transformed by the Gospel—a Gospel that embedded within the church the relentless terms of its own critique, renewal, and transformative power. —Gary Haugen
Curiosity and humility are not just important virtues for the human—they are essential to the ethos of science and engineering that is often overlooked in our daily interactions. Adam Grant highlights the elements of forming scientists to recognize the limitations of our knowledge, how to seek answers in the unknown, and communicate these to our peers and families. We must recognize that what we know is fallible, that we have some “un-learning” to do, and that this is critical to our humanity and our ability to serve those around us. Examples from social psychology, education, and sports make this a read for every audience. —Cameron Kim
You can fill several shelves with COVID post-mortem books, but in its own fashion, the best one so far is this peculiar novel about illness, desire, and attention. —Abraham Nussbaum
Kiran Desai’s 2025 Booker Prize shortlisted The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia is a character rich and captivating joy to read. It also illustrates how joy itself thrives best in the messiness of daily life. —Suzanne Shanahan
Spring 2026
Part I: Joy as a Virtue
Robert A. Emmons
Francis Su
Jennifer Frey
Angela Williams Gorrell
Emily Hunt-Hinojosa
Interlude: Lessons from the School of Life
Part II: Joy as a Vocation
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