Reading and Listening: a Multimedia Experience
Looking for a way to unwind during the first part of Fall semester? Enjoy reading with a sound track? Check out these recommended books from our collection, complete with links to accompanying music, readings, and performances.
Nonfiction
By Michelle Zauner
From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.
Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story
By Bono
When I started to write this book, I was hoping to draw in detail what I’d previously only sketched in songs. The people, places, and possibilities in my life. Surrender is a word freighted with meaning for me. Growing up in Ireland in the seventies with my fists up (musically speaking), it was not a natural concept. A word I only circled until I gathered my thoughts for the book. I am still grappling with this most humbling of commands. In the band, in my marriage, in my faith, in my life as an activist. Surrender is the story of one pilgrim’s lack of progress … With a fair amount of fun along the way.
Note: this is an eBook
The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music
by Dave Grohl
So, I’ve written a book. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I’ve recorded and can’t wait to share with the world or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child. From hitting the road with Scream at 18 years old, to my time in Nirvana and the Foo Fighters, to flying halfway around the world for one epic night with my daughters…the list goes on. I look forward to focusing the lens through which I see these memories a little sharper for you with much excitement.
Note: this is an audiobook
Fiction
By Cixin Liu
With the scope of Dune and the commercial action of Independence Day, this near-future trilogy is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience this multiple-award-winning phenomenon from China’s most beloved science fiction author. Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision
by Matt Haig
Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself?
By Andy Weir
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. An irresistible interstellar adventure as only Andy Weir could deliver, Project Hail Mary is a tale of discovery, speculation, and survival to rival The Martian—while taking us to places it never dreamed of going.
By Rebecca Yarros
Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret. Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
Poetry
By Sarah Kay
No Matter the Wreckage invites readers to revel in both new and beloved works, showcasing Kay’s remarkable ability to celebrate the essence of family, love, travel, history, and even peculiar romances between inanimate objects (“Toothbrush to the Bicycle Tire”) with eloquence and charm. With freshness and wisdom, Kay’s poetic voyage invites readers to embark on a soul-stirring journey of self-discovery and exploration of the world around her. This collection is full of honest and commanding poems, encouraging us to join in.
by Margaret Atwood
In Dearly, Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and – zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.
By Amanda Gorman
In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Now in paperback and featuring an interview with the author and a discussion guide, Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
Graphic Novels
by Neil Gaiman
Illustrated by an exemplary selection of the medium’s most gifted artists, the series is a rich blend of modern and ancient mythology in which contemporary fiction, historical drama, and legend are seamlessly interwoven. An unforgettable tale of the forces that exist beyond life and death, this first of four volumes—drawn by Sam Kieth, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III, and Kelley Jones, with spectacular guest art by Chris Bachalo, Colleen Doran, Charles Vess, and Michael Zulli—introduces readers to a dark and enchanting world of dreams and nightmares: the home of Morpheus, the King of Dreams, and his kin, the Endless.
By George R. R. Martin
Set one hundred years before the events in George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Sworn Sword graphic novel follows the adventures of Ser Duncan and his squire, Egg, as they quest for honor and glory in the Seven Kingdoms. After the deaths, surprises, and heroics in The Hedge Knight, Dunk and Egg continue their journey in search of the fair puppeteer Tanselle. Along the way, the elderly knight Ser Eustace takes both men under his charge, alongside another knight–and this one promises trouble. Peace is ever elusive for Dunk and Egg, as they are soon embroiled in the schemes of local nobility, while a darker, greater thread threatens to unravel long-held truths of the Battle of Redgrass Field.
