Hub staff report, Dec 18
It’s no surprise that Johns Hopkins faculty, staff, and administrators are a community of readers. From the dean who reads a book a week to the career development adviser who can’t resist adding new finds to the growing pile of books next to his desk, Hopkins people voraciously read their way through 2024. Here are some of their favorites.
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Senior lecturer | Writing Graduate Programs; author of Behind You Is the Sea (HarperCollins, 2024)
I have been telling everyone I can about Tracy Dimond’s first full-length poetry collection, Emotion Industry. Dimond is a Baltimore resident who worked as a librarian and curator of literary programming for years, and her poetry is so captivating. It has tremendous energy, and every line is so thoughtful and smart. Her topics range from living with chronic illness in a world that doesn’t tolerate, being queer in a society that is increasingly vocal about its hate, to feminist rage against patriarchy, to critiquing capitalism and its way of commodifying our lives and talents. Every single poem here is a little gift, a gem of compassion.
Christopher Cannon
Bloomberg Distinguished Professor | English and Classics
My choice would be Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. What I liked so much was the way the very carefully interleaved plot of past and present (it is set during the pandemic) opened out so firmly into optimism: It seems to say that troubled pasts can yield richly satisfying lives. This is all the more impressive because Patchett makes Chekov’s tragic The Cherry Orchard a touchstone (Tom Lake is set in a cherry orchard) as well as Thornton Wilder’s haunting (and sad) Our Town—it turns out, that in her hands, there are better outcomes possible. I’ll also say that I didn’t read this book in the conventional way but listened to it on Audible in large part because I learned Meryl Streep read it there. That, in itself, was a joy and a revelation.
Robert Lieberman
Professor | Political Science
This year I returned, as I do every few years, to Mark Twain’s masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I don’t know of any other work that so wholly captures and lays bare the grotesque ethical, social, and political distortions that slavery wreaked on American society. But it’s also a hilarious comedy, a picaresque adventure, and a coming-of-age story that reveals new details and layers with each reading. But this time around I didn’t have to leave Huck behind when I finished Twain’s version of his story. I followed up by reading James, by Percival Everett, which follows the same story through the eyes of Jim, who in his escape from enslavement becomes Huck’s traveling companion down the Mississippi River, his mentor and guardian, and ultimately his friend. Everett’s sense of adventure, comedy, and humanity is every bit the equal of Twain’s, and his amazing reimagining of Jim’s and Huck’s journey adds still greater depth to both the comic and the tragic aspects of this cornerstone of American culture.
Sarah Szanton
Dean | Johns Hopkins School of Nursing
If you’ve read other Percival Everett books, you know he traverses the space between terror and comedy. James is a riveting and literary work that illuminates both contemporary and 19th century society. The novel is a retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn narrated by a highly educated Jim. To survive, he must code switch when interacting with white people. As readers of James, we think more deeply about racial identity and the significance of language. It’s a thrilling book. And it will go make you read the original again.
read more at: https://hub.jhu.edu/2024/12/17/book-recommendations-johns-hopkins-scholars-2024/
