What we read this summer

Our CETL team is filled with readers (and writers). In an era when we worry about students' willingness to engage with course readings, we know that modeling our own reading habits can send a powerful message about the value of reading regularly. With that in mind, here are a few things we each read this summer!

Josh

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

The Winter’s Tale and Richard II by Shakespeare

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Articles on alternative grading in teacher education

Only one of these is for work (can you guess which?), but I find the summer to be a time for rejuvenation as well. For me, this means reading fiction as much as possible.

Emily

My husband and I had a baby earlier this year, so I’ve had little time for summer reading! 

For work-related reading, I can highly recommend David Gooblar’s One Classroom at a Time. The book takes a deep dive into research on teaching but it never feels dry—I really appreciate Gooblar’s narrative writing style. CETL is bringing Dr. Gooblar to campus in September, so I hope you’ll join us!

I also dabbled in some critical pedagogy: I re-read Paolo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed and read, for the first time, Ira Shor’s When Students Have Power. The latter is a not-as-well-known but still fascinating account of Shor’s experiment in democratizing his community college classroom. It deftly weaves a narrative of the author’s experiences in the class with meditations on critical pedagogy and other kinds of research on teaching. The subject of the class was, appropriately, utopias. 

As for pleasure reading, I’m afraid it’s mostly bedtime stories these days. Currently, Dr. Seuss is a popular choice: I’m enjoying There’s a Wocket in My Pocket!, Oh, The Thinks You Can Think!, and Hop on Pop. Goodnight Moon also features heavily in the rotation. When the baby is a little older, I’ll be excited to introduce one of my own childhood favorites, Where the Wild Things Are.

Liz

I am a sucker for a reading group, so in most semesters (fall/spring/summer), I organize at least one virtual reading group open to all. Over the summer, I facilitated two groups on books I’d wanted to read for a long time. 

The first is Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman. Because I’m deeply interested in disability studies and neurodiversity, this book was atop my TBR, but I knew I’d struggle to make time without the accountability of a reading group. In a concise text, Chapman manages to tie together history, philosophy, economics, and disability studies in a way that completely blew me away. I’m not one for deeply theoretical texts, and I confess I spent far too long (and most of a reading group meeting) trying to understand what materialist analysis meant. And yet, Chapman was able to trace the history of disability through the emergence of capitalism in a way that finally allowed me to understand the true meaning behind the social model of disability. For such a short book, Chapman’s work had an outsized impact on my thinking. 

The second was Sara Ahmed’s book, Complaint! A feminist scholar with her own complicated experiences around complaints processes, Ahmed focuses on the insidious ways institutions often design labyrinth-like procedures for those who have suffered harm or injustice. As someone who struggles with abstract theory and circular writing, I found the text to be challenging on its own. The content did not make it easier; my own experiences of institutional harm (it should be said, at other institutions!) made the actual material of the book even more challenging. Honestly, I would not have made it through this book without a community of people to discuss it with. 

Through the lens of these two experiences, then, I’ve captured the biggest reasons I so adore reading groups: accountability and community. Both of these lead nicely into the third book I read this summer, Annmarie Caño’s gorgeous book, Leading Toward Liberation: How to Build Cultures of Thriving in Higher Education. I was fortunate to meet Annmarie at the American Association of Colleges & Universities annual conference in January 2026. Her work is grounded in a deep understanding of the work of Iganacio Martin-Baro, a Spanish Jesuit priest, psychologist, and professor at the Universidad Centroamericano (UCA) in El Salvador prior to his murder in 1989. Martin-Baro was instrumental in bringing liberation psychology to the El Savadoran context. Her book draws on this intellectual history and applies it to the work of leadership in higher education. In the pages of this book, I found a message of hope and community, one that I very much needed to hear in such a challenging moment for higher educators. 

And because I read voraciously, I can’t resist adding a fiction choice I also loved this summer: The Love of My Afterlife, by Kristy Greenwood. This romantic comedy novel follows a main character who dies (in the first scene—that’s not a spoiler…and also, see the book’s name!) in a rather ignominious way. Upon arrival at the afterlife waiting room, she meets the most stunningly handsome man she’s ever laid eyes upon. Then he disappears when he is revived back into his Earthly existence. She works out an arrangement to return to her life briefly…and can stay alive only if she manages to complete a rather complicated challenge. This book had everything: hilarity, heartbreak, and hope. I cried so hard, laughed so deeply, and lamented that the book came to an end. 

For each of these books, I offer both my full recommendation and my deep appreciation. They nourished my mind during the oppressively hot summer months.

Hanna

I was a teacher and a youth services librarian before coming to CETL, so children’s and young adult literature most often fills my reading lists. But I’m also an avid audiobook listener and always looking for longer listens, so when The Hemingses of Monticello audiobook came across my recommendations, I went ahead and checked it out. Annette Gordon-Reed’s lengthy investigation of Hemings family, starting with Sally Hemings’ grandmother and extending up to the present, was completely worth it. Gordon-Reed weaves a compelling tale, combining the historical evidence with a thoughtful consideration of the social, political, and personal factors at play. It was coincidental, but I found it especially meaningful to take this deep dive with the Hemings this summer, as we marked 250 years since the formal adoption of the Declaration of Independence. 

One note: I listened to and enjoyed the audiobook, but given the vast cast of characters, many of whom had the same or similar names, I eventually went to check out the physical book to support my reading. My breaking point was when Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, who had been called Patsy up to that point, was referred to as Martha, becoming at least the third Martha mentioned. The physical book has photos and multiple family trees, which I appreciated!

My family (ages five to adult) also enjoyed Varian Johnson’s The Parker Inheritance on audio as we traveled to and from the beach this summer. This incredibly clever, engaging mystery is geared towards the 8-12 age range—the main characters are 12 and 11 years old, and some of the narrative’s historical flashbacks were scary for our five-year-old—but we were all riveted up to the end. Johnson’s mystery breathes life into the American South’s not-so-distant past, and it had us searching afterwards to learn more about the factual inspirations for the book’s fictional events.