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Research Guides@Tufts

Fletcher Faculty Leisure Reading : Winter 2015

What We're Reading for Fun

Books for a Blizzard

  • BURGESS, KATRINA.  I just finished a very fun book set in Boston entitled The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro.
  • CHAYES, ANTONIA.   I read Green on Blue.  It is terrific!  Now I am back going through the C.P.Snow series Strangers and Brothers about English academic and political life. Last year I did Trollope (Barchester) and much of Dickens. I can draw a line from the latter through the women writers of the XIX (Oliphant etc) to CP Snow of  the 1950s and 60s through Downton Abbey. It is all colorful, mannerist, and great reading.
  • CHURCH, CHEYANNE.  I read the Rosie Project and Rosie Effect – they are definitely leisure category and am working my way through Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results (not so leisure).
  • CONLEY, BRIDGET.   Snow by Orhan Pamuk.
  • DREZNER, DANIEL.   Well, I was in Antarctica for the start of this blizzard, and I was entranced by David Day’s Antarctica: A Biography – a history of the exploration and contestation over Antarctic territory and resources. Definitely worth a read!
  • GLENNON, MICHAEL.  Sapiens by Yuval Harari.  The Circle by Dave Eggers.  The End of Absence by Michael Harris.  Confessions by Jaume Cabre.
  • HENRIKSON, ALAN.   The Shavit bookMy Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, a very ambivalent and challenging one, has been, mainly, my 'blizzard' reading.
  • HOLT, THOMAS.  I am reading the Old Filth trilogy by the British author Jane Gardam, which is premised on the life of fictional character, Sir Edward Feathers Q.C., and other so-called “empire orphans”--really quite good.  And definitely a must for any analytically-minded student:  Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise.
  • ISLAM, SHAFIQUL.    Here are the books I am reading during my “hibernation”…  1) I have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould,  2) The Complexity of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, and 3) Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun (English translation by Franz Rosenthal).
  • JACOBSEN, KAREN.   I am loving WIlliam Gibson's The Peripheral.
  • JOHNSTONE, IAN.   Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King. Ian McEwan, The Children Act. Susan Cain, Quiet. 
  • KHAN, SULMAAN.   'H' is for Hawk: a stunning read on goshawks, loss, watching, landscape, life, love, everything. Homebound by the blizzard, I did reread The Last Supper and Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Plus all the Rex Stout I could get my hands on. 
  • MANKAD, MIHIR.  Reading Resonate by Nancy Duarte; part pleasure, part for course.
  • RUGH, WILLIAM.   Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary. I found I couldn't put it down. It is a page turner.   Ansari has a chatty, informal style of writing that is so compelling you learn a lot of history without being bored by dates and names, although he gives you those in the process of telling wonderful stories. He wrote the book because after growing up in Afghanistan he came to the US and discovered that when we teach history we say very little about Muslims and badly shortchange the Muslim point of view of the world. He rectified that with this book. I am recommending it to my friends, and the ones who have read Islamic history before say they love it.
  • SALACUSE, JESWALD.   I read Lawrence Wright, Thirteen Days in September, a fascinating, day-by- day account of the 1978 Camp David negotiations between Israel and Egypt that led to their peace treaty.
  • WEISS, LARRY.  Snowball (biography of Warren Buffett). Ice Age: The Theory That Came in from the Cold by John and Mary Gribbin. Management Control Systems by Ken Merchant and Wim Van der Stede.
  • WILSON, KIM.  Spell of the Tiger: Man-Eaters of the Sundarbuns by Sy Montgomery (wonderful); H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (gripping); History of Upper Assam, Upper Burmah, and Northeastern Frontier by L.W. Shakespear (uhhh... good if you have thoroughly read your tax return filing instructions and seek fresh reading fodder).