2025 Berkeley Law Library
Summer Reading List

This is the first book in a series called The Murderbot Diaries. On name alone, it isn't something I would normally pick up but the series was recommended to me by a good friend who has never given me a bad suggestion for my reading list. I gave it a go (as you should always do when someone you know personally recommends a book) and it was excellent. I am now deep into the series and have enjoyed every new installment.

Do you loathe the corporate outlook on life where making money for a corporate entity as priority number one? Then you will find this series relatable. Do you ever imagine what it would be like to exist in a world where the sentient beings who occupy the spaces humans occupy range from entirely machine to entirely human with a healthy gradient in between? You thoughts will be provoked. Do you enjoy the idea that a sentient being that is more machine than human with incredible processing speeds would be somehow disappointed by our completely human trappings? What if that sentient being filled free time by binge-watching television shows?

With 'Murderbot' in the name of the series, I expected this to be rather violent and just too much - especially these days. Instead, the violence is mostly written in a way that makes it not too graphic, the characters have depth, the Murderbot is actually quite humorous, and a lot of the story is relatable in that it describes what it is like to form relationships, make difficult decisions, and take care of people you care about.

I recently decided to devote the waning decades (years?) of life to a self-selected canon of must-reads, works I’ve heard about a lot, but haven’t directly explored, Marx’s bloated tome (one of four!) among them. (Also on the short-list, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, a James Baldwin novel or two, more Melville, and another round of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.) Do not for one second imagine that recent shifts of political landscape prompted this exercise. The President of the United States has no bearing whatsoever on what I choose to read. Rather, Marx has loomed large in my informal education for many years. I’ve read some of his work, more about it, but relatively little of it. For readers who don’t do German, the 1976 Fowkes translation of Capital has endured until last year, when a new translation emerged. I’m reading Fowkes, but I hope to explore the new installment, because at the end of the day Marx is for me among the literati, as poetic as Pound, Dunbar, or Dickinson. One needs to read this book, like Moby-Dick, savoring each paragraph. Marx was “data-driven,” choosing to write in England because the government regularly produced more-or-less reliable reports about the workforce. In Capital, unlike the fun Communist Manifesto, he generally keeps his advocacy at a simmer, but his withering sarcasm erupts more than infrequently. Most striking to me, though, is the stark absence of anachronism. I’ve always had a vague sense that capital bears costs that far outweigh its benefits or conveniences. Capital helps me see why.

Recommending 'Careless People' and I hope I'm not the only one! Barnes & Noble blurb: 'Mixing the personal angle of working at Facebook with the overarching stakes of what was happening behind the scenes, this is a sharp, scathing and surprisingly fun narrative that speaks to some of the most pressing issues at the heart of the world today.'

'I did once want to be a lawyer,' wrote Dunbar according to the Introduction to this edition by Joanne M. Braxton. His story is a twist on a common one, Georg Philipp Telemann's, for example, whose parents insisted he study law. Ultimately, Georg wasn't going to have any of that, and now we have an indigestible supply of music by perhaps the most prolific Western composer of all time. (I adore Telemann. I adore his work precisely because it can be so predictable and boring.) Dunbar himself had an ambition to be a legal advocate; instead, he came to acknowledge that he should “interpret my own people through song and story, and...prove to the many that after all we are more human than African.” We are better off for his choice, but not because Dunbar explains it all to us. He does not. Dunbar's verse is fairly formal and metrically strict, sing-songy and demotic. He deploys “dialect,” i.e., so-called Negro dialect and vernacular, in his verse, and this is where his reception becomes troubled, because some have wondered whether he was cashing in on racist stereotypes. I don't care. Paul Laurence Dunbar's poems range from charming to fairly awesome, observant, often playful, always demanding of readings and re-readings.

I read this novel with my book group (we're too small to be a club) earlier this year. Could it have been more timely? Accurate or not, it is a fascinating peek into the process of selecting a Pope. Enter the claustrophobic world of a papal conclave under the guidance of the sincere and appealing Cardinal Lomeli as he navigates the treacherous waters of Vatican politics, defuses a scandal or two, along with a mystery, and​ finally shepards this particular group of cardinals to a successful conclusion. Herding cats would ​have be​en so much easier. Well researched and written, and as I said, timely.

This engaging memoir follows the childhood, education, and career of local MacArthur Genius Grant winner Josh Miele. Miele was blinded at the age of four when a neighbor poured sulfuric acid on him. With his co-author—a New York Times journalist who wrote this 2013 article about him—Miele combines a story of typical adolescent angst, drugs, romance, and rock ‘n’ roll, with more unique tales and reflections about losing his artificial eye on vacation, the merits of a cane vs. guide dog, the challenges blind people face with ATMs, and his fears about becoming a blind father. He does all this with hilarity and thoughtfulness. I particularly enjoyed Miele’s account of being an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, giving readers a glimpse into campus life as a blind student in the late ’80s.

Here's the description from the book jacket: 'At the age of four, Joshua Miele was blinded and badly burned when a neighbor poured sulfuric acid over his head. It could have ended his life, but instead, Miele—naturally curious, and a born problem solver—not only recovered, but thrived. Throughout his life, Miele has found increasingly inventive ways to succeed in a world built for the sighted, and to help others to do the same. At first reluctant to even think of himself as blind, he eventually embraced his blindness and became a committed advocate for disability and accessibility. Along the way, he grappled with drugs and addiction, played bass in a rock band, worked for NASA, became a guerilla activist, and married the love of his life and had two children. He chronicles the evolution of a number of revolutionary accessible technologies and his role in shaping them, including screen readers, tactile maps, and audio description.'

This is the first and only novel by Ben Masaoka, published posthumously a month after he had succumbed to cancer. While finishing and editing the work, apparently he knew that he did not have much time left. This biographical note adds an extra layer of poignancy to an already deeply felt coming-of-age novel, loosely based on the author’s experience growing up in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles in the 1960s. It describes a Japanese American family: parents Kazu and Alice, both disabled; an older daughter, Ruth, and the younger son, Hank. After a few chapters of introduction, the story settles on one critical year, when Ruth is starting high school and Hank is starting middle school, and events that shake the family and community. Why Criminals? The title of the book alludes to the lingering trauma brought by the wrongful incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and the resulting weight placed on the next generation youth. It’s a singular voice seldom heard, and one that we lost too soon.

I picked up this 400-page YA novel after my kiddo finished it in 2 nights with a flashlight under the blanket and, just like her, I couldn't put it down. I've since recommended it to kids and adults alike. The story follows a smart, sensitive twelve-year-old boy's life on a southern plantation, in a nearby maroon community of escaped and free-born Blacks, and in the swamp that separates the two--a liminal place brimming with mystery, danger, and promise. Luqman-Dawson's characters are well-drawn with thick, multifaceted inner worlds and many choices to make. The plot is brisk without sacrificing the pleasure of lingering over key moments. There's a spaciousness to the book that lets one's imagination fly. I found the story to thrum with hard-knock truth about brutality, danger, and the limits of family love, but also to be superbly dreamy and even healing--not easy to pull off in an antebellum novel. No surprise this book won Newbery & Coretta Scott King Awards.

Theoretically YA, but I firmly believe that anyone can enjoy this wonderful, heartfelt coming-of-age story about a young girl growing up in a crumbling castle in the English countryside, and what happens to her and her family when that most classic of tropes, the handsome stranger, comes to town. Written in the style of a diary, the reader gets completely transported into Cassandra Mortmain's world: you really *feel* this novel, everything from cool English breezes to warm bear-fur coats to the tipsy happiness of first love to the adolescent chafing at familial ties. Also something of a Künstlerroman, as you get to witness Cassandra dip her toes into the making of art with words—such a joy. It's a perfect cold-weather read, and almost demands to be paired with a cup of tea, but if you're going somewhere hot this summer, let it cool you down.

I was pulled into Chelsea Devantez' story from the first page, and I couldn't stop reading. Why are parts of the book redacted?! Turns out the author is legally barred from telling some of her story, but she found an ingenious way to share the parts she could. Devantez tells a gripping tale centered around various women who had an influence on her life. I found myself wondering how she managed to survive some of her nail-biting adventures. I was fascinated by the story of her father(s), i.e., the person she grew up thinking was her dad and the person she found out much later was the donor who contributed half of her DNA. The story of how she chose her name resonated deeply with me. The way she worked to break the cycle of domestic violence in her life was moving. Her description of the complex relationship she has with her mother and her siblings was deeply meaningful. Lastly, her experiences as a female comedy writer brought to mind the kind of roller coaster ride seen in the TV series, Hacks, but her boss seemed much less difficult than Jean Smart's character. You will not regret picking up this book. Just be sure you have time to be totally absorbed by it.

Rachel Cusk is more famous for her fiction, but this memoir is my favorite of her books. The New York Times listed the book as one of the best memoirs of the past 50 years, and for good reason. It has, hands-down, the best sentence I read all year: 'The harness of motherhood chafes my skin, and yet occasionally I find a predictable integrity in it too, a freedom of a different sort: from complexity and choice and from the reams of unscripted time upon which I used to write my days, bearing the burden of their authorship.'

Bolu Babalola believes in love: 'Romance sweetens the casual bitterness we can encounter; it heightens the mundane and makes the terrestrial supernatural,' as the British-Nigerian author puts it in her 2020 debut collection of short stories. Call it 'Sex and the City' for the average Greek demi-goddess, Yoruba orisha, or Chinese folklore heroine: this anthology re-imagines romances from myths and folktales from around the world. Whether it's love with a proper stranger, finding love at second sight, or falling in love again with the best and truest version of yourself, the short story format makes for a perfect beach read -- fun and engaging, light-filled and heartwarming ... but not so immersive that it will distract you from that beach volleyball game in progress two spots over (... which you are watching because of the athleticism on display, of course). Babalola has a keen way with sparkling, flirty dialog, but nevertheless creates characters and tales with heartfelt emotional resonance. I'm curious to try one of her long-form rom-coms (Honey & Spice, 2022, or this year's Sweet Heat). But for now, Love in Color is just the right tangy little bite for the summer.

An aspiring young Senegalese writer in Paris becomes obsessed with an out-of-print masterpiece from 1930 and its author, another Senegalese writer who was disgraced and driven into obscurity by accusations of plagiarism. So begins a spiritual and physical journey across three continents in search of Truth and Literature. A remarkable homage to Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, it incorporates themes of colonialism, empire, black magic, archival silences, and art versus politics. A big, ambitious, fun, brilliant book.

Given to me (with strong recommendation!) by our very own Dean of Students, Annik Hirshen. A book of nearly indescribable beauty, cataloguing the wealth of changes that occur over centuries on a single plot of land in the New England countryside. It toes the line between novel and short story collection, moves fluidly from style to style (here a pseudo-folk song, there an epistolary exchange, over there a bonafide ghost story), and in general is a rollicking good time. Mason, a psychiatrist, has a lot to say about human nature, nature nature, and the interactions—exultant, troubled—between the two.

In last summer's reading list, I enthused at length about Legendborn and Bloodmarked, the first two books in this YA fantasy cycle, by Tracy Deonn. Well, number three came out in March, and it certainly did not disappoint. Bree's story has become more complex and nuanced, focusing more on her individual journey as her supernatural powers burgeon and she fights to heal the world and save her friends from the forces of evil, and slightly less on mundane Romantical Dilemmas. This installment features shifting narrative perspectives that follow three major plotlines. This structure, a common device in many YA novels and series, is deftly deployed here to give readers the opportunity to see allyship in action from several angles, adding further dimension to some of the side characters. (Don't worry, Bree's fierce, justice-speaking, demon-slaying, sword-swinging bad-assery remains fully centered in this volume.) Sadly missing in action, for now, are Alice Chen (best of besties ... but she's in a coma, so ... not her fault?) and Selwyn Kane (one of Bree's love interests, and the ultimate Bad Boy Who's Secretly Awesome), whom we glimpse only fleetingly through the eyes of his mother. Yes, it seems he is still hot (at least in the form of his burning, demonic rage) and yes, he still craves Bree (in his own mysterious, saturnine way). But it's hard to appreciate some good Bad-Boy-Love-Triangle Drama when it's filtered through his mom's words .... So I guess we'll have to wait for Book 4 to see whether Alice gets out of her coma and breaks out of her sidekick role, and whether we'll get any chapters from Sel's deep, brooding (but, you know, hot) perspective. Some readers found this installment a slow read, but believe me, the last chapters are a wild ride that pay off the intricate build of the first half, and create a heck of a cliffhanger. (Yeah, there will be a fourth book.)

Orbital is a beautiful book, taking place over the course of 24 hours orbiting the Earth from the International Space Station. The book meanders from profound thoughts about humans' relationship to the Earth to the point of view of one of the six astronauts stationed in the ISS at the time, their motivations for pursuing their career, the physical effects of being in space, getting along in close quarters, and looking out at the Earth through the window. In these crazy times it helped me shift my perspective and allowed me to feel gratitude -- the world is big and small, strong and fragile, and we, as humans, are lucky to call it home.

1914, World War I is just about to start, and besides killing more than a million of her citizens it will upend much of England's class-stratified social structure. European leaders were said to have stumbled into WW1 like sleepwalkers. Great Britain's Prime Minister at the start of the war, Herbert Asquith proves the point. An aristocrat who occupies the top level of England's class system, this fictionalized account of his passionate affair with the equally privileged 26 year old Venetia Stanley shows him almost oblivious to the imminent danger about to engulf his country and all of Europe. The 65 year old Asquith thinks of little else but Venetia. They correspond daily and he blithely reveals state secrets in his increasingly cloying letters to her. We know about the letters, and the affair because the real Venetia Stanley saved all of the letters, Harris used them when writing this novel. The fictional part is a young, working class Scotland Yard intelligence officer, Paul Deemer who is tasked with tracking down intelligence leaks.

This is a little unorthodox, since I haven't read the book itself, but I have read the NYT review, which piques my curiosity. I have a vague recollection of visiting LA's Eso Won, depicted in the review. Anyway, I'd like to see the Mitchell book. I'm reminded of a different species of protest bookstore, Westwood's defunct Sisterhood Bookstore, where I volunteered for a few years. Closer to home these days, Reid's Records on Sacramento in Berkeley, was a jewel of a gospel-inflected record store, at the time of its closure in 2019 the oldest extant record store in California. I visited on its last day.

I aspire to be a punk feminist, but Kathleen Hanna is the queen. I listened to the audiobook narrated by the author herself, and I highly recommend that format. The struggle to overcome childhood abuse and neglect could have been debilitating. The trauma of rape and sexual abuse could have ground her down, but Kathleen Hanna triumphed. I was captivated by her story and I was sad to finish the book. Nevertheless, I still have the Spotify playlist to keep my company!

I believe it is incumbent upon us all to read Sebald, who writes like no one else in the canon. At once travelogue, factual compendium, prose poem, and memoir, this is, I believe, his most representative work, and his most stirring. Seeming digressions come together to form beautiful strings of pearls; cryptic photos rear up between paragraphs, complicating our understanding of the words that hem them in; history and memory twirl together, rendering the reader (if the reader is at all like myself) genuinely speechless at the author's power. I don't want to give away anything else, just go read it! Please!

If nothing else, this book is pretty funny. Frankly, I might even say if you like the show 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia', you'll like this. It's awful people doing awful things, just like you'd expect them to, but it's an amusing ride. If you wish 'Sex and the City' had Samantha as the main character, this book might be for you. I think there's enough going on here to capture about anyone's attention at least once, but there are other writers that go in-depth into his themes a bit better (if you want seduction, read Nin, somewhat rambling, internal prose with a point go to Dostoyevsky, etc.). I think, like all Henry Miller books, this one, too, is a very specific mood for a slightly specific reader, but it's unserious and approachable in a way I think all can find intriguing.

The origins of this book, written by a mysterious author who goes by “Uketsu” (a Japanese nonsense word that translates to “rain hole”), are in the strange, slightly unsettling YouTube videos that Uketsu began posting in 2018. Both the videos and resulting books have become viral sensations. Strange Pictures consists of four stories with disparate, but interlocking, characters and situations all involving violence and death. The gimmick is that the puzzling plots of each story depend on deciphering the various drawings and sketches drawn by characters within each story, which contain not just visual information but also psychological clues. It’s a different and entertaining take on the horror/mystery genre with sufficiently creepy vibes and clever twists and turns; your mileage may vary depending on how much you can suspend your disbelief and just enjoy the ride. And if you like this one, another book, called Strange Houses, is coming out in June.

Percival Everett (recent winner of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for James) is one of my favorite authors: Each of his novels is different, multi-layered, brilliant. And hard to do justice to in a short review. The Trees begins in 2018 with a series of murders in Money, Mississippi, which was the site of the horrific abduction and lynching in 1955 of 14-year-old Emmett Till. At the scene of each murder, the body of a dead Black man appears and later disappears from the morgue, only to reappear at subsequent crime scenes, recalling details from history. This inexplicable mystery brings in two state detectives and an FBI agent who have to deal with local law enforcement, among others. As the story deepens, more characters are introduced while more killings occur across the country at a breakneck pace that is mirrored by the novel’s structure (each chapter is just a page or a few pages long, making for a deceptively quick read). Partly a parody of detective fiction, the novel is filled with hilarious quips and wisecracks—a staple of Everett’s work—which underscore the complexity and devastating truths that remain unresolved today. Highly recommended.

About These Olive Trees, from the Publisher: The story of a Palestinian family’s ties to the land, and how one young girl finds a way to care for her home, even as she says goodbye. It’s 1967 in Nablus, Palestine. Oraib loves the olive trees that grow outside the refugee camp where she lives. Each harvest, she and her mama pick the small fruits and she eagerly stomp stomp stomps on them to release their golden oil. Olives have always tied her family to the land, as Oraib learns from the stories Mama tells of a home before war. But war has come to their door once more, forcing them to flee. Even as her family is uprooted, Oraib makes a solemn promise to her beloved olive trees. She will see to it that their legacy lives on for generations to come. Debut author-illustrator Aya Ghanameh boldly paints a tale of bitterness, hope, and the power of believing in a free and thriving future.

This is How it Always Is addresses being a parent, and a child, in a modern world in the most hilarious way possible. The book is chock full of piercing insight into the politics of parenthood, the hypocrisy of school officials and well-meaning neighbors and parents, and the double-edged protection and harm of secrets. I loved the interactions among the family members, and the unexpected plot twists presented jolting insights into how and why family members make certain decisions about those who they love. I also really enjoyed how a child's questions about why social conventions and assumptions are the way they are pointed to how they didn't necessarily have to be that way. My own experiences living in Wisconsin and Seattle provided even more relevant context about the communities this family inhabited. I've leaving out an obvious main theme in the book you that can find in any review, but that theme is not the entire story. All parents will see themselves reflected in this unusual and goofy family (or its neighbors).

This is the second famous book I've read this year that offers a precise street address in Oakland for a famous family. In this book, it's Robert Louis Stevenson's wife, Fanny's, house. You'll have to read the book to see where the house was / is. This is the wild and crazy story of R.L. and how he met his equally wild and crazy (for the times) wife, Fanny. Despite being sickly throughout life, R.L. produced three major works (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde) and many other lesser works aided in no small degree by Fanny who wrote and published short stories alongside him while simultaneously caring for him and the rest of her family. Fanny was unusual for the late 1800s because she was independent, often traveling the world by herself as when she moved from Indiana to a miner's camp in Nevada, where her first husband, Sam Osbourne, was trying to strike it rich in the silver mines. After that venture failed, they both moved to San Francisco, where she discovered his other unsavory habits. As a first step towards divorce, she decided to separate from him by attending art camp in France where she met R.L. Stevenson. R.L. Stevenson followed her back to San Francisco where they eventually married and he began writing Treasure Island. They lived a peripatetic life together that ended in Samoa after many years of sailing the South Pacific seas. The book is as much about Fanny as it is about R.L.

This wonderful book by Steven Greenblatt, who graced the Berkeley campus for twenty eight years, is a study of the life and work and world of Shakespeare. Born into modest family in Avon, he received a scholarship to attend secondary school, where he excelled in Latin and acted in local theatrical productions. At eighteen, he got his sweetheart pregnant, married her, and soon left by himself for London. Greenblatt's book, not really a biography, focuses on what Shakespeare read at a child in his Latin class, his early exposures to the classics, and his life in Avon and London and back and forth. He honed his skills in the theater first as an actor and this, Greenblatt maintains, enhanced his capacity for writing dramatic plots and dialogue. Greenblatt also shows how so much of Shakespeare's plays derive from Roman plays from antiquity, and when they don't, from his own personal life. Like Saul Bellow, Shakespeare remembered everything, and put much of it to good use in his writing.

I've just read half the book, but will complete it over the next two weeks as I float down the Canyonlands on the Green River in Utah