Our reading list for summer term 2025 has been completed and promises psychopathic and dystopian stories, experimental reading experiences, feminist science fiction as well as some classic fantasy.
May 8, 2025: Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess. She’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But the longer Winifred spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.
Whether creeping across the moonlit lawns in her undergarments or gently tormenting the house staff, Winifred struggles at every turn to stifle the horrid compulsions of her past until her chillingly dark imagination breaches the feeble boundary of reality.
virginiafeito.com
June 12, 2025—Culture Week special: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins & The Hunger Games by Gary Ross
Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be North America. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, “The Hunger Games.” The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed. When her sister is chosen by lottery, Katniss steps up to go in her place.
suzannecollinsbooks.com
Special! Extravaganza!
We will be looking at both Suzanne Collins’s novel The Hunger Games (2008) and Gary Ross’s movie adaptation (2012) for our Culture Week special. The special becomes an extravaganza with open discussion forums on aspects such as young adult dystopias in relation to current global developments and a feel-good book slam to counter the dystopian dreariness. Stay tuned for more information!
July 10, 2025: The Turnglass by Gareth Rubin
You’re holding a book in your hands. It’s not just any book though. It’s a tete-beche novel, beloved of nineteenth-century bookmakers. It’s a book that is two books: two intertwined stories printed back-to-back. Open the book and the first novella begins. It ends at the middle of the book. Then flip the book over, head to tail, and read the second story in the opposite direction. Both covers are front covers; and it can be read in either direction, or in both directions at once, alternating chapters, to fully immerse in it.
1880s England. On the bleak island of Ray, off the Essex coast, an idealistic young doctor, Simeon Lee, is called from London to treat his cousin, Parson Oliver Hawes, who is dying. Parson Hawes, who lives in the only house on the island—Turnglass House—believes he is being poisoned. And he points the finger at his sister-in-law, Florence. Florence was declared insane after killing Oliver’s brother in a jealous rage and is now kept in a glass-walled apartment in Oliver’s library. And the secret to how she came to be there is found in Oliver’s tete-beche journal, where one side tells a very different story from the other.
garethrubin.com
1930s California. Celebrated author Oliver Tooke, the son of the state governor, is found dead in his writing hut off the coast of the family residence, Turnglass House. His friend Ken Kourian doesn’t believe that Oliver would take his own life. His investigations lead him to the mysterious kidnapping of Oliver’s brother when they were children, and the subsequent secret incarceration of his mother, Florence, in an asylum. But to discover the truth, Ken must decipher clues hidden in Oliver’s final book, a tete-beche novel—which is about a young doctor called Simeon Lee…
August 14, 2025—Feminist sci-fi special: The Female Man by Joanna Russ & Soft Science by Franny Choi
Four women living in parallel worlds, each with a different gender landscape. When they begin to travel to each other’s worlds each woman’s preconceptions on gender and what it means to be a woman are challenged. Acclaimed as one of the essential works of science fiction, The Female Man takes a look at gender roles in society and remains a work of great power.
amazon.de
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness—how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.
amazon.de
September 11, 2025: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
A Wizard of Earthsea marks the first of the six now beloved Earthsea titles. Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tumultuous tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death’s threshold to restore the balance.
amazon.de
