Our reading list for summer term 2026 has been completed and excites us with a mix of fiction and non-fiction, a range from short stories to full-length novels, and a Culture Week special with a novel and film double feature.
April 23, 2026: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. They borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo: a game where players can escape the confines of a body and the betrayals of a heart, and where death means nothing more than a chance to restart and play again. This is the story of the perfect worlds Sam and Sadie build, the imperfect world they live in, and of everything that comes after success: Money. Fame. Duplicity. Tragedy.
gabriellezevin.com
May 28, 2026—Culture Week special: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones & Howl’s Moving Castle by Hayao Miyazaki
Sophie has the great misfortune of being the eldest of three daughters, destined to fail miserably should she ever leave home to seek her fate. But when she unwittingly attracts the ire of the Witch of the Waste, Sophie finds herself under a horrid spell that transforms her into an old lady. Her only chance at breaking it lies in the ever-moving castle in the hills: the Wizard Howl’s castle. To untangle the enchantment, Sophie must handle the heartless Howl, strike a bargain with a fire demon, and meet the Witch of the Waste head-on. Along the way, she discovers that there’s far more to Howl—and herself—than first meets the eye. What will happen to Sophie Hatter when she enters Howl’s castle?
amazon.de
Special! Extravaganza!
We will be looking at both Diana Wynne Jones’s novel Howl’s Moving Castle (1986) and Hayao Miyazaki’s movie adaptation (2004) for our Culture Week special. In addition, there will be snacks and tea, arts and crafts to turn the special into an extravaganza.
Stay tuned for more information!
June 18, 2026: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans
Sybil Van Antwerp is a mother and grandmother, divorced, retired from a distinguished career in law, an avid gardener, and a writer of letters. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books. Because at seventy-three, Sybil has used her letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. But as Sybil expects her life to go on as it always has, letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life.
virginiaevansauthor.com
July 9, 2026: Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.
amazon.com
In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.
August 13, 2026: Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed―or untoyed with―by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley.
The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls―until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true―though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place―revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.
amazon.com
September 10, 2026: The Hotel by Daisy Johnson
A place of myths, rumours and secrets, The Hotel looms over the dark fens, tall and grey in its Gothic splendour. Built on cursed land, a history of violent death suffuses its very foundations―yet it has a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. On entering The Hotel, different people react in different ways. Many come out refreshed, longing to return. But a few are changed for ever, haunted by their time there. And almost all those affected are women…
amazon.com
