Looking for your next summer read? Look no further.
UChicago News asked the 2026 winners of the Quantrell Awards and Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring Awards for their recommendations.
The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
I think these two books are excellent examples of the power of the mind. Human curiosity is forever drawn to two realms: the physical universe and the inner workings of the mind. Both are sources of profound beauty and endless fascination. These books showcase the beautiful products when we use the mind’s power to probe these mysteries and explore the relationship between the mind and the external world.
—Prof. Wei Wei
“Funes the Memorious” from Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
My recommendation is a short story, one I have sometimes used in class, “Funes the Memorious” from Jorge Luis Borges’s book Ficciones. The story is about a young farm worker who, after an accident, acquires a perfect memory. Borges shows us the astonishing things Funes can do with this gift, but also its strange uselessness. I will not spoil the story here, except to say that it beautifully illustrates an idea that is central to science in general, and to economics in particular: understanding the world is hindered by including every detail of it. Understanding means learning what to abstract from, what to simplify, and what to leave out.
—Prof. Fernando Alvarez
Intuition by Allegra Goodman
I love academic novels, and Allegra Goodman’s Intuition is better than most. It explores the ambitions and uncertainties of a cancer research lab, where the drive for success in the face of grant shortages yields both elation and suspicion when experiments yield promising results. My favorite part of Intuition is Goodman’s nuanced depiction of humanness among those working mostly behind the scenes of scientific discovery.
—Prof. Jeffrey Stackert
Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and his Protégé’s Unsolved Murder by Bruce Lincoln
Secrets, Lies, and Consequences is a murder mystery whose intrigue rivals that of an Agatha Christie novel. It is also a serious historical work that reflects soberly on the long shadows of the twentieth century’s worst political offenses. The book takes on the troubled past of the famed scholar of religion, Mircea Eliade, and his ties to one of the strangest events in the University of Chicago’s history: the assassination of Ioan Culianu in Swift Hall in 1991. Perhaps the only detail more surprising than Lincoln’s theory of the crime is the fact that he taught himself Romanian just so that he could write the book. It’s a captivating read!
—Prof. Jeffrey Stackert
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
This is a book so short you could devour it in the course of a single day. I have read it many times and keep coming back to it as the years go by. Set in the north of England more than a century ago, it tells the story of a Great War veteran who arrives in a small village to restore a medieval mural. Among many things, it is a book about the joys of skilled labor, the healing properties of great art, and the pleasures of unexpected love. The story is brief and simple yet deeply affecting in a manner that is difficult to describe, shot through with emotion and beauty, leavened with dry wit and a sense of the absurd. A Month in the Country is unfashionable in the best possible way; a poor fit for our brash, impatient and mendacious times. I keep copies of it on hand to give away to close friends and loved ones.
—Assoc. Prof. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Want more recs? See recommendations from previous years.
