Each week, we ask a member of the college grad student community to share 3 picks related to one of their passions. This week, Delilah D. Pacheco, a CITE doctoral student, shares 3 books that remind of life beyond academic pursuits:
Lately, as the semester progressed, I found myself gravitating to books and poems that reminded me of life beyond academic pursuits. Here are some recommendations:
- The God of Small Things by Arundathi Roy: This 1997 Booker Prize winner is a grand tale of family, childhoods, and the cost of love and loss. Set in Kerela, in southern India, this book is a great introduction to the best of Indian literature.
- Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye: Nye is considered to be one of the leading poets of the American Southwest. Her poems weave in the everyday and the forgotten into topics of rich cultural awareness.
- Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: An intergenerational epic that begins in early 1900s Korea, when Sunja escapes her hometown and the father of her child and marries a sickly minister on his way to Japan. A tale that traverses busy cities and universities to move into the seedy underbelly of the underworld, Lee writes complex and passionate characters simply trying to survive — whatever the cost.