Whether on a break from college classes or simply taking a vacation for well-deserved time off, summer is a great season to relax with a new book to read. Whittier College history professor Elizabeth Sage and Douglas Manuel, a Bayard Rustin Teaching Fellow at Whittier’s Department of English Language & Literature, give their recommendations on page-turners below.
Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes
Elizabeth Sage spent her summer in Italy taking Italian language classes, and she complemented her studies with a dose of Italian literature.
In English, she read Italian classics like Dante’s Inferno, plays by the Nobel Prize-winning Italian authors Luigi Pirandello and Dario Fo, and The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni. Published in 1827, Sage said The Betrothed is considered the first real Italian novel.
Yet she’s also read detective novels in Italian, such as works by Andrea Camillieri that feature the unforgettable Inspector Montalbano, Antonio Manzini’s series with the hard-boiled Roman detective Rocco Schiavone, and Maurizio de Giovanni’s The Bastards of Pizzofalcone, set in contemporary Naples.
But the most memorable book she read this summer was Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes. Written in 1952, the novel was only recently translated into English.
“It’s incredibly moving in the way that it portrays the life of a middle-class woman, trapped in a patriarchal society and a conservative family, who finds freedom only in the pages of her diary, which she must hide from her husband and children,” Sage said. “It made me cry, and after having read it in English, I bought it in Italian in order to read it again.”
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
Since he reread the Parable duology this summer, Douglas Manuel highly endorses Butler’s works, calling them powerful and a “hauntingly accurate prediction and conjuring of our current moment” because he is teaching a writing course on Los Angeles authors this fall.
“When it comes to L.A. fiction, Octavia Butler was and remains one of the brightest flames we’ve ever had,” Manuel said. “Her work is in a kind of renaissance right now, and I’m so happy and here for it. A Black woman telling the truth, warning us — we should have listened better in 1993, when Parable of the Sower was first published. We should be listening better now.”
