Spring is drawing to a close. Summer is upon us. That means it’s time for summer reading.
Luke C. Sheahan, Editor
Once final grades are submitted, and I’ve rested, I begin my trek through a summer booklist. At the top is always Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I read it every year, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly. This year I have quite a bit to go this summer, which is fine by me. This year, I will also read McCarthy’s play, The Stonemason. As far as I know, the last of his works that I have yet to read deeply. Added to my fiction list is Aaron Gwyn’s The Cannibal Owl. After running Daniel Cowper’s glowing review, I can’t pass it up. I will also read Plainsong by Kent Haruf. If time allows, I’ll read Kokoro by Natsume Soseki. This classic of early twentieth century Japanese literature has been on my wish list for a while. My reading of Last Summer Boys by Bill Rivers has been delayed for too. I’ve also committed to re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia to my children. If we are persistent, we should be able to read all seven by the end of the summer despite many campfires, baseball games, soccer games, and the like that will get in our way.
In terms of my professional reading, Nathanael Blake’s Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All ought to be on the top of everyone’s summer reading list and it’s certainly on mine. Join us for the upcoming Book Gallery! Benjamin Clark’s Contending for American Nationhood: Joseph Story and the Debate over the Federal Common Law is new and necessary reading on constitutionalism. I will read John Wilsey’s Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer, again. I read the manuscript to blurb it, now I need to read it to absorb it. I received a copy of Seth Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time at the Ciceronian Society’s annual conference last March. As a Nisbet scholar, my work revolves around associations, especially the local kind. Looking forward to this one. A translation of The Windmills of Sancho Panza by Tage Lindbom was just published. Well worth a read, I am sure, and I hope to get to it by the end of the summer. Every year for Halloween, I host a special episode of The Book Gallery on Russell Kirk’s fiction. As I prepare for the fall in July and August, one item on my reading list is Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, recommended to me by repeat Book Gallery guest Adam Simon, about what makes for a good ghost story, among other things. I look forward to thinking through Kirk’s fiction as works of “eerie” literature.
David G. Bonagura, Jr., Religion Editor
What would summer reading be without Christopher Dawson? This summer I have three Dawson works on the top of my list. The first is Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, which is his history of Medieval Europe. Then I will be reading his two political works from the 1930s: Religion and the Modern State and Beyond Politics. I will be writing an introduction to this latter book for its reprinting by Catholic University of America Press in 2026.
In my judgment, radical individualism is the plague of our era. Larry Siedentop’s 2014 book Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Modern Liberalism has been recommended to me as an insightful “how we got here book.” I look forward to comparing it with Carl Trueman’s excellent The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which I read in 2023.
For some time I have wanted to dig into Catholic social thought and compare it to conservative thought—not in terms of economics, as is too often done, but in terms of their respective approaches to human nature. The election of a new pope, Leo XIV, who deliberately chose his name in homage to the founder of this line of thinking, has heightened the importance of this reading.
This summer marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. I hope to find time to read John Henry Newman’s first major book, Arians of the Fourth Century, that covers the topic and its surrounding theological and cultural dramas.
In the world of fiction, I am going for it: the entire Lord of the Rings this summer. At the moment I’m early in Book I when the traveling hobbits meet Aragorn. I confess, to my shame, I have no recollection of the finer details from having read this over two decades ago. I am grateful for a summer of redemption!
Darrell Falconburg, Humanities Editor
With a growing number of visitors, interns, fellows, and educational programs at the Russell Kirk Center—not to mention several academic and public conferences I plan to attend—this summer is filling up fast. Still, I hope to find time to read, both for work and for leisure.
The Kirk Center’s new School of Conservative Studies is set to launch later this year, and in preparation, I plan to read several books that complement our academic offerings. Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Short Stories sits on my shelf ready to be reopened, along with several secondary works about this remarkable writer—including Fr. Damian Ference’s Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist (Word on Fire, 2023). I also hope to read Christopher Dawson’s The Gods of Revolution and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
My daughter is almost a year old, and my wife and I continue filling our home with good books that form the moral imagination. An illustrated edition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs by the Brothers Grimm is coming in the mail. A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson and Sing-Song by Christina Rossetti will surely be part of our summer reading as well. I’m especially looking forward to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key and a few classic—if unconventional—titles like Struwwelpeter and Goops and How to Be Them. Along these lines, we enjoyed Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children earlier this spring.
Our growing home library continues to be filled with new books and old. In light of the recent election of Pope Leo XIV, I plan to explore the thought of one of this new pontiff’s great predecessors. Specifically, I plan to read certain encyclicals from The Church Speaks to the Modern World: The Social Teachings of Leo XIII, with an introduction by Étienne Gilson. And given my ongoing interest in the renewal of classical and liberal arts education, I’m eager to read Louis Markos’s Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education (IVP Academic, 2025). Thanks to David Hein, author of Teaching the Virtues (Mecosta House, 2025), a thoughtful review of Markos’s new book will appear in The University Bookman this summer.
Isabel Dobbs, Managing Editor
My second child was born in April, so my true summer reading list will likely become whatever books keep me awake and turning pages in the middle of the night. One series that I expect to be exciting is F. Marion Crawford’s Saracinesca. In 2023, Cluny published new editions of this novel and the subsequent books in Crawford’s Roman tetralogy with introductions by Stephen Schmalhofer. The editions were dedicated to former Bookman editor Gerald Russello. I’ve never read anything by Crawford, but I am a fan of his contemporary, Henry James, to whom he is often compared. Its focus on an aristocratic Roman family reminds me of another favorite book of mine, Lampedusa’s The Leopard. And Schmalhofer explains why it would appeal to Bookman readers.
As a city dweller, I am enjoying reading Jane Jacobs’s famous The Death and Life of Great American Cities and am struck by its continued relevance. Next I’d like to read Timothy Carney’s Family Unfriendly (the subject of a recent Book Gallery) to think about how both our infrastructure and culture impact family life.
The first American pope seems to be a common source of inspiration for summer reading. He has inspired me to revisit St. Augustine’s Confessions. As a Villanova grad, of course I smugly imagine Pope Leo XIV reading Augustine as an undergraduate at my alma mater. And I hope that he leads us to reexamine St. Augustine’s discovery of “beauty ever ancient, ever new.”
Support the University Bookman
The Bookman is provided free of charge and without ads to all readers. Would you please consider supporting the work of the Bookman with a gift of $5? Contributions of any amount are needed and appreciated!
