Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
The Daily asked Stanford students to share their top reads of the summer — here’s what they said.
“Nothing to See Here” by Kevin Wilson — Blyss Cleveland, Ph.D. candidate
By the time I reached the end of chapter two of “Nothing to See Here,” I set aside my library copy and purchased my own copy. I had laughed at protagonist Lillian’s wry observations, but her declaration that her attempts at being self-sufficient were really just learning to live without what she needed pushed me to add it to my bookshelf.
28-year-old Lillian has kept in intermittent contact through letters with Madison, her wealthy roommate from boarding school whose life has been on a predictably upward trajectory ever since. At the beginning of the novel, Madison asks Lillian to be a governess for her stepchildren, while Madison’s husband is being vetted for the secretary of state position. In addition to schooling, Lillian is tasked with figuring out how to keep the children calm. It turns out they catch on fire — but only when they’re overstimulated!
The mechanics behind the spontaneous combustion aren’t explained, but I appreciated this elision. Instead, the focus is on Lillian learning to grow up through this sudden and challenging caregiving role. I loved the depiction of the complicated cross-class friendship between Lillian and Madison. Sometimes the universe tilts and throws us into the orbit of people we’d otherwise wouldn’t encounter and our lives are improved from the collision.
“Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstadter — Michael Kim ’28
As a newly declared Symbolic Systems major, I decided to read one of the major’s “founding texts,” “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” (or “GEB” for short) by Douglas Hofstadter.
I expected a rather dense text of loosely thrown together ideas. Instead, I was treated to a delightful exploration of a simple idea: how elementary parts can interact to create incomprehensibly complex systems. “GEB” is surprisingly entertaining and tongue-in-cheek. It is a playground of analogies and isomorphisms between ostensibly unrelated topics such as computability theory, music theory and genetics. Hofstadter also does a fantastic job at making esoteric ideas accessible without reducing them nor boring someone who is already familiar. The joy of “GEB” is in how Hofstadter connects ideas, and how it deepens the reader’s intuition on the engine of life, its limitations and its magical elegance.
“Pale Fire” by Vladimir Nabokov — Emmett Chung ’27
In a brilliant metafictional melange of satire, mystery and thriller, “Pale Fire” is a wildly fun read best known for its plot structure. The book purports to be the eponymous 999-line poem written by the recently-murdered poet John Shade, while most of the text consists of line-by-line critical commentary analyzing the poem, courtesy of Shade’s editor, Charles Kinbote. Readers will immediately realize, however, that not only are Kinbote’s annotations completely unrelated to the poem itself, but also that his interpretation of events doesn’t seem quite accurate either. It’s best to go in blind (though do read the index in its entirety — it’s relevant to the plot). If this is madness, however, yet there is method in ‘t, which is the puzzle for us to unravel. But in our quest for a definitive answer, we may end up sounding more like Kinbote than we’d like.
“The Will of the Many” by James Islington — Kelly Wang ’26
I held my hand over the next page to prevent myself from reading ahead in this epic fantasy novel. Originally an orphan in the fictional society of Caten, Vis is adopted by a powerful senator named Magnus Quintus Ulciscor Telimus and sent to the prestigious Catenan Academy. Vis’ discomfort seeped through the pages, as he became integrated into the Hierarchy system that he’d spent his whole life avoiding — one where lower classes cede their physical and mental energy, or Will, to Catenians of higher status.
My stomach churned as Vis deployed underhand tactics to rise through student ranks and fulfill the secret mission Ulciscor sent him on: investigate the alleged suicide of Ulciscor’s brother in the school where it happened. But despite the unease that broiled in my mind, I found myself reading on, amazed by Islington’s imagination and vivid prose. I suddenly knew how it felt to bury a past that a violent rebel group threatened to expose. I grappled with the dissonance between Vis’ pressure to conform and his personal dissent toward the Hierarchy. Not a word or page wasted, Islington used every moment to draw me into the land of Caten and emotionally invest me in Vis’ survival and well-being.
“Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar — Chloe Loquet ’29
Having traversed thousands of miles aboard planes, trains and automobiles, the tattered yellow paperback finally made it onto my seat back tray table. Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar’s profound debut novel, “Martyr!,” helped my Sophomore College class pass the hours as we travelled across Alaska. The single copy was passed along like a pair of magical jeans in an early 2000s coming-of-age film, each creased page and tiny stain a souvenir collected along the way. As I sat there hurtling through the air at 10,000 feet, Akbar’s stunning yet poignantly honest writing cracked open my heart and mind.
The book follows Cyrus Shams, a recently sober poet obsessed with discovering the meaning of his life — or rather, of his death. At every point, energy and beauty ooze from the page in a collage of gut-aching reality, metaphysical wonder and biting humor. The novel is refreshing in both content and style, effectively flowing between narrative points of view, between dream states and waking life, between broad political discussions and deeply internal reflections on the self. In its exploration of martyrdom as a cultural fascination, “Martyr!” is a breathtaking meditation on identity that will draw you into its characters, its world and its rollercoaster ride of emotions.