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Dear Students and Families,
The English Department sends the following summer reading list in hopes that your months away from Hotchkiss will be enriched by the texts we have suggested.
We ask that students read two books this summer. The first is this year’s All-School Read, Celeste Ng’s bestselling 2022 novel Our Missing Hearts. We urge you to watch this short video featuring students on the All-School Read Committee and to peruse this helpful study guide as you begin to engage with this exciting and highly relevant novel.
The committee of students and faculty who selected Our Missing Hearts admired its gripping storyline, its interrogation of censorship, and its consideration of both literature and technology as materials for social change. In its intersectional portrayal of race and gender, too, the committee saw a connection to our yearlong celebration of 50 Years of Women at Hotchkiss. We hope this novel will connect in meaningful ways to a slate of speakers and exhibitions on campus around the theme of gender and the women who have joined and led the Hotchkiss community over the past half a century.
Your second summer reading assignment is sorted by grade level. In keeping with the celebration of women at Hotchkiss this year, the English Department has chosen a book by a female author for each grade level that we think will inform the rich variety of other texts you will encounter in your English courses this coming school year. We hope that after a summer of reading these books on your own, we will gather around the maple tables in Main Building this September to transform our individual experiences into collective conversation.
There will likely be moments of real joy and contemplation as we read, as well as encounters with language that may unsettle or even offend us. Navigating such encounters is essential, and should we find ourselves in such a moment, we (and the works themselves) may be best served by considering the context of the vexing material: Does the author use it disparagingly or gratuitously? How do the language and the events described serve the work as a whole? How might we present these thoughts to classmates during an open discussion? We offer such questions as ways to help us all make the most of our summer reading and to begin what soon becomes a shared communal inquiry in the fall.
At the close of what we hope is a restful and reinvigorating summer, you will be asked to speak and write about the works you have explored and to share your reactions and reflections with others. We aim to establish class atmospheres of respectful rapport and curiosity, and our words about the readings and viewings we each select over the summer are the first steps to that end.
Sincerely,
Dr. Katie Fleishman
Head of the English Department
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