Books Your May 2025 Reads Stories You May Like Remembering a Fellow Grad Student Who Went on to Be a Literary Icon Fashion Forward: Dazzling Designs Delight in Barton Hall Which Big Red Ghost Are You? This month’s featured titles include essays on womanhood, an anti-aging cookbook, and a debut legal thriller set in Zambia Did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out! For more titles by Big Red authors, peruse our previous round-ups. Have you published a book you'd like to submit? Scroll down for details! Mothers and Other Fictional Characters Nicole Graev Lipson ’98 “Anchored by topics such as motherhood and daughterhood, friendship and marriage, beauty, aging, and gender stereotypes, the essays cohere into a revealing memoir,” says Kirkus, observing that the works are “deftly crafted” and “likely to resonate with grateful readers.” A winner of the Pushcart Prize, the Arts & Sciences alum has been included in the annual Best American Essays volume and has been published in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and elsewhere. In her essay collection, she contemplates being a woman in the modern age—pondering such topics as marital fidelity, female friendship, assisted reproduction, and the need for solitude even within a happy marriage. Along the way, she draws perspective and inspiration from literature—from Shakespeare to Virginia Woolf to Alice Munro. “Lipson’s prose isn’t only gorgeous, it’s skillful—dare I say masterful,” says the Chicago Review of Books. “Each sentence sculpted with grace, each paragraph constructed with careful planning. Each essay using a range of literary techniques, stunning in their execution.” The Ocean’s Menagerie Drew Harvell Harvell, a renowned marine ecologist, is a professor emerita of ecology and evolutionary biology in CALS. Her latest book is subtitled How Earth’s Strangest Creatures Reshape the Rules of Life. In it, she chronicles the remarkable undersea world of marine invertebrates—whose evolutionary history stretches back some 700 million years—and the lessons they offer to help improve life on terra firma. “Plenty of time and circumstance allowed these animals to perfect staggering biological feats unlike any we see on land,” she writes in the preface. “There are animals that photosynthesize like plants, animals that transform wavelengths of light with engineering precision, animals that build castles of glass or limestone using seawater.” As Harvell takes readers around the globe, she describes not only the remarkable creatures under the sea, but the increasing threats to their habitats, including from human-driven climate change. “Buoyed by fascinating trivia and lay reader-friendly science,” says Publishers Weekly, “this should be a no-brainer for nature lovers.” Wolfbaby Susan Holcomb, Grad ’10–11 Holcomb is an L.A.-based writer who began PhD studies in physics on the Hill before leaving to work in the tech industry. She led the data science team at the world’s first smartwatch company—then shifted gears and earned an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her chapbook—a collection of “flash fiction” (very short stories)—was the winning entry in a small press’s annual competition. Stories You May Like Remembering a Fellow Grad Student Who Went on to Be a Literary Icon Fashion Forward: Dazzling Designs Delight in Barton Hall Says the publisher, the Cupboard Pamphlet: “This is not the pastel coming of the stork—this is the wolf. In this collection … remnants of bloody bible pages, bathtubs of black oil, and biting teeth are the truth of what it means to mother. Who was the woman you were before your matrescence? What shape did she take after?” Big Enough Joy Lin, MMH ’10 The Hotelie wrote and illustrated this children’s book, aimed at readers around ages 4–8, under her pen name, Regina Linke. It’s a prequel and companion piece to her web comic and book The Oxherd Boy. That project gathers inspiring tales—based on principles of Chinese philosophy—about the relationship between a young boy named Ah-Fu, his family’s ox, and a rabbit living in their garden. Big Enough describes the first time Ah-Fu was tasked with bringing the ox home from the woods—and his fear that he wouldn’t be up to the job. “The illustrations, painted digitally using traditional Chinese techniques, are by turns realistic and minimalist, then fantastical and lush, capturing an agrarian countryside filtered through the unbridled imagination of youth,” says Kirkus. “This tale of quiet persistence, enhanced by the ox’s impressively expressive eyebrows, will strike a chord with young readers looking for their own burst of courage.” The How Not to Age Cookbook Michael Greger ’95 Greger is a physician and CALS alum who frequently appears in the national media, spreading his message about the key role that diet and nutrition play in health and longevity. He has published a trilogy of self-help books on the topic—How Not to Die, How Not to Diet, and How Not to Age—each of which has a companion cookbook. His latest is the cookbook follow-up to How Not to Age. Library Journal calls it “an accessible, information-packed guide demonstrating that it is never too late to take steps toward a healthier lifestyle.” The volume gathers more than 100 recipes, with photos, showcasing the diet Greger recommends to promote longevity and wellness—with an emphasis on plant-based foods and wholesome ingredients like nuts, greens, berries, beans, and legumes. Recipes include Singapore-Style Noodles with Tempeh; Baked Carrot-Cake Oatmeal; Lentil-Walnut Burgers; Barley Risotto with Artichokes and Mushrooms; and Banana-Walnut Cake with Blackberry-Almond Butter Sauce. The Lions’ Den Iris Mwanza, LLM ’92 Set in Zambia in 1990, Mwanza’s debut legal thriller follows a young attorney named Grace Zulu who takes her first pro bono case, defending a 17-year-old boy. Her client, who faces a harsh sentence for homosexual acts, has been beaten in prison, and eventually vanishes into the carcel system. It’s up to Grace to get justice for him—battling an autocratic government, institutional homophobia, corrupt police and judges, and the tragic impacts of the HIV/AIDS crisis. “The Lions’ Den is an angry and heartrending novel, told with verve and a deep understanding of systemic cruelty,” says a review in Foreign Policy. “Mwanza, a corporate lawyer-turned-novelist who has worked in both Zambia and the United States, conveys her young heroine’s disillusion and powerlessness with sororal intuition.” To submit your book for consideration, email cornellians@cornell.edu. Please note that to be included, books must be recently published by a conventional publisher—not self published, pay-to-publish, publish on demand, partner-published, or similar—and be of interest to a general audience. Books not featured will be forwarded to Class Notes. Published May 14, 2025 Leave a Comment Cancel replyOnce your comment is approved, your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *Comment * Name * Class Year Email * Save my name, email, and class year in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ Other stories You may like Campus & Beyond The Eclipse in Photos: Looking Up, from Two Campuses Alumni Remembering ‘a Fighter, and an Activist for the Hungry and Poor’ Students ‘Dump and Run’ Turns Student Castoffs into Treasure