Books Your September 2025 Reads Stories You May Like The Most Iconic Cornell Tradition: Cheering Big Red Hockey in Lynah! Walking in a Winter Wonderland Genealogy Research Helped Me Find My Cornellian Cousins This month’s featured titles include the latest by a National Book Award winner and a classical history of Jewish resistance to Rome 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! And did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out! Flashlight Susan Choi, MFA ’95 “This is a novel about exile in its multiple forms, and it reads like a history of loneliness,” says the New York Times. “Nearly every person has the detachment of a survivor.” Flashlight—which follows four generations of a family, from World War II-era Korea to the U.S. post 9/11—is the sixth novel for Choi, who won a National Book Award for 2019’s Trust Exercise. It opens with an apparent tragedy: after a seaside walk, 10-year-old Louisa is found unconscious on the beach and her father has vanished, presumed to have drowned. The novel traces the family’s history, starting when the father—originally named Seok, later Americanized to Serk—is a child whose impoverished parents leave Korea for Japan in search of work. When they’re later duped into moving to North Korea, he refuses to join them and goes to the U.S., where he earns a PhD and meets his future wife. Eventually, their child—Louisa—grows up to have kids of her own, as the legacy of her parents’ and grandparents’ collective trauma is passed down. “Flashlight is acutely aware that for every miraculous survival, there are countless stories that remain mysteries, the ‘presumed’ in ‘presumed dead’ freighted with many unanswerable questions,” says the Chicago Review of Books. “Even what might read as a happy ending from the outside does not eliminate the scars of what it took to get there, all the minutes that slogged by, hard to explain but crucial.” Making the Case for Equality Ellen Andersen ’88 Andersen is a professor of political science at the University of Vermont. Her nonfiction book focuses on Lambda Legal—the nation’s oldest nonprofit legal advocacy organization devoted to LGBTQ+ issues—and its major civil rights cases. The coffee-table volume, from the art book publisher Phaidon, is laid out in a style akin to a scrapbook—with numerous images and ephemera, like pamphlets. It covers cases that have safeguarded LGBTQ+ rights in a wide variety of realms, from employment to housing to military service. They include Nabozny v. Podlesny (1996), which mandated that schools protect students from anti-LGBTQ+ bullying; Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down state sodomy laws; and Obergerfell v. Hodges (2015), which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. Andersen co-authored the book—which features a foreword by famed writer and academic Roxane Gay—with Jennifer Pizer, the organization’s chief legal officer. “When Lambda Legal opened its doors in 1973,” they write, “it confronted a world in which one of the biggest challenges facing LGBTQ+ people was the government itself.” Masks Margaret Caplan ’03 The Arts & Sciences alum and physician teamed up with her screenwriter husband, along with an illustrator, to co-author this graphic novel for middle-grade readers. (It’s published under her pen name, Margaret Rae.) Its heroine is a green-skinned monster named Poe, who lost her parents to the humans who hunt her kind. With her home in an abandoned building facing demolition, she and her two adopted siblings venture out in search of a fabled monster sanctuary. As it happens, it’s Halloween—and the holiday allows them to pass as kids wearing masks. They eventually make friends with a human boy, whose own experience with social rejection helps him sympathize with the monsters’ plight. “This touching graphic novel uses monsters as a metaphor for any marginalized community seeking safety and acceptance,” says School Library Journal. “The monsters are feared not for their actions but how they look, and the story highlights themes of identity, chosen family, and resistance.” Stories You May Like The Most Iconic Cornell Tradition: Cheering Big Red Hockey in Lynah! Walking in a Winter Wonderland How to Have Willpower Michael Fontaine Subtitled An Ancient Guide to Not Giving In, the volume is the latest entry in the “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers” series, several of which have been penned by the Cornell classics professor. “In the spirit of the best ancient self-help writing, Plutarch, a pagan Greek philosopher and historian, offers a set of practical recommendations and steps we can take to resist pressure and to stop saying ‘yes’ against our better judgment,” says the publisher, Princeton University Press. “And in a delightfully different work, Prudentius, a Latin Christian poet, dramatizes the necessity to actively fight temptation through the story of an epic battle within the human soul between fierce warrior women representing our virtues and vices.” Previous editions by Fontaine have included How to Get Over a Breakup, How to Drink, How to Grieve, and How to Tell a Joke. Next up: How to Speak Freely. “Let’s simply follow Homer, since he said, ‘Shame, which does men both great harm and great help,’” says Fontaine’s new translation of Plutarch. “He wasn’t wrong to mention the harm first, incidentally, since shame only becomes healthy once reason has removed the excess and leaves us with the right amount.” Child of Light Jesi Bender Buell ’07 A work of experimental fiction, this historical novel is set in Utica in the 1890s, and it interweaves many local landmarks and real-life residents of Central New York. The protagonist is a 13-year-old girl whose parents have contrasting interests: her mother is pursuing Spiritualism while her father focuses on electrical engineering. Bender's previous publications include the poetry collection Dangerous Women, the experimental play Kinderkrankenhaus, and the debut novel The Book of the Last Word. Also an artist, she currently works at the Cornell University Library. “When the reader encounters the story of how the mother and father came together, I start the text as two columns telling two separate stories,” Buell explains in a recent personal essay in Cornellians that explored the importance of experimental art. “As they meet, the columns alternate line by line and start to ‘braid’ together until they form one passage.” Jews vs. Rome Barry Strauss ’74 A longtime Cornell faculty member, Strauss is now Arts & Sciences’ Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus. He has published numerous books on classical history, including The Battle of Salamis, The Trojan War, The Spartacus War, The Death of Caesar, and Ten Caesars. With his latest, he chronicles (in the words of the subtitle) “two centuries of rebellion against the world’s mightiest empire.” Strauss describes the three major Jewish uprisings against Roman rule that roughly spanned from 63 BCE to 136 CE—revolts that both reshaped the faith and saw the rise of Christianity. “Historian Strauss hits another home run with this thorough account of the tumultuous relations between Rome and its most contentious subjects, the Jews, in ancient times,” says Library Journal, adding: “There is no better history of this important but little-known subject.” As Strauss observed in a Cornell Chronicle story about the book: “It was amazing in writing this to see how little has changed in the geopolitics of the region: Israel, a small state between large empires, was also the situation in antiquity.” 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 September 3, 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 Cornelliana Pioneering Big Red Players Look Back at Early Days of Women’s Varsity Athletics Bear Hugs Alum’s Books Show It’s Never Too Early to Teach Kids about Money Campus & Beyond Remember Arriving on Campus? Now, Move-In Is a Major Event