Fall break is upon us, which hopefully means at least a small respite from the endless churn of exams, papers, and activities. It may even mean a chance to read something that isn’t for classes, and which we might not encounter in our academic rounds. In that light, here are a few books that feel in tune with autumn, “that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness,” as Jane Austen describes it. 

 

A lot of what I read as an English professor is fiction and poetry, Irish in particular, which is how I came upon the work of Pádraig Ó Tuama. He’s a poet, theologian, and conflict mediator who used to lead the reconciliation community Corrymeela in Northern Ireland. The book of his that I love best, though, is his nonfiction work “In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World,” a wide-ranging reflection on what it means to be made in the image of God in a world full of sorrow and pain. In particular, Ó Tuama writes on how to name and embrace the present moment in which we find ourselves without falling prey to false dichotomies that can both warp our memories and distort our visions of the future. If welcoming is a spiritual discipline, as Ó Tuama suggests it is, then we must learn to welcome whatever finds us in our present moment, and to sit with it, rather than see difficulty as a matter of struggle and conquest. It’s a deeply reflective, tender book that makes everyday living more bearable, without offering false certainties. 

 

I also return again and again to the novels of the Japanese-born British Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, and I’ll particularly single out “Never Let Me Go” and “Klara and the Sun” as a compelling double bill interrogating what it means to be a creature with a soul. The former offers a bleak, disturbing picture in which certain characters are treated as less than human, and therefore deserving of exploitation in order to save the lives of those who are truly human. The latter offers a more hopeful vision of a being whose self-sacrificing care for another perhaps elevates her from the category of non-human to some kind of personhood. Like Ó Tuama, Ishiguro wrestles with how to maintain one’s humanity in a world that often erodes it. 

 

Finally, American poet Louise Glück is a poet I discovered as an undergraduate and have loved ever since, particularly her collection “The Wild Iris.” In this collection, the poet (also a struggling gardener) speaks to God, and in some poems, God speaks back, but the most vivid and remarkable poems might be those in the voice of plants in the garden, glorying in their brief, vivid lives and their fight for survival. Glück surprises the reader constantly with these unsentimental but beautiful reflections on what it means both to live and to die. 

 

If you find yourself in need of refreshment that acknowledges the passing of one season, but the hope of another to come, one of these just might do the trick.