Turn Pages With the Pack
You feel the hot breeze and smell the honeysuckle and you know it’s coming — summertime in North Carolina. Long days. Bright sun. That Southern sizzle. No better time to crawl into the shade and catch up with a good book.
A good book takes you places. To the future, the past. To that mountain you may climb in a year or to the stars we won’t reach in a thousand. A good book opens your heart and mind, letting you glimpse the world with different eyes. The right book, at the right time, can unlock doors to your deeper self.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. We asked readers of the Pack to recommend books that transformed their thinking and their lives, and to share the scoop on the best reading spots at NC State.
Sally Parlier (she/her)
- Place in the Pack: Lecturer, First-Year Writing, Department of English
- Book Recommendation: The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
Why should readers check out this book?
When I finished The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, I thought: this is the Great American Horror Novel. But the more I considered it, I wonder how much the “horror” qualifier is necessary there. Beloved, Moby Dick, Blood Meridian — our greatest American novels are horror stories. I think it’s likely no coincidence that Good Stab, Jones’ Blackfeet vampire protagonist, and The Kid, from McCarthy’s aforementioned Blood Meridian, were both born “the year the stars fell,” the Leonids Meteor Shower of 1833.
The Great American story is violent, vicious and haunted, and Jones turns our notions of the Western and the vampire upside down. It’s an important work. But as a fast-paced tale of revenge with a wild back half, it also makes for an excellent summer read.
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
When I’m away from home I prefer audiobooks, so my favorite spot to read on campus is mobile. If I need a break from my office, I like to pick a new route for a walk and see what plants or art installations I can discover while I’m listening to my book.
Tuesday Pil
- Place in the Pack: 2025 graduate in English and incoming candidate in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing
- Book Recommendation: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
Why does this book hold special meaning for you?
As a middle-grade writer, I still read and study a bunch of excellent kids’ books, so I would definitely recommend When You Reach Me to those who are interested in storylines with soft sci-fi and a contemporary, nostalgic feel. Stead’s book explores changing friendships, individuality, coming-of-age, class inequality and accepting what you can and can’t change. It’s a very short and accessible book, and still packs an emotional punch.
Rereading it as an older person now, I realized that the novel masterfully utilizes some unconventional prose structures and poignant character-building while slowly revealing the sci-fi element. It is a slow burn for sure, and it changed the way I thought about a story’s pacing forever!
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
I love to read on the Court of North Carolina, especially in the sunny spring and early fall months. You can lay on the grass or sit on one of the chairs, and there’s a lot of room to stretch out your legs. I also love sitting under the shade and cloud-watching to rest my eyes. The background noise — students chattering, birds chirping and cars rolling down Hillsborough — adds a relaxing element to my reading.
Steven Greene
- Place in the Pack: Professor and director of undergraduate programs, Department of Political Science
- Book Recommendation: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon
Why should readers check out this book?
I get enough politics in my daily life, so when reading for enjoyment, I tend toward fiction, science fiction and science. Eve is a fantastic science book — engagingly written. All good books — fiction or non-fiction — excel at telling stories, and this book tells the story of human evolution through the lens of the female body.
I’ve been interested in human evolution since my college days over 30 years ago and have tried to keep up with scientific advances through the years, but I learned so much from this book. I found the perspective of how the female body shaped not just biological evolution, but social evolution, to be truly fascinating. My students from this past semester could even tell you that I was regularly sharing anecdotes and factoids I had learned from this book.
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
Honestly, when I’m on campus, I’m reading politics and political science on my office computer. So, I don’t really have a favorite place to read on campus. If I did, it would absolutely be in the Court of North Carolina, where I love to go and just relax for a few minutes on nice days.
Tim Peeler
- Place in the Pack: Writer and editor, University Communications and Marketing
- Book Recommendation: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Why does this book hold special meaning for you?
Desperate for a qualified book to read for an 11th-grade book report, I bought a paperback copy of A Confederacy of Dunces at my local Revco drugstore simply because it had a banner that read “Winner of the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.” Little did I know that the absurdist novel with a tragic backstory would become one of the biggest influences in my reading and writing life.
Its main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is the most uniquely American literary character since Huckleberry Finn, and Reilly’s adventures in New Orleans left me in stitches, the same way Huckleberry, Don Quixote and Arthur Dent did in books I had previously read. He has been the literary grotesque inspiration for many of the off-kilter stories, columns and books I’ve written through the years.
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
When I was a student at NC State, I would meet up with a friend from my hometown at a specific spot on Rocky Branch Creek — a quiet, wide place in the stream. I haven’t stopped there — at the tiniest rushing waterfall where we once met — in ages, even though it’s only a few steps from my office. That was the spot where I decided during the fall of 1984 that I wanted to become a writer instead of a mechanical engineer.
Every day I am on campus, I take an afternoon walk along the greenway adjacent to that waterfall. We stroll right by that spot where I spent hours working on writing assignments, reading great works of literature and developing a reporter’s insight.
Charla Blumell (she/her)
- Place in the Pack: Director, LGBTQ Pride Center
- Book Recommendation: All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks
Why should readers check out this book?
All About Love explores the many dimensions of love — its connection to the heart, community, justice and the self. hooks reveals how love can be both operationalized and weaponized, while also showing its vulnerability, its beauty and its potential to be the very thing we need most.
This is a powerful yet accessible read — one you’ll likely return to and feel compelled to share. With honesty and vulnerability, hooks invites us to walk alongside her as she reflects on her own intimacies and struggles, always threading her insights with hope.
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
My favorite place to read on campus is a quiet outdoor spot on the top level of Witherspoon Student Center (weather permitting). It doesn’t get much foot traffic, which makes it easy to get lost in a book — you can almost forget you’re on campus at all.
Addison Selna (he/him)
- Place in the Pack: 2025 graduate in parks, recreation and tourism management
- Book Recommendation: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Why does this book hold special meaning for you?
This book is what ignited my passion for environmentalism, natural resources and trying to decipher humanity’s relationship to them. The book dismantles the argument that says humans are in a position of ownership or control over the natural world. It does so in a way that balances eloquence and digestibility while not becoming unnecessarily sophisticated.
Each read through of this text has given me new language, perspective and continues to encourage my growth. I highly encourage this book to anyone who wants to better understand the habits of human history that have led to climate change, natural disasters and the degradation of the beauties of the world while never letting go of hope for a reachable change.
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
One of my favorite spots on campus to read is the garden in front of the Nuclear Engineering Department. This spot has always been a space of positive rest and reflection for me. The balance of the beautiful nature and the architecture of North Campus creates a great dichotomy.
Cee Emmanuel (they/them)
- Place in the Pack: 2025 graduate in biological sciences
- Book Recommendation: Bitter by Akwaeke Emezi
Why does this book hold special meaning for you?
As a queer, Black person existing in the world, Akwaeke Emezi’s writing made me feel seen in all my identities, even those which I have yet to name for myself. Before Bitter, every book I read felt like participating in a story separate from my own; this story felt comfortably and uncomfortably familiar, as if it had long been woven into my life’s tapestry.
Through the protagonist, I was urged to witness, integrate, honor and uplift the parts of myself I had hidden away or been made to feel ashamed of. Bitter reflected my boundless capacity for creativity and change-making. Bitter exemplified steadfast, healing and appealing models of love, reverence, strength, advocacy and community that I have spent much of my time embracing and working to nurture in my own life.
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
The swinging benches just behind Williams Hall before you get to the Free Expression Tunnel. I love this space because it feels like an oasis amongst the hustle and bustle of life on campus.
While reading here, I give myself permission to slow down and relish in mindful moments of peace, taking deep breaths of gratitude, intentionally easing back into my body to feel the warmth of the sun on my face in early spring or the bite of a crisp wind chill in late autumn.
Amy Rossi (she/her)
- Place in the Pack: Director of development communications, Development Communications and Stewardship
- Book Recommendation: Restaurant Kid by Rachel Phan
Why should readers check out this book?
One thing I’ve been really enjoying this year is reading the work of my fellow 2025 debut authors. Phan writes about growing up in her family’s Chinese restaurant in Ontario, an experience called the third culture because her youth is starkly different from her parents’ early years in Vietnam and her classmates’ childhoods in their small Canadian town.
Phan’s search for belonging and identity is powerful, and the emotional core of the book is so strong, it had me in tears. Part of its uniqueness as a memoir is its structure, as Phan holds a journalistic lens up to some of her experiences and to herself, bringing in her family’s perspective on the restaurant and their lives (and how the two are forever linked). Her effort to connect with her parents not just as her mom and dad but as people shaped by trauma is a heartfelt one — a love letter, as she calls it, in the truest sense.
Where’s your favorite spot to read at NC State?
When our offices were at Holladay Hall, I occasionally took a few lunch breaks with a book at Mary Yarbrough Court. It always felt a bit tucked away to me and like a central-casting campus spot. On a spring afternoon, when you can smell everything blooming, it’s the perfect place to escape into a good book, even for a few minutes.
Chris Tonelli (he/him)
- Place in the Pack: Director of Libraries Communications, the NC State University Libraries, and two-time graduate (Zoology ’97, Master of Arts in English ’00)
- Book Recommendation: The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Why should readers check out this book?
Based on how much I’ve liked more recent works like Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, Lauren Groff’s Florida, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and anything by Murakami, it turns out I just really like to travel — in books — to different places and time periods. And if a book can do both, all the better. Now, if a book does those two things and explores some seedy aspect of a particular culture’s underbelly, I’m sold. And if in examining that culture we get entrée into the art and writing scene, forget about it. Especially if it’s poets.
Roberto Bolaño’s characters are almost always artists and writers and/or members of their culture’s seedy underbelly, and they often oscillate between Mexico and Chile over the course of a work, making him, predictably, one of my favorite authors. The Savage Detectives does this to the nth degree, throwing in a substantial stop in Europe and Asia, making it one of my all-time favorite novels.
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
I recommend a hammock for reading, preferably along the Court of North Carolina. For me, there is a fine line between reading and dreaming, since I often fall asleep while reading, and in a hammock, conveniently, reading, sleeping and dreaming are all socially acceptable activities.
Wynter Douglas (they/them)
- Place in the Pack: Librarian and library coordinator, African American Cultural Center
- Book Recommendation: Blues in Schwarz Weiss by May Ayim
Why does this book hold special meaning for you?
Growing up, I was captivated by history and the people who started movements or made lasting impacts in their communities. I have always loved poetry and the power of self-expression through the written word. Before college, I attended a school that taught German, so when I came across May Ayim’s Blues in Schwarz Weiss while browsing the library stacks during my college years, I was immediately drawn to reading it because it brought together many of my interests.
This collection of autobiographical poetry, prose and essays acts as a snapshot of the emergence of the Afro-German identity movement in the 1980s and 90s. It was through this book that I was able to relate more to my German lessons and get a deeper cultural understanding of what it was like for Afro-Germans to exist in Germany at that time. As a multiracial person, it was a balm to my soul to be able to work through the poems and essays in this book and be validated in experiences I had growing up in a very different yet similar context.
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
My favorite place to read on campus during my lunch breaks is the African American Cultural Center Library on the second floor of Witherspoon Student Center. It is empowering to be a reader in a space that is full of amazing authors who center all aspects of what the African American Cultural Center stands for and who embody the Sankofa principle, which teaches that “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”
Matt Shipman (he/him)
- Place in the Pack: Assistant director of research communications, University Communications and Marketing
- Book Recommendation: The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers
Why should readers check out this book?
This science fiction novel is part of a wonderful series, but can be read on its own without having to read any of the other books. It’s a slice-of-life novel about several characters who are stuck with each other for a few days while some issues beyond their control are resolved. The characters are all wildly different from one another, but find that they do share some common ground and, over the course of a few days, form a real bond with each other.
I found this novel unexpectedly moving. While the characters here are not even of the same species, I think it serves as an optimistic parable about how very different people can still find space to work together and care for one another in a meaningful way.
Where is your favorite spot to read at NC State?
One of my favorite spots on campus to read is the small garden situated between Watauga and Peele Hall, just behind Holladay Hall. It’s shady and green, with comfortable benches and a view down past Leazar onto the Court of North Carolina. It’s a lovely spot on a spring day.
This post was originally published in NC State News.