The Glynn Summer Read
The Glynn Summer Read: 2026
Glynn first-year scholars read a common set of books, selected by current Glynn scholars, over the summer before they start Notre Dame. They meet to discuss the books at a festive event at the start of the fall semester. Students engage in thought-provoking conversations and get to know one another and other members of the Glynn community, including the directors and other scholars.
Below are the books for 2026. Since there are just three books on the list, we strongly recommend reading all of them so that you can better participate in the discussion. Links are provided to suggested editions on Amazon. Books can also be accessed at your public library, on audiobook apps, or through an interlibrary loan.
The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (Penguin Press, 1967, 2026)
Nothing in the whole of literature compares with The Master and Margarita. One spring afternoon, the Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow. Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantastical, funny, and devastating satire of Soviet life combines two distinct yet interwoven parts: one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem. Each part is brimming with historical, imaginary, frightful, and wonderful characters. Written during the darkest days of Stalin’s reign, and finally published in 1966 and 1967, The Master and Margarita became a literary phenomenon, signaling artistic and spiritual freedom for Russians everywhere. The book is available here.
A World Appears, by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2026)
When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness. In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves. The book is available here.
Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel (Vintage, 2023)
The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space. Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment. You can purchase the book here.