Books, movies, podcasts, music, and game suggestions from your favorite law faculty.
Hello everyone. It has become a Georgia State University College of Law Library tradition to solicit summer leisure reading suggestions from our faculty and provide said suggestions via a well-written and entertaining blog post (typically by yours truly.) Last year, we decided to open the content suggestions up to more than just books due to our new, more remote existences. We liked the results from those submissions, so we decided to try asking for a variety of content mediums again.
So, without further delay, here are some suggestions for books, movies, games, shows, podcasts, and music from GSU College of Law faculty.
Cassandra Patterson
Available in both book and Amazon Prime Video Series
The Underground Railroad by Colston Whitehead
A (somewhat fictional) story about Cora, a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When she meets Caesar, also a slave, he urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad. In Colson Whitehead’s conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop.
Jack Williams
Books
Breath by James Nestor
No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, they began to be killed off.
In this last remnant of the Wild West—where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,” roamed – virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four, Osage, the newly created FBI took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations.
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground, marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and between the visions of self each century embodied
Music
Beach Boys – Pet Sounds
anything by B.E.N. on Spotify
Bill Edmundson[1]
Podcasts
They are a couple, Liz and Matt, and they are informative and sure-fire fun. Liz is a journalist now writing for The Atlantic. Matt is a labor lawyer turned policy wonk. They have two young girls and mix together parenting advice, cultural commentary, policy analysis, and irreverent humor —all in roughly equal measure. (Disclosure: Matt blurbed my forthcoming book.)
The Chapos take vulgarity, brilliance, and the mercurial to the bleeding edge. If you sometimes feel as if events are shoving you to the point of madness, this crew could serve as your guardrails. Topical, opinionated —even perhaps, biased. If you know of someone funnier than Felix Biederman, sassier than Amber D’Allee Frost, or more insightful than Matt Christman, please let me know.
Books
The Founders Coup by Michael J. Klarman
…should be on every American’s bookshelf. No —on every American’s bedside table. Beginning law students should especially give this book their attention. Klarman teaches at Harvard Law, and he writes clearly while telling an unforgettably compelling story —the story of the rowdy formation of our basic norm, the U.S. Constitution of 1789.
Lincoln by David H. Donald
…is not to be missed. “Honest Abe” Lincoln —”with all flaws”— has to be at least the provisional model of every decent lawyer. Forget Atticus Finch, that “white savior” figment of the Southern literary imagination. Put aside the estimable Bryan Stevenson, who will never come close to holding political power. Lincoln’s was a life lived by a real, powerful, imperfect human being, who was also a lawyer to his bony marrow.
Pam Brannon
Video Games
- Breath of the Wild
- Any and every other Zelda game
- Psychonauts
- Mass Effect, especially since the Legendary Edition just came out
TV Shows
- Haikyuu!! – A shōnen sports anime series based on the manga by Haruichi Furudate, and produced is by Production I.G and Toho in conjunction with Japanese television network MBS. The anime consists of four seasons, four movies, and five OVAs.
- Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist – A woman starts to hear people’s innermost desires through songs.
- Pose – A drama spotlighting the legends, icons, and ferocious house mothers of New York’s underground ball culture, a movement that first gained notice in the late 1980s.
Podcasts
- Archive Atlanta – A weekly history podcast sharing stories about the people, places, and events that shaped the city of Atlanta.
- Revolutions – A podcast exploring the great revolutions of history
- Partially Examined Life – A good reminder of my days as a philosophy undergrad.
Lisa Bliss
Board Games
Poetry for Neanderthals
…in which you have to get your teammate(s) to say the word by describing it to them using only single syllables. It’s pretty hilarious, can be enjoyed by all ages, and a game can be played quickly.
Quiddler
If you like word games, my husband and I have played a round of “Quiddler” every single night since the pandemic started. It’s a game that uses cards with letters on them, and players use a combination of luck and strategy to create words using their cards and try to outscore the other player(s). I also love the game “Code Names.”
Kris Niedringhaus
Books
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of clean-up and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interest. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle would last for decades and come at a steep price.
Told through the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold onto its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
The Great Library Series by Rachel Caine
Ruthless and supremely powerful, the Great Library is now a presence in every major city, governing the flow of knowledge to the masses. Alchemy allows the Library to deliver the content of the greatest works of history instantly—but the personal ownership of books is expressly forbidden.
Jess Brightwell believes in the value of the Library, but the majority of his knowledge comes from illegal books obtained by his family. Jess has been sent to be his family’s spy, but his loyalties are tested in the final months of his training to enter the Library’s service.
When his friend inadvertently commits heresy by creating a device that could change the world, Jess discovers that those who control the Great Library believe knowledge is more valuable than any human life—and soon, both heretics and books will burn….
- Ink and Bone
- Paper and Fire
- Ash and Quill
- Smoke and Iron
- Sword and Pen
Podcast
Buried Truths Podcast – We can’t change our history, but we can let it guide us to understanding. Buried Truths investigates still-relevant stories of injustice, resilience, and racism in the American South.
Terrance Manion
Books
Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 by Michael Azerrad
This is the never-before-told story of the musical revolution that happened right under the nose of the Reagan Eighties–when a small but sprawling network of bands, labels, fanzines, radio stations, and other subversives reenergized American rock with punk rock’s do-it-yourself credo and created music that was deeply personal, often brilliant, always challenging, and immensely influential.
Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture by Grace Elizabeth Hale
In Athens, in the eighties, if you were young and willing to live without much money, anything seemed possible. Cool Town reveals the passion, vitality, and enduring significance of a bohemian scene that became a model for others to follow. Grace Elizabeth Hale experienced the Athens scene as a student, small-business owner, and band member. Blending personal recollection with a historian’s eye, she reconstructs the networks of bands, artists, and friends that drew on the things at hand to make a new art of the possible, transforming American culture along the way.
American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley
As the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award-winning historian and perennial New York Times bestselling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race to the moon.
Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton
The harrowing true survival story of an early polar expedition that went terribly awry–with the ship frozen in ice and the crew trapped inside for the entire sunless, Antarctic winter–in the tradition of David Grann, Nathaniel Philbrick, and Hampton Sides
Music (all on vinyl)
- fIREHOSE
- the Replacements
- Husker Du
- Dinosaur Jr (including their brand new album, Sweep It Into Space, which is actually good)
- B-52’s
- Pylon
Yaniv Heled
Books
The “Culture” series by Ian Banks
The Culture series or Culture cycle refers to a series of novels and short fiction written by Scottish author Iain Banks. The stories center around the Culture, a post-scarcity semi-anarchist utopia consisting of various humanoid races and managed by very advanced artificial intelligence.
Within the Culture series:
Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks
The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died; billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction, cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.
Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it and with it their own destruction.
The Algebraist by Ian Banks
It is 4034. Humanity has made it to the stars. Fassin Taak, a Slow Seer at the Court of the Nasqueron Dwellers, will be fortunate if he makes it to the end of the year. The Nasqueron Dwellers inhabit a gas giant on the outskirts of the galaxy, in a system awaiting its wormhole connection to the rest of civilization. In the meantime, they are dismissed as decadents living in a state of highly developed barbarism, hoarding data without order, hunting their own young & fighting pointless formal wars.
Nirej Sekhon
Book
East West Street by Philippe Sands
A renowned international law scholar discovers that this family history is wound up more intimately with international criminal law than he ever might’ve imagined. This history/memoir/biography recounts Sands’ genealogical journey in gripping detail.
Lauren Sudeall
Book
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.
But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut.
Patrick Parsons
Podcasts
- Cocaine and Rhinestones – a podcast about the history of 20th Century Country Music and the lives of those who gave it to us.
- Broken Record – a musical artist interview podcast by Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, and former New York Times editor Bruce Headlam. Most notably, Rick Rubin is the producer responsible for albums like Tom Petty’s Wildflowers, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication, Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around, and System of a Down’s Toxicity. He is undoubtedly one of the most influential music producers in American popular music. This link goes directly to Rick’s interview with Atlanta’s own Andre 3000.
Video Game
- Dragon Age Inquisition – I hadn’t owned video games since the Playstation 2. This is still the only game I own, and it took more time to finish it than I’ve spent on anything in the past few years. I might not buy another video game until the next Drago Age installment comes out.
TV Show
- The Last Narc – In 1985, DEA agent Enrique `Kiki” Camarena is kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Mexican drug lords. Special agent Hector Berellez reveals the truth about the conspiracy behind Camarena’s murder that stretches from Mexico to Washington, D.C.
[1] Descriptions by Professor Edmundson himself
The Blackacre Times 
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