Looking Closer: RHB’s Annual Summer Reading List

Sometimes the most important discoveries happen when we stop rushing and start paying attention.

Our summer reading picks this year invite the sort of close looking that the season hopefully allows. From corporate culture to childhood screen time, from leadership paradoxes to unlikely basketball success stories, these books ask us to look more closely at the systems, stories and assumptions that surround us. They remind us that transformation often begins not with dramatic action, but with the willingness to see what we’ve been missing—and the courage to sit with what we find.

Ken Anselment’s picks:

I just finished A Gentleman in Moscow, which now has more torn up Post-it Notes poking from its pages than just about any other book I’ve read.

Why are they torn up? To mark the good bits. Because I would often take the book with me while traveling (itself a commitment; this is no slender read) and, because I don’t usually pack Post-Its, I’d carefully halve and then re-halve the ones already in the book to stretch them further. Each ragged sliver marked a moment worth returning to: an astute observation, a delightful turn of phrase, or a passage that made me feel like I was in the hands of a master sentence crafter and meaning maker.

Here’s an example of this mastery—deliciously meta in its construction—in which the narrator describes the Count (the eponymous Gentleman) and his precocious partner in mischief, Nina, spying from the balcony of the Hotel Metropole’s Boyarksy ballroom “The Second Meeting of the First Congress of the Moscow Branch of the All-Russian Union of Railway Workers.”

(To those who have suffered through a bylaws revision meeting, here’s your warning that this may strike a little close to home.)

In the first fifteen minutes, six different administrative matters were raised and dispensed with in quick succession—leading one to imagine that this particular Assembly might actually be concluded before one’s back gave out. But next on the docket was a subject that proved more contentious. It was a proposal to amend the Union’s charter—or more precisely, the seventh sentence of the second paragraph, which the Secretary now read in full.

Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence—one that was on intimate terms with the comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard. For its apparent purpose was to catalog without fear or hesitation every single virtue of the Union including but not limited to: its unwavering shoulders, its undaunted steps, the clanging of its hammers in summer, the shoveling of its coal in winter, and the hopeful sound of the whistles in the night. But in the concluding phrases of this impressive sentence, at the very culmination as it were, was the observation that through their tireless efforts, the Railway Workers of Russia ‘facilitate communication and trade across the provinces.’”

After all the build up, it was a bit of an anticlimax, conceded the Count.

But the objection being raised was not due to the phrase’s overall lack of verve; rather it was due to the word facilitate. Specifically, the verb had been accused of being so tepid and prim that it failed to do justice to the labors of the men in the room.

What follows is a feisty debate about better verbs. It was one of dozens of laugh-out-loud moments. (It should be noted that I am more prone to snickers and smirks than guffaws while reading, but Amor Towles has had that impact on me.)

This isn’t a book to be read. It’s a book to be savored.

Oh…and one more thing. Because I feel compelled to shamelessly self-promote, I might also add that I’ve been rereading my own book, Climbing the Admissions Leadership Peak: Lessons from the ALP, mostly in preparation for some upcoming workshops I’ll be leading. (Would you look at that? A self-promotional layer cake.)

Aimee Hosemann’s picks:

My entries this summer are a reminder that the past always lurks, but in its lurking, it often asks us to reckon with both how it shaped us and how present it will always be, even as we come to understand it differently over our lifetimes. These books are also well crafted, excursions into the imagination sparked by writing.

My first suggestion is Ramona Emerson’s novel Shutter, about a Navajo forensic photographer named Rita Todacheene. Rita is visited throughout the novel by Erma, a woman whose death scene she documents in exhaustive detail, shutter by shutter, at the beginning of the novel. Erma demands that Rita discover her killer, leading Rita into a web of corruption and danger. Throughout the novel, Rita revisits her childhood and we learn about the grandmother whose raising makes it possible for Rita to go away to college. We also watch Rita discover during childhood the ability to interact with ghosts and how the adults in her life respond to this dangerous breaking of a taboo. In full disclosure, I do not frequently read fiction that falls into or near the “horror” genre. I prefer my mysteries to be a bit tidier. However, once I started reading the book, a text rendered with gorgeous detail and emotion, I couldn’t put it down. Every scene is simultaneously dream-like and viscerally real. That feels like life to me.

My second recommendation is Something in the Woods Loves You by Jarod K. Anderson. Anderson’s website bio describes him as “a strange mix of fantasy nerd, nature writer, podcaster, poet and erstwhile academic.” This strange mix is appropriate to the way Anderson writes about living with depression and how he finds healing in nature. Anderson had a career in academia, including in development work, which made him instantly relatable to me. 

In chapters named for species of flora and fauna that live alongside him in Ohio, we follow him through times he is laid low by this illness and cannot contemplate another kind of life. We join him as he finds a therapist whose mix of tough love and nonjudgmental listening starts to chisel cracks in the defenses his illness has built up over time. We also follow Anderson through at-first tentative trips into nature that become longer rambles featuring devoted attention to the details of how nature changes every day. He begins to change. He also revisits his engagements with nature over his lifetime, beginning a process of recovering those parts of himself that had been set aside. 

One of my favorite vignettes is about the white-tail deer, where he makes the point that deer, who spook easily, will return to browsing for food once danger has passed. Other creatures look to them for a sign that the woods are safe again. He achieved the distinct honor of being silently and nonthreateningly present long enough that the deer began to browse again after meeting some while on a walk. The deer began to eat again and the birds began to sing again. Anderson had become part of the safety of nature for a moment.

The book is a tough read at times. There’s no tidy narrative here. There’s no vanquishing depression. But, hopefully, what there is, is the love of people who want more for us, who help us want more for ourselves. Hopefully we have the willingness to ask the tough questions of ourselves and make the tiny efforts that over time lead us into something different. Hopefully we have hope.

Ryan Millbern’s pick:

Pipeline to the Pros: How D3, Small-College Nobodies Rose to Rule the NBA by Ben Kaplan and Danny Parkins

I had trouble narrowing down my choices for this year’s Summer Reading List. I was going to recommend Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodeser-Akner, a darkly comedic novel about the kidnapping of the Fletcher family patriarch and the ways in which that trauma plays out in the lives of his children over the course of the next 40 years. But after recommending a Debbie Downer of a novel last year, I thought I’d offer up something more hopeful in 2025.

Pipeline to the Pros: How D3, Small-College Nobodies Rose to Rule the NBA by Ben Kaplan and Danny Parkins lives at the intersection of several of my obsessions: NBA history, NBA front office palace intrigue, the value of a liberal arts education, what it takes to create successful organizational culture, how great coaches are made—and in turn, how they shape their players—brilliant underdogs disrupting good ol’ boy networks with their intelligence and savvy. You know, those old chestnuts.

Pipeline to the Pros examines how the experience of being a student athlete at a small liberal arts college uniquely prepares people for success in climbing the NBA coaching and executive ranks. Kaplan and Parkins profile several of the NBA’s biggest front office and head coaching names—from Gregg Popovich and Brad Stevens to Jeff and Stan Van Gundy to Frank Vogel and Tom Thibodeau—detailing how their unique blend of skills, experiences and connections helped them change NBA front office hiring practices forever.

I highly recommend this book for my fellow NBA junkies working in higher education who are looking for something to fill the void between the end of the NBA Finals and the beginning of the 2025-2026 season.

Alex Williams’ picks:

There are two books I’ve returned to a few times this year—one as a consultant who cares deeply about corporate culture, and one as a parent who gave in to devices earlier than planned.

Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People is a rare look inside the machinery of one of the most influential companies in the world. It’s not a tell-all, but a candid reflection on how quickly a company’s culture can drift when growth is prioritized over grounding. She doesn’t aim to take down Meta. Instead, she invites us to look closely at what happens when small compromises become standard practice, and when the speed of decision-making outpaces reflection.

I’ve spent most of my career helping institutions design the systems that shape student experiences. I’ve seen again and again how fragile even the most well-designed system can be if the culture surrounding it isn’t aligned. Wynn-Williams doesn’t offer a blueprint, but her perspective underscores what many of us already know: culture is defined in the moments when no one is looking for credit, and it breaks down when assumptions go unchallenged.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation hits differently. I have three kids—11, 9, and 6—and like most parents, I’m doing my best. I’m also a firm believer that parenting advice should be invitation-only, so I won’t offer any. But I will say that Haidt’s research gave me pause. He makes a compelling case for how quickly childhood has shifted in the last decade, and how much of that shift is tied to the smartphone.

This isn’t a book that leans on nostalgia or blame. It’s more of a mirror, showing what’s changed and asking whether we want to keep going down the same path. Haidt’s suggestions like delaying smartphones, reclaiming unstructured play or limiting passive screen time aren’t new, but they’re harder to ignore when backed by data and international comparisons.

Both of these books ask a version of the same question: What are we letting in, and what are we building without realizing it? For anyone thinking about culture (whether in a company or a household) they’re worth your time.

Rob Zinkan’s pick:

Pope Francis’s passing in April prompted me to read Chris Lowney’s 2013 book, Pope Francis: Why He Leads the Way He Leads. (I was familiar with Lowney from my Ed.D. program at Creighton University, where we read his fascinating book about the Jesuits called Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World.) 

Lowney takes us on Pope Francis’s leadership journey—through stories from Jesuits who knew him as Fr. Jorge Bergoglio—and explores how we can bring the pope’s “refreshing, deeply countercultural vision of how leaders live and what they value” to our own lives. This vision has a paradoxical quality. “I must be immersed in the world yet withdraw from the world. I must stand for something yet embrace change. I must invest in knowing myself only to transcend myself and serve others.” This dynamic tension is what “unleashes the commitment, imagination, and drive to surmount the complex problems we increasingly face in all walks of life.” 

The book offers both philosophical depth and practical wisdom. In closing a chapter on leading through change, the author ponders, “Rather, if we are modest enough to lead, we are both authors of the future but readers of it as well, attuned to a world that is ‘never finished, and never runs out of possibilities,’ as the pope puts it.” At just over 150 pages, it’s the kind of book that rewards slow, thoughtful reading…perfect for summer reflection.