Dear St. Andrew’s Community,

Summer asks something different of us than the school year does. Where the calendar was once full and quick, these weeks open up—an invitation to rest and refocus, to make room for the outdoors, for the people you love, and for a good book. 

We ended the year in fine St. Andrean fashion—bidding farewell to the Class of 2026, and shortly after, welcoming more than 330 Saints back to campus for Reunion. At nearly every turn, in conversations among students and faculty, parents and alumni, the same happy subject kept surfacing: what everyone was planning to read this summer.

Students often have the best book recommendations, and I enjoy discovering what they are reading. We read whole texts at St. Andrew’s—a custom that seems almost quaint in this age. 

I am preoccupied by the idea of the bound book, so often clutched under the arms of our students. This fascination is not new, nor is the link between the summer and reading especially noteworthy. What is distinctive, however, is the way I’m thinking about books this particular summer. In a few short days, we will mark our country’s 250th birthday, an anniversary notable for so many reasons, including for how completely America’s founding, and our citizenship today, rests on the written word. 

To be a good citizen requires more than a deep understanding of self; citizenship asks us to understand our place in the world, in nature, and in society. Reading privileges reason over emotion, deliberation over impulse; it rewards perspective and reflection. It builds empathy and the habit of weighing our judgments of others with care. In reading, we learn to move beyond surface to heart—to discern, in both literature and life, what is true. These are the essential habits of citizens. 

It never fails to amaze me that 26 letters, arranged and rearranged on a page, reveal enduring truths that are rarely self-evident. Central among these truths is that we humans hold and articulate the highest ideals and yet fall short of them again and again. In this gap between aspiration and reality, literature gives us either comedy or tragedy. Reading the Declaration of Independence after 250 years, we see that America, too, has always existed in the space between the ideals of that soaring text and the messy reality of self-determination in the hands of imperfect people. 

Putting principles into practice is never easy. Yet this is the work of self-government. It is the slow, hopeful labor captured in the promise of “a more perfect union.” As the political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote, “Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.” 

Humans reading text, reflecting on it, returning to it—this is the essence of the undertaking and the substance of that hope. Consider why we chose July 4, 1776, as our national birthday. We did not choose April 19, 1775, the start of the American Revolution; nor July 2, 1776, the day the Continental Congress adopted the Lee Resolution and dissolved political ties with Britain. Instead, we chose July 4, the day the decision was explained, the day a written argument—debated and revised—was adopted and then signed by men willing to put their names to it. From that day to this, tyrants everywhere have feared the person who writes down the case for freedom: the conviction that all of us are created equal in the eyes of God and must be equal before the law.

Free and self-governing societies were not possible without texts, and the citizens, leaders, and visionaries who wrote, printed, and read them. And so, I confess some worry about the rumblings that we are becoming a post-literate society, or that schools are abandoning whole books. I do not believe a democratic society of free people can govern themselves without reading and writing about hard and complex ideas. Even at the most practical level, reading whole books—especially those that challenge us—strengthens the muscles of focus, intellectual endurance, and articulate disagreement. And reading does more than sharpen us: it brings joy and humor, deepens our empathy, and opens a door to a larger world.

If young people are to have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, if they are to flourish, they must have the capacity to read widely, reason soundly, and engage generously with the world and with one another. Our hope rests in their ability to ask new questions and imagine new ideas. St. Andrew’s students do this every day, and it is one of the reasons I am so proud of them. 

This summer, our students will be reading great books—and so will I. I’ve shared my own summer reading list below; I hope you will find something for yourself and add a few of your own. For reading and writing are not old-fashioned virtues, relics from 250 years ago. They are the very foundation of human freedom. 

 

In faith and learning,

Joy McGrath ’92

 

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Head of School Joy McGrath’s 2026 Summer Reads
If you pick one up, Joy would love to chat with you about it!

Moonglow; Michael Chabon
Blood Meridian; Cormac McCarthy
Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America; Leila Philip
Hadji Murat; Leo Tolstoy
The Death of the Heart; Elizabeth Bowen
Reader, Come Home; Maryanne Wolf
Saints in Art; Rosa Giorgi
Playworld; Adam Ross
Independent People; Halldor Laxness
Red Bird; Mary Oliver
The Grammarians; Cathleen Schine
The Heart’s Invisible Furies; John Boyne
Eleanore of Avignon; Elizabeth DeLozier
Empty Theatre; Jac Jemc
Wildoak; C. C. Harrington
Essex Dogs; Dan Jones
The Shards; Bret Easton Ellis
The Covenant of Water; Abraham Verghese