Juna Saito (she/her) is really enjoying being a Swat alum. Working in the Office of Sustainability as a full-time fellow, you can spot her around campus at events like the Apple Pie Baking Competition or tabling about sorting your trash at Garnet Days. With all of her newfound spare time, she loves to attend storytelling events, gather friends for board game nights, and hunt for green mint chip ice cream around town.

What are you reading these days?: My theme in books of the year has been childhood reads! This includes chapter books I loved as a little one that I haven't read in over a decade, commonly assigned reading books that we never read in high school, and graphic novels that I always wanted to read, but I was told didn't count as 'reading' as a kid. I just finished re-reading Suzanne Collins's Gregor, the Overlander series. My 5th grade teacher only made it to the second book of the story when reading it aloud to us, and I wanted to know how it ended!

Describe your favorite place to read on campus: Curled up in bed at 3am in my dorm room, or else listening to audiobooks on my walks to class or meetings!

Is there a book you’ve read multiple times? I do an annual reread of one of three series: The Hunger Games, Percy Jackson, or Twilight. I typically do this during the summer or over the darkest days of winter as a reward for getting through the long academic year!

Is there a book you pretend to have read? This summer I found that Dav Pilkey (the creator of Captain Underpants) has been writing Dog Man adaptations of some of the classically assigned reading books I was so set on reading this year, such as Lord of the Flies or Catch-22, and by reading the Dog Man versions, I have crossed those off my list and will claim to have read them from here on out.

Who is your favorite author? Lately? Dav Pilkey.

What’s the latest book you could not finish even though you thought you should? Slaughterhouse-Five. While I believe it would be more interesting if I was in a class that got to dissect it, I can see why my friends were bored with it in high school.

Do you have a literary nemesis? While I love Sally Rooney's stories, I really don't love her style of dropping punctuation, and I often find myself hesitating to reach for her books because the reading experience is tiring on my brain.

What is your favorite reading genre? My comfort genres are YA, dystopian and fantasy, but I also really love realistic fiction and memoirs.

What book do you recommend most often? Beartown by Fredrik Backman

What’s the best movie adaptation of a book you’ve read? I often avoid movie adaptations because I don't want my imagined images of the story to change, and if I do, I often view them as separate stories. That being said, I watched the Dog Man movie this year and cried.

What author would you like to meet, and what would you ask them? Fredrik Backman!!! Because all of his works that I've read were translations, I wonder if and how he thinks about how emotions like grief will translate across cultures through his stories and characters.

What book made an early impact on you, and why? My mom read me The Phantom Tollbooth as a child and I truly believe it is where I got my whimsy.

What is one lesson you’ve learned from a book that you think everyone should know? My most recent lesson is from "What if We Get It Right?" by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. She explains that, especially in relation to the climate crisis, everyone has a role to play in taking action. The things to sit and figure out are 1) What are you good at? 2) What do you enjoy?, and 3) What work needs doing? Once you find your intersection, your time will be best spent working on that.