The University of California Santa Cruz’s The Deep Read, now in its fifth year, is focusing on Hernan Diaz’s “Trust” this spring, culminating with an appearance by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist in May.  

Sponsored by the university’s Humanities Institute, the free program, in which readers dig deep into a text over a series of four weeks with guidance from UC Santa Cruz scholars, attracts people from all over the world.  

“It has been such a joy and privilege to watch this program grow from an idea five years ago to a signature program for our campus and community,” said Irena Polić, The Deep Read’s founding director. “We now have over 9,000 deeply engaged readers across the globe, and that number continues to grow each year.” 

Approximately 60 percent of participants are UC Santa Cruz students, faculty and staff, but the mostly online program is open to anyone who signs up.  

Starting in late April, participants will get weekly emails addressing different aspects of the novel from UCSC scholars. The teaching lineup includes labor economist Lori Kletzer, UCSC campus provost and executive vice chancellor; Madhavi Murty, feminist studies associate professor; Dard Neuman, associate professor of music; and program leader Zac Zimmer, associate professor of literature.  

Zimmer will appear in conversation with Diaz on May 19 at UC Santa Cruz’s Quarry Amphitheater to conclude the program.  

In addition to weekly online discussions, regional salons are slated for April 25 in the Bay Area and May 8 in San Diego. A session devoted to the writing craft of “Trust” is on April 30, and a faculty in-person and online salon with participating professors is May 6. 

Insights from a spring quarter class on “Trust” and Diaz works taught by Humanities Institute program manager Laura Martin at Porter College, a UCSC satellite, also will be shared with The Deep Read participants.  

Selected for its themes that address implications of the technology from a historical perspective, “Trust,” published in 2022, focuses on opulence and excess in America. The protagonist becomes the richest man in the world by manipulating his holdings the 1929 stock market crash. Divided into four parts, the novel is told through a novel-within-a-novel, an unfinished manuscript, a memoir and a diary. 

Goodreads.com calls “Trust” an “immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle” that “engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.” 

In a welcome email, The Deep Read leaders greet participants with the message, “Together we’ll consider how the technologies of finance and fiction overlap in this novel about capitalism and its social, cultural, and political power in the U.S.” 

“I really enjoy coming together with my community as a reader. I love how the Humanities Institute brings discussions and scholars to the experience,” said Susan Pearce, a Deep Read participant since the program’s inception and president of the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History Board of Directors. She was instrumental in last year’s activities featuring the nonfiction “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future” by Elizabeth Kolbert, given that the subject addressed issues around climate change, a topic central to the Natural History Museum’s mission.  

Pearce, whose children read the Kolbert book in their high school classes and also participated in Deep Read, was delighted to meet the author last year.  

Looking forward to meeting Diaz this year, she said, “I’ve already read the book.”  

Previous Deep Read selections were: Yaa Gyasi’s “Transcendent Kingdom” in 2022, Tommy Orange’s “There, There” in 2021 and Margaret Atwood’s “The Testaments” in 2020.  

 To participate in The Deep Read, visit thi.ucsc.edu/deepread/.