The cobbled embankment near the A-brug has everything medical student Rajaie Almatrood needs for reading outside: ‘It’s sunny and quiet here with not too many people walking around.’ As the Saudi student is reading a nonfiction book about the logic of failure, Black Box Thinking (2015) by Matthew Syed, he is reflecting on his recent internship. ‘I considered it a failure at first, but now I’m trying to learn from my mistakes, like they do in aviation when a black box flight recorder helps investigate accidents in order to improve performance later.’

‘I’m very much like a sunflower’, says Elisa Davis (left) from the US. ‘I need some sun.’ As soon as the weather gets better, the evolutionary biology student likes to be outside, reading. Her pick for today is Good Omens (1990) by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, which is about an angel and a demon getting together to save the world. ‘The book is pretty sarcastic and I’d say it matches the weather, because it’s very sunny and a little bit cold.’

Megan Stamp (right), also an evolutionary biology student from the US, hoped to read a short anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (​1969), but the sunny weather got in her way. ‘I read a couple of pages and fell asleep’, she says laughing. ‘The book has been interesting so far, but it has been a long week of hard work and I’m finally able to lie down in the sun.’

Corto Chaulot-Talmon from Paris wasn’t planning on reading in the park, but ended up flipping through the pages of Promise at Dawn (La promesse de l’aube, 1960) after cycling around with his friends. The weather was too nice to go home and Romain Gary’s writing was too beautiful to resist, so the humanitarian action student immersed himself in the memoir and coming-of-age novel about a mother-son relationship.

As a history student, Pascal Dijkhuizen is more interested in classic literature as well as dystopian novels, so picking up The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells was inevitable for him. He bought the book second hand a while ago, but was waiting for the right moment to read it. ‘The exam period has just ended, so finally there’s time and space again to read something.’