Summer Reading List

One of my annual rites of late spring is to pull together my summer reading list for both travel to and from The Europe and long summer evenings on the front porch. For the past few years, I’ve poked around the edges of the cyberpunk genre and wrapped up some reading important to my teaching and research. Here’s 2013 and 2011.

I think I’ve probably read enough cyberpunk stuff for a while, but I’ll continue to do some science fiction for the summer just to get my ready for my afternoon naps in the field. I have loaded on my Kindle the first two volumes of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation and Authority. And I have an itch to re-read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. I’m not sure why I want to reread it, but I do and it seems like as good a summertime reading as anything.  I also have Thomas Pynchon’s The Bleeding Edge moldering on my Kindle. I want to read it, but it seems sort of daunting.

I have a handful of books that I started, but haven’t finished yet. These sort of gnaw at my existence. Mostly, I haven’t finished them because I got distracted my something else rather than because of any shortcoming of the book. So I need to read the last 100 pages or so of Paul Halstead’s Two Oxen Ahead: Pre-Mechanized Farming in the Mediterranean. I figured 8-weeks of work on an intensive survey project in rural Greece will give me a nice backdrop to that book. I should also finish up Nick Montfort’s and Ian Bogost’s Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System as well as D.B. Weiss’s novel Lucky Wander Boy. Between the world of technology and rural Greece sits the unfinished volume by Jeff Ferrell called Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trashing Picking, and Street Scavenging. 

For quiet evenings, I think I’ll take with me – in paper no less – the new City Lights’ edition of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.

Finally, (and I forgot to include this in my original post) I’m going to collaborate with Kostis Kourelis to read Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture.

That should get me through at least the first part of my summer.