Summer Reading List

Last year, I had a rough summer reading list. It was too long and diverse and lingered well into the fall. This year, I’m trying to go a bit leaner and doing a bit more fiction.

Of course, for the first time ever, I’ll also be carrying along a stack of graduate student papers that need to be graded. I’m thinking I can do that on the flight to Athens. 

Here are my 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011 reading lists.

I’m taking one paper book with me this summer. I have this idea that someone will ask me to review it. I don’t know why, I’m not a geologist, but maybe someone will surprise me.

John P. Bleumle, North Dakota’s Geologic Legacy. NDSU Press 2016.

I’ve been really looking forward to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Harvard 2016. I suspect it’ll add something to my thinking about slow archaeology. And I’ll leave my paper copy of E. Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (New York 2013).  

Richard Rothaus has suggested that I read Anthony Lowenstein’s Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe. London 2015, and John William’s Stoner. New York 1965. (For more of Richard’s and Kostis Kourelis’s recommendations, see here.)

I’ve also packed some science fiction for my before bed reading. I’ve started reading science fiction again a few years back and have kept at it.

I’d be massively remiss not to read some Kim Stanley Robinson, so I’m taking a Kindle version of his new book Aurora (2015).

I also have Neil Stevenson’s enormous Anathem (2008) on the ole Kindle. 

I was browsing Amazon and was drawn to the cover, and maybe the title, and bought Robin Sloan’s Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel (2012). 

I’m sure there will be books that I absolutely MUST READ, like, you know, the red-lines of my Guide to the Bakken manuscript or Historical Archaeology 50.1which treats American Landscapes and features an article on underground mining landscapes.

And, of course, I’ll be reading Polis Notebooks, but more on that in a few days.