Summer Reading List

I don’t want to say that I’m behind in my preparations for this summer, but I will concede that things are not as far along as they usually are.

One thing that I absolutely had to do is build my summer reading list. Each year for the last dozen years, I’ve posted what I planned to read over the summer: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011.)

This summer feels particularly filled with left overs. Books that banged around my summer reading list for years now and I haven’t managed to read them. I had hoped this year to read the final installment in Arkady Martine’s science fiction “Teixcalaan” trilogy, Marlon James “The Dark Star” fantasy trilogy, or even the final book in William Gibson’s “Jackpot” series. Since none of these books have appeared, I feel like this is a good moment to try to get through some long simmering reading projects (with just a few new ones as well).

First, my major reading project is William Gaddis’s J R (1975). This part of this vaguely quixotic effort to read the major works of American post-modern fiction. I’m pretty nervous about taking on a 1000 page novel as it violates most of my rules about Big Books, but it’s been staring at me for a few years now and I feel like I need to at least TRY.

I figured I would leaven the sheer enormity of J R with some shorter books. For example, I’m keen to read more in James Sallis’s Lew Griffin series. I’m also excited to read Zadie Smith’s The Fraud (2023) after reading and enjoying On Beauty (2006). I’m several years behind in my other reading and still haven’t read Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022). That might be my book for my international flight. I also picked up Evelyn Waugh’s Helena (1950) on a lark. I continue to have a Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun trilogy and Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons on my Kindle.

There are some odds and ends that I’m reading. For example, I’m reading Amiri Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1962) and Fred Moten’s In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). This is part of my larger project on Black Pseudoarchaeology.

I’m also eager to read Elizabeth Kryder-Reid and Sarah May’s edited volume, Toxic Heritage: Legacies, Futures, and Environmental Injustice which came out last summer and I still haven’t managed to read.

I’ll probably also throw the most recent issue of the Greensboro Review, Ploughshares, and Conjunctions in my bag to read when I get a chance. Since the most recent issue of Ploughshares was edited by Laila Lalami, I’ve now added to my pile of books her 2014 novel, The Moor’s Account.

In addition to these I have a few manuscripts to read for review. They’ll ride with me on my iPad!