Summer Reading List

Every summer, I put together a reading list that is mostly aspirational. It’s a combination of books I want to read, books I should read, and books that I have to read for my research or just being a good well-rounded person or whatever. 

By mid-summer, the reading list has collapsed and I’m frantically skimming whatever academic articles are necessary to finish whatever project is looming in front of me. What matters is that I want to read more broadly, more deliberately, but life is life and the wheels always fall off at some point.

Here an index of my former efforts: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011.

Here’s hoping that 2026 might be different.

First, I have a stack of fiction. I’ve been working my way through Iain Banks’s Culture series and have three more books to read (of the 9 books available on Kindle): Excession (1996),Hydrogen Sonata (2010) and Surface Detail (2015). I also want to read the new Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife (even though I’ve not entirely loved this series). I also think that I want to read the sequel to Blindsight by Peter Watt: Echopraxia (2015).

I also have Willa Cather’s Praire Trilogy on my Kindle: O Pioneers!,The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. I’ve read the first and third and should re-read them. It’s hard to know whether I will or not. 

I have a handful of books that I should read to stay abreast of my field. For example, I need to read T. Kiely, A. Reeve, and L. Crewe’s edited volume, Empire and Excavation. Critical Perspectives on Archaeology in British-Period Cyprus, 1878–1960(Leiden: 2025). I want to read Astrid Van Oyen’s The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family (2020). 

I hope that Dan Hicks’s Every Monument Must Fall (2025) can help me think about the tension between ruins, memory, and monumentality in some of my work in Greece. I want to read Nikolas Bakirtzis’s Architecture and Sacred Landscape in Byzantium: Making Prodromos Monastery on Mount Menoikeion (2026).

I also want to read Hamlin Garland’s The Mystery of the Buried Crosses: A Narrative of Psychic Exploration (1939) and The Shadow World (1908). These two books got me thinking about re-reading Kyriacos C. Markides’s The Magus of Strovolos(1985) and Homage to the Sun: The Wisdom of the Magus of Strovolos (1987).

Related in an unrelated way, I also  want to read Matthew Bernico and Dean Dettloff’s Enough Is Enough: Degrowth, Capitalism, and Liberation Theology (2026).

Less related is the recent biography of Marquis de Morès by Sergio Luzzatto: The First Fascist: The Sensational Life and Dark Legacy of the Marquis de Morès(2026).

I grabbed a copy Costas Montis’s 1974 Anthology of Cypriot Poetry and Andonis Decavalles, Bebe Spanos, and Costas Proussis’s 1965 Voices of Cyprus: An Anthology of Cypriot Literature.

I still plan to read Haruki Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls: A Novel(2025).