Summer Reading List

It’s summer reading list season! It is my annual exercise in hope and humility where I put together a pile of books that I desperately want to read and then fall miserably short of my goals. I’ve tried to do this for the last few years (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011.)

I have a couple ancient history books that I want to at least open this summer. I’m teaching Roman history in spring 2026 and I want to try to vaguely keep up with something that my students might want to read. So I’m going to start with Douglas Boin’s, Alaric the Goth. (2021) and Walter Scheidel’s new book, What is Ancient History?(2025). I can’t help but think that my buddy Kevin McGeough’s new book Readers of the Lost Ark: Imagining the Ark of the Covenant from Ancient Times to the Present (2025) will be anything less than a must read.

A few years ago I started re-reading Ronald Syme’s, The Roman Revolution. (1939) for reasons. I even started to blog my reactions to each chapter. I got as a far as chapter 19 and lost momentum and this has always haunted me a bit (like maybe if I had kept doing this the present would different?). This feels like the year to pick up where I left off (which was ironically when I arrived in Cyprus for my 2019 summer study season).

Once in Cyprus, I have this fantasy that I’ll dip into some new books on the history of the island. The most obvious one is Alex Christofi’s, Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean. 2024. Thomas Kiely, Anna Reeve and Lindy Crewe’s Empire and Excavation: Critical perspectives on archaeology in British-period Cyprus, 1878–1960 (2025) looks like the perfect volume to read alongside Maria Hadjiathanasiou, Andreas Karyos, and Emilios A. Solomou’s Colonial Cyprus: A Cultural History (2024), but the $100+ price tag on the Colonial Cyprus volume makes this unlikely to happen.

In Greece, it would be fun to read Dimitris Antoniou’s, Why Not Build the Mosque? Islam, Political Cost, and the Practice of Democracy in Greece. (2025).

I also want to read some works that touch on my interest in archaeology of the contemporary world. I’ve still not read Jason De León’s Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling. (2024) orDaniel O. Sayers’s, The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed. (2023). I’m most excited about Dan Hicks’s, Every Monument Will Fall: A Prehistory of the Culture War. (2025).

Finally, I do want to read some fiction especially on flights. I am very interested in reading Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin (2019), both because of RUIN and also because I found Children of Time (2015) sufficiently intriguing to warrant reading more. Becky Chambers, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (2022) and Record of a Spaceborn Few (2018) have intrigued me with their easy and hopeful style. 

I suspect that I’ll spend some time reading a classic novel or some Afrofuturism and perhaps something like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together and Prayerbook of the Bible.

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