Summer Reading List

Each summer, I try to put together a summer reading list. Usually this is in response to my summer travels and is a good way to make sure that the books I want to read in Cyprus and Greece are on my iPad, Kindle, or laptop. I usually anticipate some time — especially in the evenings — to read a novel or two and to try to expand my rather narrow scholarly interests. 

You can check out my past reading lists here:  2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011. Going back to these lists always evokes a sense of nostalgia commingled with a sense of disappointment that I never really accomplish what I set out to do. I guess life is full of unfinished plans.

This summer will be even a bit more challenging than in the past because not only am I not heading to the Mediterranean, but also because I should be working to wrap up any number of long-overdue publishing projects (including a book) and I should be thinking about how to adapt my classes to a more dynamic and uncertain teaching environment in the fall.

That means books like Alice Gorman’s Dr. Space Junk vs. the Universe (MIT 2019) is on the top of my list. Susan Stewart’s The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (Chicago 2020) needs to also be read and digested. I also want to read some environmental history especially as it intersects with the American West. I have my eyes on Christopher Wells’s Car Country: An Environmental History (Seattle 2014), Matthew Kingle’s Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (Yale 2008), Sara Dants’ Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West (Wiley 2017), Flannery Burke’s A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century (Arizona 2017) and the recent gaggle of books on barb wire. 

I also want to think more carefully about how I plan to teach my world history class in the fall. I have on the top of my book pile Antoinette Burton’s A Primer for Teaching World History (Duke 2011). I also know that I’m going to used Eugene Berger’s open access textbook, World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500as my text, but I suspect I’ll need to supplement it, if I want to teach the course the way that I want to teach it. I need to check out Merry E Wiesner and Urmi Engineer Willoughby’s A Primer for Teaching Women, Gender, and Sexuality in World History (Duke 2018). I’m sure there are dozens of other books that I need to check out as I prep this class.

There are also some odds and ends things that I feel like I should read and try to understand. I want to read some Hirokazu Miyazaki and on the idea of an anthropology of hope. I have a copy of his recent edited volume, The Economy of Hope (Penn 2016) and his earlier monograph, The Method of Hope (Standford 2004) on my book pile these days next to Ismael Vaccaro, Krista Harper, and Seth Murray’s edited volume The Anthropology of Postindustrialism: Ethnographies of Disconnection (Routledge 2016) and Arjun Appadurai’s little collection of previously published essays, The Future as Cultural Fact (Verso 2013).

Finally, I’d love to read a few more novels. I’m about halfway through Ling Ma, Severance: A Novel (2018), and I would like to finish N. K. Jemisin’s series, The Broken Earth, although I’m not entirely sure that I’m enjoying it. I also want to read Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire (2019); she’s a Byzantinist and a novelist!