Summer Reading List

Today is the last day of classes for the spring semester and I have to begin thinking about my summer reading list. I have something like 25 hours of travel in about week so that alone should be enough to get a good start on summer reading.

You can check out my past reading lists here: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011.

My reading will fall into three categories, I think. First, I want to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest novel, New York: 2140and Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Walkaway.

I also need to catch up on reading for two future projects.

For my little Introduction to Early Christian Archaeology project. This includes reading William Tabbernee’s edited volume, Early Christianity in Context and Bonna Wescoat’s and Robert Ousterhout’s 2012 volume, Architecture of the Sacred,Michael Peppard’s new monograph on Dura Europos, The World’s Oldest Church, and Ulrich Huttner and David Green’s Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley.

I also want to start to do some more serious reading for The Budget Project with some big picture books like Mary Douglas’s How Institutions Think as well as some classics like Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins and Jaroslav Pelikan’s 1992 reappraisal of Newman’s The Idea of a University. I’ll also check out some new stuff like Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy and William Rouse’s Universities as Complex Enterprises.

I also need to keep reading in some of my long-term and less well defined projects. For example, I should have read Thomas G. Andrews’ Killing for Coalon the Ludlow massacre and I should read Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s book on architectural improvisation called Adhocism and Mamoud A. El-Gamal and Amy Myers Jaffe’s Oil, Dollars, Debt, and Crisis.

I’d like to keep my fingers in a few other projects, including my continued work on slow, and read Ivan Illich’s work on conviviality, Tim Ingold’s Making, and Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain.

Finally, I’ve had Thanasis Vionis, A Crusader, Ottoman, and Early Modern Aegean Archaeology on my reading list for three years! This will be the summer that I read and digest it.