Summer Reading List

My summer reading list this summer is a hot mess and my track record of following through with my summer reading is … well, it’s not good. 

That said, if there’s any time where certain unrealistic aspirations are appropriate its in the spring when I can look ahead to a few long flights and the occasional afternoon quiet reading break (at least while I’m abroad working in Greece and Cyprus). This alone encourages me to concoct a reading list each summer (and you can review my past reading lists here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2011.)

Top on my list are two Ishmael Reed novels: Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and The Last Days of Louisiana Red: A Novel (1974). I read these novels many years ago (in college, I think!), but my growing (if random) interest in mid-century Black fiction has drawn my back to them. I’ll finish Chester Himes’s Blind Man with A Pistol (1969) and The Heat’s On (1966) as well.

Along similar lines, I plan to read some Stanley Crouch especially his work on jazz from Considering Genius: Writing on Jazz. Along similar lines I got a copy of the new biography of Robert Johnson, Biography of a Phantom: A Robert Johnson Blues Odyssey, for my birthday and hope to give it a read.

I have three science fiction books that I want to read. Arkady Martine’s latest, Rose/House (2023) is high on the list in part because it’s short! Iain Banks’ Consider Phlebas (1987) has simmered on my reading list for a long time. Finally, Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand(1984) is a left over from last year. Another gift book that I’m eager to read is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain Gang All Stars (2023) will have to wait until I get home because it’s hardcover!  

Along those lines, I hope to get a chance to read some of Margo Natalie Crawford’s Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics (2017) and David Grundy’s A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (2019) to give me a bit of context for Ishmael Reed. I also have a digital copy of the relatively recent Thomas Dent reader edited by Kalamu ya Salaam: New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader.

In keeping with a New Orleans theme, I feel like simply have to read another James Tallis novel. I have on my Kindle: The Long-Legged Fly and Moth. Hopefully a few of you checked out his recent short story in North Dakota Quarterly, “Lying Down.” It might be available for free one or two more days, if you haven’t!

I’m sure that I’ll also have to spend some time reading in my field a bit. I have ordered a copy of the most recent volume of the Edinburgh History of the Greeks: 20th and Early 21st Centuries: Global Perspectives by Antonis Liakos and Nicholas Doumanis, but it won’t arrive until after I’ve left for Greece. I also need to re-read some of David Pettegrew’s monograph on the history of the Isthmus for an article on the Corinthian countryside in the Roman period. I will also look at Cavan W. Concannon’s “When you were gentiles”: specters of ethnicity in Roman Corinth and Paul’s Corinthian correspondence (2014) and Amelia Brown’s 2018 book Corinth in Late Antiquity: A Greek, Roman and Christian City (2018).

I also want to read the two new-ish Paul Shackel books that slipped through the cracks (somehow) when I was working on my manuscript:  An Archaeology of Unchecked Capitalism: From the American Rust Belt to the Developing World (2020) and Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country (2018). 

In any event, this is quite a pile of books and it is unlikely that I can read them all. That said, it is spring and hope springs eternal (see what I did there?). As always, I’ll report back as I go.