For many years, I have been using my Amazon Wish List as a vast “to-read” list — including recommendations, books of which I’ve read interesting reviews, books I want to remember for my research, etc., etc. (I very rarely actually buy the book from Amazon; instead, I’m free-riding on their easily accessible database of virtually every book ever published.). Over time, the list became so unwieldy as to be useless, and this year I resolved to attack the problem from two directions. First, I would go through the list and be honest with myself about whether I would actually read certain titles (or groups of titles on topics I have lost interest in). Second, and more interestingly, since I am between research projects, I wanted to use my ample commute time to actually read a good chunk of them by fully leveraging my access to interlibrary loan.

The result has been an enjoyable semester of miscellaneous reading that is often pegged to certain times of my life or certain friends. It was so nice to get off the treadmill of work-oriented reading that I even resisted writing up a blog post, because it would potentially make it “feel like work.” But as an aid to my own memory, I present the list here:

• Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture — this was a good way to consolidate memories of my trip to Rome, overlaying what I had seen with its broader historical significance.
• Shabbir Akhtar, The New Testament in Muslim Eyes: Paul’s Letter to the Galatians — this is related to a long-planned article on Paul and the Qur’an; I found it to be extremely strange and borderline unreadable, to be honest.
• Robert O. McDonald, Works Like a Charm: Incentive Rhetoric and the Economization of Everyday Life — I already blogged about this one.
• Jiwei Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism — I’ve read a lot on Soviet Communism but comparatively little on China, and a review article on Ci’s work in NLR made this seem like a good starting point. It was pretty bracing, presenting Mao’s career as marked by magical thinking and a weird secular eschatology.
• John Rieder, Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System — an effortlessly authoritative overview of science fiction studies, through the lens of the ways that commercial culture transforms the meaning and function of “genre” compared to classical models.
• Seth Benardete, Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero — this was recommended to me way back when I was first prepping Shimer’s senior capstone sequence. I probably should have read it back then!
• Seth Benardete, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey — This wasn’t a “recommendation,” but I figured I enjoyed Achilles and Homer so much I would check this one out. It gave me a lot to think about for particular details of the Odyssey, but I’m not sure I understand the overarching argument about how Homer is somehow Platonic in approach (such as it is discernible in his almost Gillian Rose-like severe style).
• Zdravko Planinc, Plato through Homer: Poetry and Philosophy in the Cosmological Dialogues — This was a recommendation from my summer seminar on Plato and Homer; it similarly gave me a lot of insights for future teaching.
• Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners — my friend Bruce Rosenstock, who passed away in 2023, recommended this to me way back when I was working on Awkwardness. Since I didn’t have reliable library access at the time and wasn’t planning on making it a scholarly book, I left the recommendation aside — but picking it up semi-at-random now, I enjoyed the morbidly fascinating tidbits of medieval manners, as well as the introduction in which he uses his own sociological method to account for why the sociology of his time sucked.
• Erving Goffman, Stigma: The Management of Spoiled Identity — another Bruce recommendation from the Awkwardness days. This is remarkable for the author’s matter-of-factness about the negative valence of certain traits in the context of mandatory “normality.” I was also struck by how his discussion of affinity groups, complete with publications, for most stigmatized identities anticipates the explosion of similar groups in online settings.

For the summer, I’m going to need to shift gears back toward class prep and research for most of my reading, so this is where I leave this particular project. I think I’m going to make an effort to do something similar every few years, though. Undirected reading is really important for keeping one’s mind fresh and nimble.