Summer Reading 2015

Of the reading of books there is no end. Now that the summer violin workshop I was teaching at is over, it is time to read. More.

First thing, I have been reading already this summer, since summer began. (When it began is hazy. I think it started sometime March, but then again maybe it didn't.) I have read about ten books over the last four weeks, depending on how you do the math and whether you think summer begins in March:

1. Poems - Emily Dickinson. The Project Gutenberg edition is the first published edition, which means that a lot of Emily's idiosyncrasies -- dashes, bizarre capitalization, unorthodox syntax -- are edited out.
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh - trans. David Ferry, and trans. Andrew George. Read the latter a week after the other. George's is leaps and bounds better.
3. The Lost World of Genesis One - John Walton. Introduction to Walton's theory of the functional ontology of Genesis One. No, I'm not sure I really get it either.
4. Paradise Regained - John Milton. A disappointment in light of Paradise Lost. Go read the gospels of the KJV or Douay-Rheims instead. (But it does have some very insightful asides.)
5. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert - Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. A startling account of a lesbian English professor's conversion to Christianity, which sheds new light on issues I never thought much about before.
6. The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes - trans. Robert Alter. Alter, comp lit professor at UC Berkeley, has some valuable notes on the passages, chiastic structures, and ideas of the wisdom books. The translation itself doesn't meet expectations, though. (A telling example: he translates the verse in Job, usually rendered along the lines of "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," as something like "He slays me; I have no hope.")
7. The Chosen Ones - Alister McGrath. An uneven wannabe Narnia book.
8. Lancelot - Walker Percy. The more I read Percy the more I think he wrote a lengthy Variations on a Theme of Existentially-Crisised Middle-Age Southern Chick Boy. Lancelot is funny, perceptive, almost prescient, but not as much as Lost in the Cosmos.
9. Poems - Ranier Maria Rilke. Nice ethereal, almost mystical atmosphere in this collection.
10. Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys: Music History as It Ought to Be Taught. Impertinent humor and an off-kilter focus on the details. A book has not made me laugh so much in a long time.
11. The Iliad - trans. Robert Fagles. See blog post three back.
12. Godric - Frederick Buechner. See previous blog post.

So that's it.

And here's what I hope to finish this summer:

1. The Hauerwas Reader - Stanley Hauerwas. Started it last year.
2. I Am an Impure Thinker - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
3. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) - Jaroslav Pelikan
4. Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges
5. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
6. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
7. Silence - Shusaku Endo. The book cover of which has to be one of my favorites:

On a side note, Martin Scorsese is currently making a film based on it.

Better read the book before it comes out.

8. The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays - W.H. Auden
9. Selected Poems - W.H. Auden
10. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
11. How (Not) to Be Secular - James K.A. Smith
12. Imagining the Kingdom - Jamie Smith, who is the same person as above.
13. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
14. Both Flesh and Not: Essays - David Foster Wallace
15. Some poetry by Keats
16. Maybe Dante's Inferno
17. Perhaps the first part of Don Quixote
18. Noli Me Tangere? In order to rectify one of the biggest failures of my high school reading life?
19. El Filibusterismo? See above.

And so ends this pessimistic idealist's reading list.

fin