My wife has posted her planned reading list for this summer. For years, we’ve frequently made an effort to read things together, and last year’s list was pretty ambitious. So ambitious, in fact, that I only completed one book that was actually on it: Gravity’s Rainbow. That’s why my Summer 2012 list is actually half comprised of holdovers from last year’s list. If Heaven allows, here’s what I’ll read this summer…
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The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu (trans. Royall Tyler)
The Once and Future King, T. H. White
The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin
The Arabian Nights (an abridged edition yet to be determined)
The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon (Ellen is reading this in lieu of Gravity’s Rainbow)
King Lear, William Shakespeare
The Prelude, William Wordsworth
Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne (trans. yet to be determined)
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In addition to those, I’ll probably read a good chunk of literary theory as I prepare for the fall. Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic should arrive on Saturday, as well as a collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays on media.
