On the Nightstand

Greetings everyone! With a fortnight of MWP behind us and a fortnight to go, I thought I'd go with a diversionary posting today. Given that we're all "off" for the summer (just yesterday a neighbor used that phrase to ask what I'm up to -- egads. And then there's my mother-in-law, who always seems to wonder why we don't go "home" (to NY) for the summer, as if we're still "the kids," set free from college and on summer vacation), it would be fun to know what you have lined up for summer reading? I can never decide whether the concept of "pleasure reading" even applies to my life anymore; I enjoy almost everything I read, but it's also true that most of it is somehow related to my teaching. I guess one way to formulate the matter is to say either that everything we read is pleasure reading, or nothing is!

Anyway, at the moment I'm auditioning some novels for a Multicultural British literature class in the fall, so I've recently finished Monica Ali's wonderful Brick Lane and Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet, and have now started Andrea Levy's Small Island. My one unadulterated pleasure book this summer will likely be Andrew Sean Greer's acclaimed The Confessions of Max Tivoli (a former MFA student here at UM!). I've also been looking at Jon Katz's moving book about being a dog owner, A Dog Year, and, perhaps as compensation for having devoted three hours of my life to that Brad Pitt Troy movie recently, I'm contemplating dipping into Pierre Leveque's classic book on Greek history, The Greek Adventure. And then there's the stack of New Yorker magazines that accumulated when I was so busy during the Spring semester. Because I will obsessively read those from cover-to-cover, though, it'll be dangerous if I head in the direction of that pile! And then there are some of those titles that beckon from the Summer Institute bibliography that I might not be able to resist. And then, and then, and then ...

And you?