I try to keep a “for fun” book, a challenging book (usually a classic novel, but outside my preferred genre that I would t naturally gravitate towards), and a spiritual/theology book in the rotation!
For fun-my husband and I are currently reading “Words of Radiance”, the second in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives.
For my challenge, I’m reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” this summer! I was inspired to pick up months ago from a thread here on books we feel bad about liking.
I’m also reading “The Great Story of Israel” by Bishop Robert Barron, which synthesizes historical context of Old Testament and the spiritual and theological implications of the stories found in Scripture. Probably not one of those books that’s interesting to those outside the Christian tradition, but it’s on my summer list.
I wasn't aware of this book by Bishop Barron, but I will give it a try. I am amazed at Barron's intellectual range and how easily he weaves the spiritual with solid scholarship.
My summer used to be focused where I'd read Russian Classics -in English of course, or SciFi, or focus on Gone With the Wind and the books that surround it ( Rhett Butler's People, Scarlett and Ruth's Journey). One summer I read the entire 13 books of Jan Karin's Mitford Years, or the now 5 book Knightsbridge series, or Armstead Maupin's Tales of the City, Starhawk's work: both fiction and non, Mary Summer Rain's native stories .. you get my drift
This year I am tackling George Eliot's Middlemarch , a book I read probably 5 decades ago and remember very little of it. It's close to 900 pp and that's nothing to someone whose read almost 80 books so far this year. I'm reading it with a Substack group and we start this week. I haven't done this since Oprah did it with Anna Karinina and I am concerned about keeping at it at the pace listed in the thread.
I just finished Klavan's Kingdom of Cain, and I liked it a lot. I'm planning on reading Trollope's Phineas Finn, Ngaio Marsh's Overture to Death, and McKenzie Funk's The Hank Show, about the guy who came up with all the personal data harvesting apps do on us.
I never make reading plans, I just read. My most recent bookstore visits yeilded three non-fiction classics that are now in my to-be-read/currently reading stack:
'Confessions of an English Opium Eater', by Thomas de Quincey (1821) - this is the earliest account of drug addiction, and was quoted in the first detective novel, Wilkie Collins's 'The Moonstone'. I've started it and find it intriguing, but much different than I expected.
'On Liberty', by John Stuart Mill - I've read Mills' proto-feminist 'On the Subjugation of Women' and thought it was time I read his most famous work.
'The Art of Rhetoric', Aristotle - the Greek philosophers are not my favourite thing, but I am always curious about formative historical documents.
In addition, I've downloaded a translation of Manzoni's 'The Betrothed' onto my ereader. I've wanted to read it for many years.
I've also started Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' on my ereader. I have to take Dostoevsky in small doses - I read 'The Brothers Karamazov' a couple of years ago and finally feel ready for another.
I will probably come across other books to read and I am always rereading old favourites. I do read to my nieces and nephews, but the ones I read children's classics to are now able to read for themselves, while the little one isn't quite old enough for chapter books, but picture story books are also fun to read out loud.
I think letting whim carry you along is an excellent strategy. I’m reading Manzoni now. It’s wonderful. Too early to say definitively, but it’ll surely rise to my top ten of favorite novels. Fantastic in every way.
I'm currently reading Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin," which is very well-written and engaging even though it's about a truly malevolent child/adolescent. It is grim, though, so I'll need a palate cleanser afterward. "Persuasion" is next in my to-read stack - I read it twenty years ago, but I want to revisit it. Other summer reads planned: some Wodehouse, Ross Douthat's "Believe," some Golden Age mystery novels (I snagged an H.C. Bailey at The Mysterious Bookshop last weekend), Allen Guelzo's intellectual biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Is there anything more fun than reading through a list of people's tbr stacks, especially at the start of summer?? Thank you for this delightful space!
For me I'm almost halfway through Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary (that was supposed to be done by summer but that has not happened haha), and I promised a friend I'd read The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton. Handle with Care by Lore Wilbert and Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson are next up on my non-fiction stack. Then for fiction I've got Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and a reread of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility because I don't think I appreciated it enough in high school. And in the poetry world, I'm finishing up Rilke's Book of Hours and hoping to start on Christian Wiman's Zero at the Bone. And beyond that ... who knows? I like to have a list of must-reads with margin for surprises.
It's good! Just finished part one. It's a little dense but he's a good writer and recaps his main points fairly frequently so that helps. I'm fascinated by the neuroscience stuff (although this came out 15+ years ago so I do wonder whether more recent research affirms or disrupts his claims) and excited to move into how he applies it to Western culture/history in general. I'd say go for it if you'd have your eye on it!
Nice! I think I will. I have a BS in psychology. I always found it fascinating. To me, psychology kind of bridges physiology and philosophy in a way and it seems there's a lot of similar things in his book that would tie into that.:)
Two books I'm reading this summer are Andrew Peterson's, Adorning the Dark, and Russ Ramsey's Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart. Also just picked up Alex Hutchinson's book Endure (because if I read about running, it makes me an athlete, right?)
Peterson's book caught my attention because he'll be speaking at our ACE retreat in September and I wanted to know more about him and his Rabbit Room in Nashville. Interestingly, I saw the Van Gogh book and picked it up, thinking, he and Peterson need to know each other. Then I read the dedication of Ramsey's book and saw they already do!
I love the idea of looking at the existential struggle through famous pieces of art. I'm not literate with art, so I'm coming at this unschooled but willing to learn more. All creativity touches on the ways we wrestle with the human condition. I've been studying how people do it with *words* for so long, I was curious to see how the struggle moves through art.
So happy to read that I helped nudge you to finally pick up a Dickens! I remember the Roal Dahl streak; we were all big fans as well and Matilda and Fantastic Mr. Fox are true gems (the stop animation film of Mr. Fox includes the voices of George Clooney and Owen Wilson and is well worth watching).
I am still chewing through the end of War and Peace, will finish Letter to the Future by Michael O'Brien, next a P.D. James as palatte cleanser, then A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and I'll join you in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. Have a wonderful reading summer!
Here’s an idea for Wharton if you’re game: Let’s review jointly. We both read it and present the other five questions. Then we both answer and compile the responses as the review. We can publish here as coauthors.
This is a lark, so don’t let it interfere with your plans. But I was thinking I’d read it the first couple weeks of June and the write the review near the end of the month. In this case, I’d still plan to read early June and give you my questions by June 15; if you did the same, we could spend the next week writing our responses, sharing that that final week and then posting.
Love the idea, but can't make it happen. My headspace needs to move into the Camino pilgrimage (June 14 to 24), and I'll be happy to be offline from then until the end of July. Maybe we can make something like this happen with another book later in the summer/early fall :)
No worries! And, yes, let’s revisit later. Would be really fun—and enlightening. I tend to know what I think about something (especially once I’ve had the chance to write about it), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the same subject. We’re bound to pick up on different things in interesting ways.
I love the variety of books in your post and in the comments! I just sorted my TBR stack and chose my next 3 reads. Not sure if I'll get through them in the next few months as I'm a slow reader, but I'll try: The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas, Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, and I Am One of You Forever by Fred Chappell.
I have never read The Robe but the last two are two of my favorites. I became friends with Wendell in the early 90s and met Chappell at book fair around that time where he very charmingly flirted with my wife, who was 40 years younger than him.
I’m currently reading chunkster size books. These are Lonesome Dove, The Karamazov Brothers. I’m also reading The Postcard, The Turtle House, a reread of The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Age of Innocence, and The Old Curiosity Shop. I have big stacks of TBR books, but I’m anxious to start Raising Hare, The Fox Wife, The Night Watchman, and Prayers for the Pilgrimage.
Here's my list in no particular order of what I'm currently reading and want to at least finish this summer before I start anything new:
1. East of Eden: I've not read much Steinbeck except for "The Pearl" in high school. My wife bought this one for me, and I'm loving it. Wow.
2. The Gift by Nabokov: I am two-thirds of the way through this one, and it's a bit of a slow read, but I am enjoying it and look forward to finishing it. Some say it's one of his more challenging reads, but I'll stick with it.
3. We Who Wrestle with God: I got this latest work by Jordan Peterson after all the hoopla around the launch. It's pretty dense and best taken in small doses, but I'd like to keep working my way through it.
4. The Way of Zen by Alan Watts: Another book I am over halfway through and just need to put to bed so it doesn't keep nagging me from afar.
5. The Nature of Things by Lucretius: Started this a few months ago and got distracted. It's short and poignant, and I just need to spend a few days working through it. That said, it's nice to read a few lines in the morning with coffee. But it should be done by summer.
6. The Sword and the Stone by T.H. White: I got The Once and Future King earlier this year (appropriately gifted to me by a friend from the UK) and I'm halfway through the first volume in this multi-volume work. It's good nighttime reading before bed.
7. The Republic by Plato: Started this just the other day and am loving it. I want to keep working through it this summer, but it's another one that is best enjoyed slowly, I think.
8. An American Childhood by Annie Dillard: I got about halfway through this and my wife stole it from me and finished it. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Park in the meantime, and now I'd like to finish it. I'm a sucker for anything coming-of-age, and I would say this loosely fits that genre.
9. Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector: I got this for my wife and appropriately stole it from her (eye for an eye and all that) and loved it. It's my favorite kind of book: short, prose-poetry meditation on life and art. It sort of reminds me of The Sea Close By by Camus, which I loved. I'm halfway through this and only need an hour on the porch to wrap it up. Super short, easily rereadable.
10. ???
I'd like book #10 to be something fun and new. Maybe one of the books you recently recommended to me, Joel; I dunno. I won't want it to feel like work. I would like to read some Dostoevsky as I've never dipped my toe in that world. Tolstoy, too; but those may need to wait for Fall/Winter. Might be best enjoyed with a potato soup and some cold, rainy weather.
Just taking a look at some of the books on my print TBR shelf that I will probably be reading over the coming months: Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, Laurence Durrell's The Dark Labyrinth, Alexander Tisma's The Use of Man, William Trevor's Love and Summer, Julian Barnes' Elizabeth Finch, Emile Zola's Germinal and if I can work up the stamina, Faulkner's Light in August. Love it when I have such a wealth of books jut sitting there looking at me, and wondering when their time will come.
I have a summer stack of ~20 books taken from my library and TBR shelves. It's a pretty eclectic stack and includes a Perry Mason (because the murder weapon is from a collection of guns at the local library and I had to know), an Ace Double, Bulgakov, a bunch of history, Camp Scare, the influence of Christianity, The Observant Walker, and the first volume of Prudentius. 😵💫
Oh, and I'm finishing up my year-long reading project of all of Diana Wynne Jones' books in chronological order. I think there are four left, of her last works. Your 6-year-old would probably enjoy Earwig and the Witch!
What about the Math? Well, I just finished reading Armand Borel's "Episodes in the History of Lie Groups and Algebraic Groups". Next come Hurwitz's lectures on quaternions, which I need to re-read before I write a review. I'm also considering reading Hawkins's big book on the history of Lie Groups. And I have to spend much of the summer preparing a new version of a calculus course.
Also on the table: continuing my read-through of Willa Cather and of the Discworld books, plus whatever else strikes my fancy. I rarely plan out my fun reading.
I try to keep a “for fun” book, a challenging book (usually a classic novel, but outside my preferred genre that I would t naturally gravitate towards), and a spiritual/theology book in the rotation!
For fun-my husband and I are currently reading “Words of Radiance”, the second in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives.
For my challenge, I’m reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” this summer! I was inspired to pick up months ago from a thread here on books we feel bad about liking.
I’m also reading “The Great Story of Israel” by Bishop Robert Barron, which synthesizes historical context of Old Testament and the spiritual and theological implications of the stories found in Scripture. Probably not one of those books that’s interesting to those outside the Christian tradition, but it’s on my summer list.
I found Uncle Tom’s Cabin very moving. I can’t believe we don’t talk about that book more, especially given its historical significance.
I also find it very strange that the term "Uncle Tom" became an epithet, given the character's deep goodness.
I wasn't aware of this book by Bishop Barron, but I will give it a try. I am amazed at Barron's intellectual range and how easily he weaves the spiritual with solid scholarship.
I 100% recommend it!! It’s been a delight to read so far!
I try not to bring tech into the bedroom so I keep a paper book in there. Still trying to unpack and shelve my books from the latest move
My summer used to be focused where I'd read Russian Classics -in English of course, or SciFi, or focus on Gone With the Wind and the books that surround it ( Rhett Butler's People, Scarlett and Ruth's Journey). One summer I read the entire 13 books of Jan Karin's Mitford Years, or the now 5 book Knightsbridge series, or Armstead Maupin's Tales of the City, Starhawk's work: both fiction and non, Mary Summer Rain's native stories .. you get my drift
This year I am tackling George Eliot's Middlemarch , a book I read probably 5 decades ago and remember very little of it. It's close to 900 pp and that's nothing to someone whose read almost 80 books so far this year. I'm reading it with a Substack group and we start this week. I haven't done this since Oprah did it with Anna Karinina and I am concerned about keeping at it at the pace listed in the thread.
Have a great summer
Sounds fantastic! I’d never read Middlemarch until last year—thought it was phenomenal.
I just finished Klavan's Kingdom of Cain, and I liked it a lot. I'm planning on reading Trollope's Phineas Finn, Ngaio Marsh's Overture to Death, and McKenzie Funk's The Hank Show, about the guy who came up with all the personal data harvesting apps do on us.
Those sound excellent!
I never make reading plans, I just read. My most recent bookstore visits yeilded three non-fiction classics that are now in my to-be-read/currently reading stack:
'Confessions of an English Opium Eater', by Thomas de Quincey (1821) - this is the earliest account of drug addiction, and was quoted in the first detective novel, Wilkie Collins's 'The Moonstone'. I've started it and find it intriguing, but much different than I expected.
'On Liberty', by John Stuart Mill - I've read Mills' proto-feminist 'On the Subjugation of Women' and thought it was time I read his most famous work.
'The Art of Rhetoric', Aristotle - the Greek philosophers are not my favourite thing, but I am always curious about formative historical documents.
In addition, I've downloaded a translation of Manzoni's 'The Betrothed' onto my ereader. I've wanted to read it for many years.
I've also started Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' on my ereader. I have to take Dostoevsky in small doses - I read 'The Brothers Karamazov' a couple of years ago and finally feel ready for another.
I will probably come across other books to read and I am always rereading old favourites. I do read to my nieces and nephews, but the ones I read children's classics to are now able to read for themselves, while the little one isn't quite old enough for chapter books, but picture story books are also fun to read out loud.
I think letting whim carry you along is an excellent strategy. I’m reading Manzoni now. It’s wonderful. Too early to say definitively, but it’ll surely rise to my top ten of favorite novels. Fantastic in every way.
I'm currently reading Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin," which is very well-written and engaging even though it's about a truly malevolent child/adolescent. It is grim, though, so I'll need a palate cleanser afterward. "Persuasion" is next in my to-read stack - I read it twenty years ago, but I want to revisit it. Other summer reads planned: some Wodehouse, Ross Douthat's "Believe," some Golden Age mystery novels (I snagged an H.C. Bailey at The Mysterious Bookshop last weekend), Allen Guelzo's intellectual biography of Abraham Lincoln.
Is there anything more fun than reading through a list of people's tbr stacks, especially at the start of summer?? Thank you for this delightful space!
For me I'm almost halfway through Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary (that was supposed to be done by summer but that has not happened haha), and I promised a friend I'd read The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton. Handle with Care by Lore Wilbert and Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson are next up on my non-fiction stack. Then for fiction I've got Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and a reread of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility because I don't think I appreciated it enough in high school. And in the poetry world, I'm finishing up Rilke's Book of Hours and hoping to start on Christian Wiman's Zero at the Bone. And beyond that ... who knows? I like to have a list of must-reads with margin for surprises.
What a great range there. I’ve only read one Austen so far, Pride and Prejudice. I need to read more; P&P was a delight.
I've been wanting to read The Master and His Emissary for awhile now. How is it so far?
It's good! Just finished part one. It's a little dense but he's a good writer and recaps his main points fairly frequently so that helps. I'm fascinated by the neuroscience stuff (although this came out 15+ years ago so I do wonder whether more recent research affirms or disrupts his claims) and excited to move into how he applies it to Western culture/history in general. I'd say go for it if you'd have your eye on it!
Nice! I think I will. I have a BS in psychology. I always found it fascinating. To me, psychology kind of bridges physiology and philosophy in a way and it seems there's a lot of similar things in his book that would tie into that.:)
Oh yes, I think you'd love this book then! Totally agree about how psychology is the bridge between those disciplines.
Two books I'm reading this summer are Andrew Peterson's, Adorning the Dark, and Russ Ramsey's Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart. Also just picked up Alex Hutchinson's book Endure (because if I read about running, it makes me an athlete, right?)
Peterson's book caught my attention because he'll be speaking at our ACE retreat in September and I wanted to know more about him and his Rabbit Room in Nashville. Interestingly, I saw the Van Gogh book and picked it up, thinking, he and Peterson need to know each other. Then I read the dedication of Ramsey's book and saw they already do!
I love the idea of looking at the existential struggle through famous pieces of art. I'm not literate with art, so I'm coming at this unschooled but willing to learn more. All creativity touches on the ways we wrestle with the human condition. I've been studying how people do it with *words* for so long, I was curious to see how the struggle moves through art.
I’ve heard great things about both of those books!
I’m with you on the visual arts. I would like to invest more time there.
So happy to read that I helped nudge you to finally pick up a Dickens! I remember the Roal Dahl streak; we were all big fans as well and Matilda and Fantastic Mr. Fox are true gems (the stop animation film of Mr. Fox includes the voices of George Clooney and Owen Wilson and is well worth watching).
I am still chewing through the end of War and Peace, will finish Letter to the Future by Michael O'Brien, next a P.D. James as palatte cleanser, then A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery, and I'll join you in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. Have a wonderful reading summer!
Here’s an idea for Wharton if you’re game: Let’s review jointly. We both read it and present the other five questions. Then we both answer and compile the responses as the review. We can publish here as coauthors.
Ha, that's a great idea! Would depend on the timing as I am planning an a summer of "slow and very much offline". What timeline did you have in mind?
This is a lark, so don’t let it interfere with your plans. But I was thinking I’d read it the first couple weeks of June and the write the review near the end of the month. In this case, I’d still plan to read early June and give you my questions by June 15; if you did the same, we could spend the next week writing our responses, sharing that that final week and then posting.
Love the idea, but can't make it happen. My headspace needs to move into the Camino pilgrimage (June 14 to 24), and I'll be happy to be offline from then until the end of July. Maybe we can make something like this happen with another book later in the summer/early fall :)
No worries! And, yes, let’s revisit later. Would be really fun—and enlightening. I tend to know what I think about something (especially once I’ve had the chance to write about it), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on the same subject. We’re bound to pick up on different things in interesting ways.
Sounds perfect :)
I love the variety of books in your post and in the comments! I just sorted my TBR stack and chose my next 3 reads. Not sure if I'll get through them in the next few months as I'm a slow reader, but I'll try: The Robe by Lloyd C. Douglas, Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, and I Am One of You Forever by Fred Chappell.
I have never read The Robe but the last two are two of my favorites. I became friends with Wendell in the early 90s and met Chappell at book fair around that time where he very charmingly flirted with my wife, who was 40 years younger than him.
*Babylon White* by Kit Sun Cheah
The Starquest series by John C. Wright.
I try to not plan much because I can grow obsessive.
I’m currently reading chunkster size books. These are Lonesome Dove, The Karamazov Brothers. I’m also reading The Postcard, The Turtle House, a reread of The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Age of Innocence, and The Old Curiosity Shop. I have big stacks of TBR books, but I’m anxious to start Raising Hare, The Fox Wife, The Night Watchman, and Prayers for the Pilgrimage.
Here's my list in no particular order of what I'm currently reading and want to at least finish this summer before I start anything new:
1. East of Eden: I've not read much Steinbeck except for "The Pearl" in high school. My wife bought this one for me, and I'm loving it. Wow.
2. The Gift by Nabokov: I am two-thirds of the way through this one, and it's a bit of a slow read, but I am enjoying it and look forward to finishing it. Some say it's one of his more challenging reads, but I'll stick with it.
3. We Who Wrestle with God: I got this latest work by Jordan Peterson after all the hoopla around the launch. It's pretty dense and best taken in small doses, but I'd like to keep working my way through it.
4. The Way of Zen by Alan Watts: Another book I am over halfway through and just need to put to bed so it doesn't keep nagging me from afar.
5. The Nature of Things by Lucretius: Started this a few months ago and got distracted. It's short and poignant, and I just need to spend a few days working through it. That said, it's nice to read a few lines in the morning with coffee. But it should be done by summer.
6. The Sword and the Stone by T.H. White: I got The Once and Future King earlier this year (appropriately gifted to me by a friend from the UK) and I'm halfway through the first volume in this multi-volume work. It's good nighttime reading before bed.
7. The Republic by Plato: Started this just the other day and am loving it. I want to keep working through it this summer, but it's another one that is best enjoyed slowly, I think.
8. An American Childhood by Annie Dillard: I got about halfway through this and my wife stole it from me and finished it. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Park in the meantime, and now I'd like to finish it. I'm a sucker for anything coming-of-age, and I would say this loosely fits that genre.
9. Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector: I got this for my wife and appropriately stole it from her (eye for an eye and all that) and loved it. It's my favorite kind of book: short, prose-poetry meditation on life and art. It sort of reminds me of The Sea Close By by Camus, which I loved. I'm halfway through this and only need an hour on the porch to wrap it up. Super short, easily rereadable.
10. ???
I'd like book #10 to be something fun and new. Maybe one of the books you recently recommended to me, Joel; I dunno. I won't want it to feel like work. I would like to read some Dostoevsky as I've never dipped my toe in that world. Tolstoy, too; but those may need to wait for Fall/Winter. Might be best enjoyed with a potato soup and some cold, rainy weather.
Anyway, I'm open to suggestions.
Just taking a look at some of the books on my print TBR shelf that I will probably be reading over the coming months: Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, Laurence Durrell's The Dark Labyrinth, Alexander Tisma's The Use of Man, William Trevor's Love and Summer, Julian Barnes' Elizabeth Finch, Emile Zola's Germinal and if I can work up the stamina, Faulkner's Light in August. Love it when I have such a wealth of books jut sitting there looking at me, and wondering when their time will come.
I have a summer stack of ~20 books taken from my library and TBR shelves. It's a pretty eclectic stack and includes a Perry Mason (because the murder weapon is from a collection of guns at the local library and I had to know), an Ace Double, Bulgakov, a bunch of history, Camp Scare, the influence of Christianity, The Observant Walker, and the first volume of Prudentius. 😵💫
Oh, and I'm finishing up my year-long reading project of all of Diana Wynne Jones' books in chronological order. I think there are four left, of her last works. Your 6-year-old would probably enjoy Earwig and the Witch!
What about the Math? Well, I just finished reading Armand Borel's "Episodes in the History of Lie Groups and Algebraic Groups". Next come Hurwitz's lectures on quaternions, which I need to re-read before I write a review. I'm also considering reading Hawkins's big book on the history of Lie Groups. And I have to spend much of the summer preparing a new version of a calculus course.
Also on the table: continuing my read-through of Willa Cather and of the Discworld books, plus whatever else strikes my fancy. I rarely plan out my fun reading.
I like the way you took that!
Cather is treasure chest.
I'm currently reading
marc van doren- shakespeare which I'm almost finished unfortunately!
And Kay redfield Jamison- setting the river on fire about poet Robert lowell which I just started and so far it doesn't disappoint.
Both sound great!