Skip to main content

Summer Reading 2012

Tomorrow is the last day of classes and that means that it's time for the return of summer reading.  I'm planning on a follow-up to last year's "Summer of Shannara" by blogging my way through the Heritage of Shannara series (maybe they'll be better?).  There's also bound to be plenty of all things Greek with The Cambridge Companion to Homer, Memories of Odysseus, Spartan Notes, The Mycenaeans, Blackwell's Companion to Ancient Epic, etc. on the list.  The Greeks won't own the whole show as The Rape of Nanking and The Memory Palace of Mateo Ricci are also there to globalize a bit.  Tolkien certainly won't be left out as I happen to have gotten a nice critical edition of The Monsters and the Critics from some generous family friends as well as a copy of The Company They Keep from my wife.  Lewis is also on the menu with Sayer's biography as well as Gresham's Lenten lands and Lewis own Experiment in Criticism.  Back to the world of pulp, I also have a stack of Hellboy inbound so that I can make up for lost time.  As wild cards, there's always more Fritz Leiber and maybe some Tanith Lee (or a biography of Tennyson and some Camus).  I've just finished Doug TenNapel's Gear, but I don't know if that gets to count as Summer Reading.  Maybe it's just Finals Week Reading.

Anyhow, that's the prospectus.  As we all know, with Summer Reading things never turn out as you planned, but that's the fun of it.  How about you: any vacation time coming?  What's on your list?  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SNES as Money Well Spent: Platypus Nostalgia

I got my Super Nintendo Entertainment System when I was eleven years old.  That's a couple years after it first came out.  The occasion was a little dramatic: to celebrate the end of a two-and-a-half year course of treatment for cancer.  I had no idea that it would be waiting for me at home after the final doctors visit.  It was a nice spring day, the trees were waving gently in the breeze outside the bay windows.  With a cup of tea resting on the coffee table, I set down to play.  What was that first game?  It was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past .  Around twenty years later, my SNES still works as does that Zelda cartridge.  It's been a long way from boyhood in Southern Connecticut to manhood in North Houston, but I'm still playing. Why am I still playing?  There were stretches when I didn't.  Many times, I've just been too busy.  There were also seasons when it felt embarrassing to still be playing video games....
10 comments
Read more

The Platypus Reads Part XXVII

Thoughts after reading the "Iliad" to prepare a Greece unit for my students: -Hector is a jerk until he's dead. He even advocates the exposure of Achaean corpses and then has the cheek to turn around and ask Achilles to spare his. He rudely ignores Polydamas' prophecies and fights outside the gate to save his pride knowing full well what it will cost his family and city. After he's dead, he becomes a martyr for the cause. -Agamemnon has several moments of true leadership to balance out his pettiness. In this way, he's a haunting foil to Achilles: the two men are more alike than they want to acknowledge. -We see that Achilles is the better man at the funeral games of Patroclos. His lordliness, tact, and generosity there give us a window into Achilles before his fight with Agamemnon and the death of Patroclos consumed him. -Nestor is a boring, rambling, old man who's better days are far behind him, and yet every Achaean treats him with the upmo...
15 comments
Read more

Seeing Beowulf Through Tolkien: The Platypus Reads Part CXCIX

After spending a few weeks wrestling with Tolkien's interpretation of Beowulf , I found myself sitting down and reading Seamus Heaney's translation of the text during a spare moment.  I came to the place where Beowulf presents Hrothgar with the hilt of the ancient sword that slew Grendel's mother.  Hrothgar looks down at the hilt with its ancient runes and carvings depicting the war between the giants and God and meditates on the fortunes of men.  In a flash of insight, I thought: this is the whole poem! Let me explain.  Tolkien believed that the genuine contribution of the Northern peoples to European culture was the theory of courage.  The Northern heroes, at their best, were men who fought for order against chaos -a battle they knew they were doomed to lose.  If they were true heroes, their souls would join the gods and aid them in the final battle against darkness and its monsters and again go down fighting, spitting in the face of the meaninglessness...
3 comments
Read more