Another Non-Listless Summer

So, it's getting to be a ritual, me providing Roy Christopher with my selections for his annual summer reading list feature. My picks were included on his Summer Reading List, 2015 post on June 22nd, along with those of about 20 others, including Howard Rheingold, Steve Jones, Peter Lunenfeld, and my friend and colleague Paul Levinson, as well as Roy himself, and you can read them all, if you care to, by clicking on the old link and taking a trip down to his website.

Of course, as a public service, I will also reproduce my list here, on Blog Time Passing. So here it is:

I have great admiration for poet and essayist Diane Ackerman, and this summer I plan to dive into her most recent book, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (Norton, 2014). I also want to catch up on one of her earlier volumes, Deep Play (Vintage, 1999). And this may seem like something out of left field, but my list includes Revolution for the Hell of It (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1968) by Abbie Hoffman, partly out of sixties nostalgia, but mostly because I understand that Hoffman was under the influence of Marshall McLuhan, among other things, and I’m curious to see how much media ecology he incorporated into his own ideas about subversive activity.

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I imagine it would be appropriate to include a book on reading in a reading list, and I’ve included Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (Penguin, 2009), which comes highly recommended. To balance out a book on literacy, I have also added a book on orality, Myth, Ritual and the Oral (Cambridge University Press, 2010) by the great anthropologist and media ecology scholar, Jack Goody. Of course, reading also includes rereading, and I plan to return to J. T. Fraser’s seminal volume on the study of time, Time: The Familiar Stranger (Tempus Books, 1987), in preparation for a research project I’ll be tackling in the fall.

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It seems that the term affordances comes up quite a bit in discussions of technology and media these days, and I think it will be worthwhile to go back to the source, James J. Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Psychology Press, 1986), as it also constitutes an important contribution to the media ecology literature. Additionally, I think I’m going to learn a great deal from Zhenbin Sun’s recently published Language, Discourse, and Praxis in Ancient China (Springer, 2015), and I think the time is right for me to tackle Bruce Kodish’s massive Korzybski: A Biography (Extensional Publishing, 2011).

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One of the books I am most looking forward to reading is Where Seas and Fables Meet: Parables, Fragments, Lines, Thought (Guernica, 2015), by B. W. Powe, a leading Canadian poet, literary theorist, and media ecologist. Another is J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). And for a science fiction fix, Paul of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (Tor, 2008) should do nicely.

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 And there you have it, my 2015 Summer Reading List, for what it's worth. And since you asked so nicely, here are my previous lists: 

• 2012: Some More Reading List 
• 2013: S'more Reading Listed 
• 2014: Some More Reading for the Summer 

Perhaps you will find something of interest in these lists, or maybe this will move you to make a list of your own. As Jack Goody has make clear, lists are a format, and a medium, that were made possible by the invention of writing, so it is only appropriate that we use them in the service of reading, and reading, and reading some more...