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Summertime...
Book people stock up on things to read later, and "later" often means summer. The New York Times Book Review publishes a "summer reading" special issue, bookstores create beach displays, and publishers issue books in the spring that they hope will become the buzz of the sunny months. People on an academic calendar anticipate time to examine, unhurriedly, a book or two or 10 that will remind them of why they love to read.
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Book people also want to know what other book people are reading.
So we approached 30 or so bibliophiles and biblioholics at
Hopkins and asked the following: "Presuming an ideal summer in an
ideal world, what do you plan to read between now and September?"
We heard from a lot of people, some of them two or three times.
The question was met with enthusiasm sometimes tinged with
wistfulness. Professor of history Ron
Walters wrote to us: "The
whole idea of reading for fun seems like such a wonderful,
far-fetched fantasy. Most of my summer reading is going to be
dissertation chapters. One of the sad things about my kind of
academia is that we come to regard books as tools and only rarely
read them for the beauty of the language."
I'm not the only one who reserves a separate shelf for books yet to be read. Geoffrey Wright, director of Peabody Conservatory's computer music studio, has one too. At the moment, his contains only 26 volumes (slacker), but it could be read as a summary of his present life. He's just bought a country house and sees a lot of rabbits, so he means to read Watership Down, by Richard Adams, surely the only best-selling novel about bunnies, unless you count all that Peter Rabbit stuff. Wright's wife is Korean; on the shelf is P. Hyun's Koreana. His interests in computers, sound technology, and music explain Toward a New Music: Music and Electricity (C. Chavez), Beyond Orpheus: Studies in Musical Structure (D. Epstein), and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Wright's had respiratory problems since a child. Thus, Light on Pranayama: The Yogic Art of Breathing by B. K. S. Iyengar.
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As mentioned, the new Beowulf made more than one list,
including
that of Roger Brunyate, director of Peabody's opera department.
He recalls first reading it, "painfully," while a student at
Cambridge in England. He studied Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse, he
says, "as a kind of minor--by no means my most brilliant
success," and looks forward to the new translation in part
because the publisher elected to accompany each page of the
English text with the original Anglo-Saxon. Brunyate still has
his student copies of Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer
(1882) and Student's Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon (1896). Beowulf will, perhaps, prep Brunyate for his major summer project: "Last summer, my wife Mina and I bought different editions of Tolstoy's War and Peace. Flush with my success and enjoyment in tackling that, I intend to go on to Anna Karenina this summer." Brunyate was not the only summer reader intent on returning to previously read volumes. "One book I've wanted to reread for many years," says Romance languages professor Walter Stephens, "is Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma. I read it two or three times between sophomore and junior years." Daniel Weiss, professor of history of art, reports, "Every few years I like to reread The Great Gatsby." Sara Castro-Klarén, also a professor of Romance languages, wants to renew her acquaintanceship with Hopscotch, by Julio Cortazar. Sociologist Andrew Cherlin plans to pick up Joseph Heller's Catch-22 again: "I read this more than 30 years ago and have forgotten much of it. I was intrigued to see it show up on a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century." Jean McGarry, chair of The Writing Seminars, says, "Because I'm teaching Proust's Swann's Way in the fall, I'll start through Remembrance of Things Past for the third time. When Colette read it, she said, 'I go in one end and come out the other.' It's not quite that fast for me, [but] oddly, it's one of the few books, long or short, that I remember very well." One is tempted to quiz her on that (In the Moncrief translation, what does Mme. Swann say to Mme. Cottard about the doctor on pg. 133 of Within a Budding Grove?), but she is one's faculty boss so one does not.
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Much of the fun of examining these lists entailed coming across
titles we weren't familiar with. Carol Burke of
The Writing Seminars named Black Girl
in Paris by Shay
Youngblood, a novel about a young woman who ventures to Paris,
hoping to meet James Baldwin. "Youngblood began her career as a
writer of plays," Burke explains. "In 1997, she published her
first novel, Soul Kiss." Assistant professor of classics
Matthew Roller came up with The Footnote: A Curious
History by Anthony Grafton: "We scholars love to read about
our own practices of
reading and writing, and the footnote is one of our most
ubiquitous and valuable props. Almost everyone I know has already
read Grafton's little book. I feel left out." Dean of
engineering
Ilene Busch-Vishniac sounded a similar note: "I intend to read
the 'Disc World' books by Terry Pratchett. My family has read all
of these and I feel left out of dinner conversations and
in-jokes." (One contributor to the
Amazon.com website noted
this
about one of Pratchett's novels: "It takes a bit to get into it
because it starts off by describing this world as being a flat
disk carried on the back of four giant elephants who, in turn,
are on top of an enormous turtle. Don't ask.") Professor of
Romance languages P. M. Forni
contributed The Castle of Fratta, written in the 1850s by
Ippolito Nievo. Forni describes it as
"the story of the upbringing, the coming of age, and the decline
of the first-person narrator, Carlino Altoviti. It is both a
psychological and historical novel." As with Busch-Vishniac, family influenced Hopkins chaplain Sharon M. K. Kugler. She plans to read Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter ("This book was given to me on my birthday this year by my oldest daughter, Emily. She is 15 and is a voracious reader. I cannot tell you what a blessing it is to have one's child value books.") and At Weddings and Wakes by Writing Seminars professor Alice McDermott. ("I come from an Irish Catholic family and have been amazed by McDermott's dead-on handling of the nuances of this kind of family journey.")
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Edward Miller, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine, plans a summer of
men in peril, at least vicariously. Two of the three volumes on
his list were A Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger's
best-seller about a doomed fishing boat caught in an enormous
maelstrom, and Endurance: An Epic of Polar Adventure, F.
A. Worsley's account of Ernest Shackleton's horrific expedition
to Antarctica. Richard
McCarty, the new dean of Arts and Sciences,
inherited office
shelves full of books by Hopkins faculty, alumni, and trustees.
"I am looking forward to the prospect of finding out more about
what my colleagues do," he says, adding, diplomatically, "I could
supply names of books and authors, but I might be put in a
somewhat awkward position." No doubt by the titles he does not
elect to read.
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The beach, or at least sand, came up in only two submissions.
Neil Hertz, of the Hopkins
Humanities Center and the
English Department, first noted, "For
English teachers, the category of
'summer reading' makes no sense--we just keep reading, season in,
season out." But then he listed C. M. Doughty's Travels in
Arabia Deserta, which he has read before: "I still have the
two volumes, with the original interleaved beach sand." For Glenn
Schwartz, assistant professor of Near
Eastern Studies, his summer work tends to dictate his taste
in literature: "I have ample time to catch up on my reading
during the summer, since I'm usually in Syria doing
archaeological fieldwork, and there's little else to do when it's
time to relax. I usually go to a second-hand bookstore before I
go and load up on hefty paperbacks. Particular favorites are
Victorian novels, since their world is the opposite of the hot
and dusty environment I find myself in. Reading Paul Bowles's
The Sheltering Sky (it's about tired and sick Westerners
adrift in the Sahara) while on an unusually hot and uncomfortable
expedition in eastern Turkey was a spectacularly bad idea." Some lists revealed long-held enthusiasms. Solomon Snyder, professor of neuroscience, says, "I'd like to read Maynard Solomon's biography of Mozart [Mozart: A Life]. Why? I love biography as people have always fascinated me far more than things--that's why I became a psychiatrist. Mozart is my musical hero and music has long been my passion." Forni, of Romance languages, who describes himself as "a besotted-by-soccer Italian," plans Joe McGinniss's The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, the account of an unlikely season by a lesser Italian team. Reading the various submissions, I could feel hope: hope for time to actually read these books, and hope that they are as good as advertised, or as good as remembered. But there's something inherently optimistic about a summer reading list. I'd bet a week's pay that more than a few of our respondents have already bought the books on their lists, determined that this summer they will indeed read them. I have those 48 volumes staring down at me, but I notice that Amazon.com has discounted Beowulf by 50 percent, and has taken 30 percent off the price of the new Francine Prose novel, Blue Angel. Can I justify pushing my list up to 50? Somebody stop me. Dale Keiger is a senior writer at Johns Hopkins Magazine and a visiting associate professor in The Writing Seminars. He can be reached via e-mail at: dek@jhu.edu. And yes, he did buy Beowulf and Blue Angel. For a complete listing of summer reading picks from more than two dozen Johns Hopkins professors, visit the magazine's website at: www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/.
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