One of the few things that I have avoided for a long period of time is directing my own reading. For years now, a book or a writer falls into my line of vision because I am incapable of shaking off an impression it has made upon me. Hence, summer reading lists have seemed an artificial thing that people put upon themselves. It is only as I prepare to move between apartments, write a dissertation, and enter the last year of my dissertation that the artificial constructed nature of this reading list seems like a beautiful refuge of kind. It also serves another purpose, I cannot have every single book with me as I move apartments and to have a kind of direction is, in fact, the kind of construct that I need. And without further ado, here is my reading list:
The books that I have chosen here are all books that I have been meaning to read for a while. What I hope is that this summer I manage to write/think about them as I make my way through this pile. The list includes:
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod
The Museum of Unconditional Surrender by Dubravka Ugrešić
The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier
Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić
The New Moscow Philosophy by Vyacheslav Pyetsukh
The Undercurrents by Kirsty Bell
Berlin, September 20 by Boaz Levin
Free Jazz Communism from Rab-Rab Press
The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen
The Illogic of Kassel by Enrique Vila-Matas