A Reading List for Late Summer, Early Autumn

August 28, 2011

A Reading List for Late Summer, Early Autumn

These are the days I miss even before they are through. There is a sweet lightness to the sun, a briskness to my nighttime walks. This is the time that nets ease and leisure alongside notions of things to do, ways to be, how to become. There's an urgency to how I spend my time, there is tension in my joints, but I also catch myself staring into the sunlit dust motes for long, long moments - struck into stillness. I wander for the experience of rootlessness, and also for the feeling of having come from somewhere, having somewhere to go.

Here are a collection of books that meet this strange season of late summer and early autumn, and the ways it has with us.

Too Much Happiness - Alice Munro
Arcadia - Tom Stoppard
Without An Alphabet, Without a Face - Saadi Youssef (tr. Khaled Mattawa)
Apocalyptic Swing - Gabrielle Calvocoressi
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Illinois, My Apologies - Justin Hamm (see the Isak Interview here)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold - Francesca Lia Block
Further Adventures in the Restless Universe - Dawn Raffel (see my review here)
The Golden Apples - Eudora Welty
The Bigness of the World - Lori Ostlund (see my video review here)
Varieties of Disturbance - Lydia Davis
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories - Norman MacLean
Birds of America - Lorrie Moore
Home - Marilynne Robinson
The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley (specifically, the title novella)
Franny and Zooey - JD Salinger
Living by the Word - Alice Walker
Awakening to the Sacred - Lama Surya Das
In Search of Duende - Federico Garcia Lorca
On the Origin of the Species - Charles Darwin
Crazy Horse in Stillness - William Heyen
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Out of Africa - Isak Dinesen
The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser - Muriel Rykeyser

(An aside: Lately, making reading lists is, for me, like making poems.)

Posted at 03:13 PM in Africa, Culture, Ecological, Literary Life, Poetry, Science, Spirituality | Permalink

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Isak

Isak is a space to celebrate tales and truth in the curious, joyful way embodied by the writer for which it is named. The name "Isak," after all, means "laughter," as she was fond of pointing out.

By tales, I mean fiction (especially short fiction), as well as other literary and artistic narratives. By truth, I mean the world in which we live. I especially have my eye on creative social justice.

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