Summer time, and the reading is easy

For most in post-secondary education, summer has arrived. Finals have been taken and grades are posted. It’s now time to get down to reading, right? Many of the academic ilk spend their summer months trying to finish work they were too busy during the semester to complete–archive research, polishing articles, sleeping, etc.–and a few others use their summers to read, for once, for pleasure.

Besides editing my thesis down for potential publication and finding a teaching job and working my full-time day job (for the sake of this topic we’ll pretend these are small and easy matters), my summer holds little but time for pleasure reading.

The English faculty of the university the so kindly conferred my degree recently put together a summer reading suggestion and that inspired me to share my summer reading plans.

The plan:

Now that I have finished Ulysses (recap to come soon), I will devote my reading time to Infinite Jest. Last summer, I abandoned the text to focus on my thesis. This year, though, IJ (while no small task) will be easier than my last try because having made it through about half of it last summer, I am now prepared for the literary onslaught that is David Foster Wallace.

Once finished with Infinite Jest, I will finally get on to reading Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. The novel was released about this time last year and has been sitting on my shelf looking lonely since then. There’s nothing like a little detective fiction to make it feel like summer.

Finally, I’ll end the summer with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.

The reading list is rather ambitious, weighing in at 2211 pages in all, and that is without any of the theoretical texts to be read (Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, for the most part). No matter the number of pages, I’m looking forward to a little time to check off some works that have been sitting on my shelf, woefully unread, for months.

What are you reading this summer?