Fall 2009

Besides purchasing books at the beginning of each semester, this listing and summarizing process on the other side of classwork is perhaps my favorite part of being a student. I don't even feel bad if I end up being self-congratulatory, because I love books. So if anyone ever looks at these lists and thinks I'm one of those twisted, cocky, malignant bookworks, well, you're right. But I'll lend you some of my books, if you ask nicely.

This past semester was almost certainly the busiest of my academic career thus far. After a relaxed summer of half-hearted reading endeavours, I was amazed at how much reading can occur once you have 5 or 6 professors making all sorts of unreasonable demands on your time and eyesight. If I could read as much during breaks as I do during peak levels of activity during the semester, I would be able to polish off my "Read Before Dying" list in no time. Just for the record, I've listed below all the books I've engaged with in the past 3.5 months, including those books which I didn't quite finish but spent some serious time with nonetheless but not including articles, handouts, course reading packets, online selections, or books from which I read minor excerpts.

And how about some subject categories, eh?

Mr. William Shakespeare:
Much Ado About Nothing
Othello
As You Like It
The Tempest
Henry 5
King Lear
The Merchant of Venice
Measure For Measure
Gabriel Egan - Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism
James Shapiro - 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

Literature:
Lisa Russ Spaar - Satin Cash
The Norton Anthology of Interviews
Nicole Krauss - The History of Love
Seamus Heaney (translator) - Beowulf
J.R.R. Tolkien (translator) - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo
Bede - Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Sir John Mandeville - The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
The Old English Elegies
Medieval English Verse
Norton Anthology Of Literature: The Middle Ages
Julian of Norwich - Revelations of Divine Love
Jennifer Neville - Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry
Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing (editors) - A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes

Philosophy:
James K.A. Smith - The Fall of Interpretation
Saint Augustine - De Doctrina (Teaching Christianity)
Martin Heidegger - Being and Time (I'll be able to officially add this to the list after my Contemporary Continental class this spring)
Jacques Derrida - Speech and Phenomena
Roger Poole - Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication
*
Karl Marx and Frederich Engels - The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx - Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society
Karl Marx - Capital
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - Empire
Hernando de Soto - The Mystery of Capital
*
Descartes - Meditations on First Philosophy
G.W. Leibniz - Discourse on Metaphysics
David Hume - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Thomas Reid - Inquiry and Essays
Immanuel Kant - Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Peter Singer - A Very Short Introduction: Hegel
Søren Kierkegaard - Philosophical Fragments
Karl Marx (and Frederich Engels) - The German Ideology
Frederick Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols