For the months of July & August we embrace the spirit of summer vacation and feature the reading lists of our staff. Enjoy!
William Bernhard
I am spending a good chunk of the summer in Europe.
The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Robert Fagles)
Fragments by Heraclitus (translated by Brooks Haxton)
Elegy for the Departure by Zbigniew Herber (translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter)
The Curtain by Milan Kundera
Black Zodiac by Charles Wright
Halflife: Poems by Meghan O’Rourke
David Biespiel
The Way It Wasn’t by James Laughlin
Byways by James Laughlin
To the Castle and Back by Vaclav Havel
Goya by Robert Hughes
The Power of Babal by John McWhorter
Selected Poems by Derek Walcott
Jill Elliott
I’m getting ready to take a poetry class so I have The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck, Crow by Ted Huges and Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara to read. Through my volunteer work at Poetry Northwest I realize how important subscriptions are for the survival of magazines, so I have subscribed to The Sun, Poetry, Poets&Writers and Writer’s Chronicle. As for novels, I’m reading pretty much anything by Alice Hoffman and Joanne Harris.
The Dream Book – Symbols for Self Understanding by Betty Bethards is perhaps the book I pull from the shelf most frequently.
Shana Germain
The books that are strewn around my home office, awaiting my attention at the moment are: Neverwhere and Stardust by Neil Gaiman, Buddha or Bust: In Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness and the Man Who Found Them All by Perry Garfinkel, Soon I Will be Invincible by Austin Grossman, Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, The Lover by Marguerite Duras. I’m sure I have poetry here too (*searches through the pile*). Ah yes, here are: Thirst by Mary Oliver, Original Fire by Louise Erdrich, Natural History by Dan Chiasson. That’s all I can find at the moment. These will probably last me two weeks, but I have no idea what I’ll be reading after that. Ideally, my own handwriting on a beach somewhere.
Heather Guidero
These have been on my list for a LONG time…
Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead
The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
I’ve also been slowly chipping away at Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox by Alexander McKee
Jordan Johnson
Here’s my summer reading list, although you should know that I had to resist the urge to fill my list with abstruse essays on post-structuralism and obscure translations of classical Persian literature just to make myself appear smarter than I really am.
Flight by Sherman Alexie
Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic
Falling Man by Don DeLillo
View with a Grain of Sand by Wislawa Szymborska
Lost Cosmonaut by Daniel Kalder
Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
Near Changes by Mona Van Duyn
Jade Pekkala
I have a lot of books on my reading table.
The Tao Of Bow Wow by Deborah Wood
The Culture Clash by Jean Donaldson
The Art Of The Body by Margaret Steele & Cindy Estes
Heart In The Wild by Susan Chernak McElroy
One Hundred Poems From The Japanese Translated by Kenneth Rexroth
One Hundred More Poems From The Japanese Translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Long Journey edited by David Biespiel
Deer Drink the Moon, Poems of Oregon edited by Liz Nakazawa
And last but not least, a book I use every day Stretching by Bob Anderson
Garth Weber
Various Gilgamesh translations
Lectures on Russian Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
Philosophical Investigations by Wittgenstein
Intentionality by J.R. Searle
The Sleep Walkers by Hermann Bosch
White Noise, Underworld by DeLillo
The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker
Complete Short Stories by Chekhov
The Short Stories by Gogol