I like this time of year. Exam boards have been completed, graduation ceremonies about to take place and the new cohort has yet to materialise. Apart from the inevitably over-ambitious plans for the summer (articles written, courses planned in detail, elearning designed …) I always have a sense at least that I can catch up with some reading that’s been tagged through the winter/spring. So, here’s my reading list for the next couple of months.

I discovered W G Sebald a few months ago and have been mesmerised since. Both Rings of Saturn and the Emigrants were beautiful and so I’ve got Austerlitz and Vertigo stacked on top of each other. He reminds me how much the difference between novels and understandings from social science can be merely technical. My brother sent me Cormac McCarthy’s The Road in the winter. I read it in two sittings and cried. Powerful, atmospheric … and great for the winter! I’m curious whether the style is maintained in any of his others so I’ve got ‘No country for Old Men’ to find out. And for a really slow read in the middle of August sitting under the apple tree sweating with a beer I’ve got Marilyn Robinson’s Home - the sequel to the wonderful Gilead.

For non-fiction, round-about-work-way-but-not-really I’ve got Doug Rushkoff’s Life Inc. an off-centre look at how we’ve become morally and social ‘corporate’. He’s like Naomi Kline but with a great sense of humour. I’ve got a feeling that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire is going to influence my thinking about the public sphere and help me work out what could happen in Cuba/S. America and Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality: Literature after the world wide web seems like an excellent perspective in critical digital studies. I’ll also dip in and out of John Gray’s Anatomy – philosphy’s Ballard – as the sun goes down behind the vegetable patch.

Now, if only the sun would shine …