What They Are Reading

Mark Burnette is reading Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, Walker Percy’s The Last Gentlemen, and Thomas McGuane’s 92 in the Shade.  Future reading will include Charles Baxter’s Feast of Love or Richard Yates Revolutionary Road.

Shaun Corley just finished reading everything in English by Haruki Murakimi, and is now working on the catalogues of Phillip Roth and Jonathan Lethem. Shaun can be found watching any film by Richard Linklater, David Cronenberg and Ingmar Bergman.  He listens to the music of Neko Case, Cat Power, The Weakerthans, and The Arcade Fire.

Ricky Cox finished reading Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow and started Tales from Sacred Wind, an autobiography of Cratis Williams, Appalachian scholar and educator.

Don Cunningham is wrapping up The Bridge at Dong Ha by John Grider Miller and learning some sleight of hand from Richard Kaufman’s Expert Coin Magic

Renee Dickinson finished revisiting the Harry Potter series for ENGL 470 this summer, Bram Stoker’s Dracula for 331, and Wilkie Collins Woman in White (thanks Jola).  Now she is reading Mansfield Park.

Lou Gallo has been re-reading one of his favorites, Walker Percy, and working on Barrow's New Theories of Everything, which is just about draining his mind.  Lou is also attempting to come to terms with Eliot's The Four Quartets once again.  As for music, Lou keeps his ears open for something new in rock and classical.  The late chamber music of Shostakovich or Dvorak is good.  With rock Lou just keeps going back to the Stones, the mellow feel of Cat Power and the earlier Cowboy Junkies.  Lou is also fan of Radiohead, and considers Thom Yorke one of the greatest voices around.  He hasn’t heard anything else up to date that he wants to hear again, though he kind of likes the strange duets of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.   

Scott McDarmont has recently read or recommends the following:  Shampoo Planet, Hey, Nostradamus!, Girlfriend in a Coma, The Gum Thief, and Jpod by Douglas Coupland, Rant by Chuck Palahniuk, High Society, Church & State I & II, Jaka's Story,Minds, Guys, and Rick's Story by Dave Sim and Gehrard, Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely's All Star Superman and Frank Miller and Jim Lee's All Star Batman, Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen, Letters From The Earth by Mark Twain, Everything That Rises Must Converge, The Violent Bear it Away and Wiseblood by Flannery O'Connor, Flight by Sherman Alexie, The Road- Cormac McCarthy, Formerly Known as The Justice League and I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League by Keith Giffen, J.M. Dematteis and Kevin Maguire, Timequake, Palm Sunday, Hocus Pocus and Palm Sunday by Kurt Vonnegut, Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman and he promises to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn before the summer is out. Scott’s movie recommendations include: No Country For Old Men, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, There Will Be Blood..., Juno, Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man, and The Darkness. Music:  Magic, Bruce Springsteen; Icky Thump, The White Stripes; The Black and White Album, The Hives; Bitchin', The Donnas; Consolers of The Lonely,The Raconteurs; Accelerate, R.E.M.

Jim Minick is reading Sharyn McCrumb’s St. Dale and Ghost Riders, Ted Kooser’s latest, John Lane, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Michele Ren is reading Strange as the Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake and is happy to recommend music and films from the nineties to interested parties.

Jeff Saperstein has been reading Flight by Sherman Alexie and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler. Jeff recommends listening to Viotti, a classical composer of violin concertos, and watching Shakespeare Behind Bars, a documentary about inmates in a Kentucky prison performing The Tempest.

Rick Van Noy is finishing up the "last and best" of Richard Russo, Nobody’s Fool, and plans to read Loren Eiseley for a research project.  Additionally, Rick will read The Future of Environmental Criticism by Lawrence Buell, Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard, Gain by Richard Powers, and Strange as the Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake for a graduate ecocriticism class. You can find Rick listening to David Lindley, Steely Dan, Little Feat, The Allmans, Eric Clapton, the reggae channel of Sirius, new stuff from Wilco, fellow Jersey native Bruce Springsteen and anything from Greg Brown. Rick holds that movies come and go, but Sunday Night Baseball is forever.

Jolanta Wawrzycka is immersed in Joycean scholarship, alas, mainly because of her publishing commitments and her Irish Studies seminars centered on Ulysses and other Joyce/Yeats works. But she greatly enjoyed revisiting the stylistic treasures of Wilkie Collins’s Lady in White over the break. Recent new books by J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, and by Nadine Gordimer, Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black, are considered great reads. She also found a neat book called Descartes’ Secret Notebook, a fascinating account of the history of “modern” mathematics and Cartesian concept of the Universe. Books like these help Jolanta "re-wire my brain and give her food for thought as she re-pots her plants and refurbishes her yard furniture."

Ann Yearick read Paddy Clarke HA! HA! HA!—a different kind of coming-of-age story—by Irish Writer Roddy Doyle over Spring Break.  She also read a couple of David Sedaris's books of essays: Naked and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim