A broken iPhone took my graduating HS son and me to Harvard Square today, one of my favorite places on earth. And darn, we had a whole hour and a half to wait, what will we do? After lunch at Bartley’s (of course), we strolled Harvard Book Store; I adore that place.
I showed what I consider to be remarkable restraint in only buying 2 books for myself and 2 as gifts; but luckily I had my phone with me, so I went merrily around photographing the books I didn’t buy but wish I did. A summer reading wishlist, perhaps.
In the order I encountered them crammed into the shelves…
Cathy Jean Maloney, World’s Fair Gardens: Shaping American Landscapes
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st Century Bestiary
Cristoph Cox and Daniel Warner, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music
Peter Szendy, Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox
Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery
Leonard Freed, This is the Day: The March on Washington
Dianne Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America
George Orwell, A Collection of Essays
E. B. White, Essays of E. B. White
Ben Brusey, Pu Pu Hot Pot: The World’s Best Restaurant Names (we were just talking about that place – it’s in Central Square – with our kids the other day, insisting it was real. Which it is)
Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle that Changed a Nation
Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth
Colin Meloy (lead singer of the Decemberists), Wildwood, Book I
Peter Clarke, Keynes: The Rise, Fall and Return of the 20th Century’s Most Influential Economist
or maybe, instead – Robert Skidlesky, Keynes: The Return of the Master
Bruce Watson, Sacco & Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders and the Judgment of Mankind
Thomas Dyja, The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream
Michael Golay, America 1933: The Great Depression, Lorena Hickock, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Shaping of the New Deal
Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945-2000: The Rise of a Global Power, The Democratic Revolution At Home
Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
H. W. Brands, American Dreams: The United States Since 1945
Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
Daniel E. Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry
Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts
Rachel Lee Rubin, Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture
Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
Nortin Hadler, The Citizen Patient: Reforming Health Care for the Sake of the Patient, Not the System
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive
Oh, and the two I did? I knew you’d ask.
Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (to read alongside my other 2 summer books about the 1970s: Strange Rebels and Stayin’ Alive)
and
Sarah Vowell, Radio On: A Listener’s Diary
