Ah, summer. It is not here yet and for this I am thankful. Spring has been entirely cooperative in that nearly the entire month of May, with a few disgustingly hot intervals, has been blustery, gray, and rainy. The outdoors enthusiasts who so proliferate in my home city all seem depressed and confused and I take every opportunity to laugh at their pain.
The worm will soon turn for me, it always does. Hazes and thunderheads will be banished and Mr. Godforsaken Golden Sun will begin his reign of terror anew. Grown adults will prance about in short pants that early twentieth century mothers would have given little Charlie a right good cuffing for wearing when he was out playing stick ball. Women with nothing to offer the world but their posteriors and mammaries will see to it that the populace has fullest advantage to them. I, of course, will stay inside.
To commemorate and to assure a summer spent in the great indoors, few things are better and more prosaic than the summer reading list. I was taken aback to learn that many people compile summer reading with the intention of reading those books in some out-of-doors locale, a beach, for example, which has given rise to the highly objectionable notion of the “beach book”. There are a number of reasons I do not think that books are ideally read on beaches. Sand can get into the pages and compromise the integrity of the binding. The glare of those awful rays will reflect off the white paper, squeezing and straining the eyes. The most prominent consideration against beach books is that all of the finest beaches I have experienced were windy and boulder strewn, offering few places for respite and reading, leaving one with few options other than, perhaps, to glance down now and again at a pocket volume of Plutarch or Shelley to steel oneself before continuing to trudge onward to the rocky promontory.
My list is as follows
The Black Death by Joseph P. Byrne
Sketches by Boz by Charles Dickens
The Great Mortality : an intimate history of the Black Death, the most devastating plague of all time by John Kelly
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
The Black Death : natural and human disaster in medieval Europe by Robert S. Gottfried
High Churchmanship in the Church of England, From the Sixteenth Century to the Late Twentieth Century by Kenneth Hylson-Smith
The Black Death in Egypt and England : a comparative study by Stuart J. Borsch
I think that that will keep me relatively occupied until the leaves start to turn(leaves, turn. Ha! Never mind).The major move at the end of the summer may rob me of the opportunity to really delve into that last work on the plague but certain sacrifices must be made in the name of family and pragmatism.
