Field Reading

I’ve spent the past year reading like an extractive industry: mining books and articles for theoretical nuggets that I could summarize in one or two sentences for my preliminary exams or the literature reviews in my grant applications. This is not a satisfying way to read -- it’s a survival strategy.

In the final weeks building up to my exams, I fantasized about the day I would pick up a book and read for pleasure. It’s been several years since I’ve really read for the joy of reading. Even when I’ve been fortunate enough to read research-related books that were beautifully crafted and gripping, I was too often doing so on deadline, and in typical grad student fashion: read the introduction and conclusion, skim other chapters for ethnographic evidence -- and do so as quickly as possible.

My friends have been helping me recover the pleasure of reading. Stacey cajoled me into reading the ultimate historical junk book: Pillars of the Earth -- 983 pages that veer between 12th-century soap opera and Gothic cathedral-building tutorial. Kathleen refreshed my love of Barbara Kingsolver with The Poisonwood Bible, and Jen gave me Blindness by José Saramago as a post-prelim present. I’ll open it tonight for the first time.

I’m in an academic discipline that values good writing, a discipline that is most powerful when its members combine rigorous scholarship and theoretical insight with richly textured ethnographies. Once upon a time I loved to write, particularly poetry. But this phase of graduate school has left me speaking and writing in jargon. Most of the time I don’t even realize it’s jargon until my family asks for a translation. Over the next 15 months I’ll be taking field notes on a daily basis with the goal of writing my dissertation next year, and one day, si Dios quiere, my own book.

So here’s my goal: To spend the next 15 months in the field reading books that that will not only be enjoyable to read, but that will also help me to be a better writer. I want to read authors who will help me listen to the cadence of dialogue, and who will help me think about character development and how to vividly set a scene. I also just want to read gripping stories. For fun.

Daunted by the idea of lugging 100 books to Bolivia with me, I recently bought a Kindle (e-reader). I’ve been filling it up ever since. And I want to ask my cohortmates and the blogosphere what you-all will be reading this summer, what you are planning to read in the field, and what you think I should read while I’m in Bolivia.

Basically, I want to start a discussion thread on good books.

All genres are welcome, from science fiction to the realism of Depression-era literature. And I would especially love to hear about powerfully written ethnographies. I’ll list below books I’m lining-up for the field. I’d love to hear what you are reading or what you think I should add to my reading list.

My Working List
Germinal, Émile Zola
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
The Death of Ivan Ilych, Leo Tolstoy
The Plague of Doves, Louise Erdrich
The Painted Drum, Louise Erdrich
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
A Mercy, Toni Morrison
Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verhgese

And of course, a few anthropologists…
Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor, Harri Englund
Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, Julia Elyachar
Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street, Karen Ho
The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the Real, Michael Jackson