2025 Roundup, Books – Medieval Karl

Here is 2024. And here is 2023.

Big Books in Rough Order of Bigness
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa Harlowe; or, The History of a Young Lady [the biggest] [can I get some applause!??]
Karl Marx, Capital (Reitter trans.) (10 pages a day, Jan 1 until I was done) (first time!)
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (Treharne translation, started 2024)
Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea (octopus fight!)

Little Books
Paul Scheerbart, Stairway to the Sun
Kate Zambreno, Animal Stories
Osamu Dazai, Early Light
Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator
Jonathan Barrow, On the Run With Mary
Ingeborg Bachmann, The Honditsch Cross
Hans Erich Nossack, The End
Jenny Erpenbeck, Things that Disappear
Joe Brainard, I Remember
Láslzó Krasznahorkai, Spadework for a Palace
Jon Fosse, Morning and Evening
Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection
Samantha Harvey, Orbital
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Marlen Haushofer, Killing Stella
Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative
Joshua Landy, Marcel Proust: A Very Short Introduction

My Equivalent of Beach Books
John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Christopher Priest, Inverted World

Primary Texts for Teaching
Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) [+ most of the Norton critical material]
Woolf, To the Lighthouse [+ the Norton critical material]
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway [+ the Norton critical material + a good chunk of the Merve Emre annotated Dalloway]
Woolf, Orlando [+ the Norton critical material]
Brontë, Jane Eyre [+ the Norton critical material]
Marius, On the Elements, ed. and trans., Richard C. Dales
Bernard Silvestris, Cosmographia (Wetherbee for Dumbarton Oaks)
David Rollo, trans., Medieval Writings on Sex Between Men: Peter Damian’s The Book of Gomorrah and Alain de Lille’s The Plaint of Nature
Peter Damian, The Book of Gomorrah (trans. Matthew Cullinan Hoffman)
plus rereading a lot of Chaucer, Edward Plantagenet, John Gower, and Gerald of Wales

Background for Teaching
Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Trembley, Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction
Steven Swarbrick, The Earth is Evil
Nicholas H. Steneck, Science and Creation in the Middle Ages: Henry of Langenstein (d. 1307) on Genesis
Joan Cadden, Nothing Natural is Shameful: Sodomy and Science in Late Medieval Europe

For Book Writing and Article Writing
William of St Thierry, The Golden Epistle
Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, trans, The Writings of Margaret of Oignt: Medieval Prioress and Mystic
Bernard McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics
Marguerite Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls [both modern English translations, plus chunks of Middle English, reread how many times?]
Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy [reread how many times?]
Seneca, On Anger
Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty (vols 1 and 2)
Francis Gumerlock, ed. and trans., The Seven Seals of the Apocalypse
Pierre-Olivier Dittmar and Maud Pérez-Simon, Les monstres des hommes : un inventaire critique de l’humanité au XIIIe siècle

Just Medieval Good Times
Nicholas Watson, Balaam’s Ass: Vernacular Theology before the English Reformation (Vol 1)
Francis Young, ed and trans, Pagans in the Early Modern Baltic: Sixteenth-Century Ethnographic Accounts of Baltic Paganism

Big Ideas Just for Me
Jacques Derrida, Theory & Practice
Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (trans Hazel E. Barnes)
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of The Third World
C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War

Sadly only One Book of Poetry
Susan Landers, What to Carry into the Future (though I did read a a good chunk of one of Pessoa’s people this year)

Fitness and Health Stuff
Ran only 1 race this year, the Gaza 5k in Prospect Park, which is a great event, not a 5K (hello! the park is 3.3 miles!), but a worthy worthy cause. Did an absurd running vacation in the Isle of Man for a friend’s birthday (40 miles in 3 days, so much elevation: I bloodied myself hilariously atop a foggy hill, utterly worn out). Now doing 1 day a week at the gym (important! now that I’m older!) and only 4 or 5 hours’ running a week (important for mental well-being!). So, otherwise: ran 1,272.7 miles (~70 more than last year, and haha ~800 miles fewer than 2020, a year where there was nothing to do but run and teach remotely). If you have a prostate, get your PSA checked! If you have access to it, modern medicine is amazing.

Music Project
I determined last Fall I would get off the music streaming apps (tho the household has switched to Qobuz, which I understand pays artists better than Spotify). I got a raspberry pi 5, reorganized and retagged my music files, put em on the (always on) pi, and used Tailscale and Jellyfin to be able to listen to them on my phone as I walked around. Everything also on my main machine, played using Jriver. 15,189 files (modest for some people); 45.4 days of continuous music; 118 GB. Goal was to listen to everything at least once. And I did it! Finished yesterday. Here’s my last.fm account.

Travel Highlights
Azores and Lisbon were the real vacation. Earlier that year: Isle of Man (with a brief stop in Dublin) followed by Edinburgh and London to stay with friends (wonderful lovely people!). A brief talk in Athens. Same later in Providence RI. And conference travel to Dartmouth, Kalamazoo, New Orleans, and Sewanee.