Summer Reading...

Like every other academic, I have quite a lot of writing to get done this summer, but I do have a few books I want to make sure to read before September:

1. Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era
I've been waiting for this one for a while, and I know it will be useful for my own work. Iton's insights always are.

2. David Edwards, ARTSCIENCE: Creativity in the post-Google Generation
How can I be a PIK Professor at Penn and not get excited about this book.

3. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
I am trying to finish a piece on a Black sex magician who was in full swing at about this time. Plus, I just read Mothers of Invention and was completely blown away by its rigor.

4. David Levering Lewis, God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215
He has to be considered something like the scholarly gold standard at this point.

5. Noah Feldman, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
I am already 50+ pages into it. A razor-sharp intellect who makes things all look far too easy.

6. Anita L. Allen, The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the Twenty-First Century Moral Landscape
I saw a review of it that has me totally intrigued.

7. James Baldwin, No Name in The Street
I want to make it through all of Jimmy B by the end of the decade. Just four more to go.

8. Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road
Everybody I know seems to be talking about this one.

9. Chuck Klosterman IV, A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
I like his writerly voice whenever I catch it in Esquire or GQ or something.

10.Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
I read up to chapter 10 when it first dropped and then got swamped.

11. William Jelani Cobb, The Devil & Dave Chappelle & Other Essays
His cultural critiques always seem to turn the analytical screw one more rotation than almost anybody else.

Just my list. Let me know if you know of something I should add--and why.