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Mark Burnette
is reading Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter,
Walker Percy’s The Last Gentlemen, and Thomas
McGuane’s 92 in the Shade. Future reading will
include Charles Baxter’s Feast of Love or Richard
Yates Revolutionary Road.
Shaun Corley
just finished reading everything in English by Haruki
Murakimi, and is now working on the catalogues of
Phillip Roth and Jonathan Lethem. Shaun can be found
watching any film by Richard Linklater, David Cronenberg
and Ingmar Bergman. He listens to the music of Neko
Case, Cat Power, The Weakerthans, and The Arcade Fire.
Ricky Cox
finished reading Waterworks by E.L. Doctorow and
started Tales from Sacred Wind, an autobiography
of Cratis Williams, Appalachian scholar and educator.
Don Cunningham
is wrapping up The Bridge at Dong Ha by John
Grider Miller and learning some sleight of hand from
Richard Kaufman’s Expert Coin Magic.
Renee Dickinson
finished revisiting the Harry Potter series for ENGL 470 this
summer, Bram Stoker’s Dracula for 331, and Wilkie
Collins Woman in White (thanks Jola). Now she is
reading Mansfield Park.
Lou Gallo
has been
re-reading one of his favorites, Walker Percy, and working
on Barrow's New Theories of Everything, which is
just about draining his mind. Lou is also attempting to
come to terms with Eliot's The Four Quartets once
again. As for music, Lou keeps his ears open for
something new in rock and classical. The late chamber
music of Shostakovich or Dvorak is good. With rock Lou
just keeps going back to the Stones, the mellow feel of
Cat Power and the earlier Cowboy Junkies. Lou is also
fan of Radiohead, and considers Thom Yorke one of the
greatest voices around. He hasn’t heard anything else
up to date that he wants to hear again, though he kind
of likes the strange duets of Robert Plant and Alison
Krauss.
Scott McDarmont
has recently read or recommends the following:
Shampoo Planet, Hey, Nostradamus!, Girlfriend
in a Coma, The Gum Thief, and Jpod by
Douglas Coupland, Rant
by Chuck Palahniuk, High Society, Church &
State I & II, Jaka's Story,Minds, Guys, and Rick's
Story by Dave Sim and Gehrard, Grant Morrison &
Frank Quitely's All Star Superman and Frank
Miller and Jim Lee's All Star Batman, Mere
Anarchy by Woody Allen, Letters From The Earth
by Mark Twain, Everything That Rises Must
Converge, The Violent Bear it Away and
Wiseblood by Flannery O'Connor, Flight by
Sherman Alexie, The Road- Cormac McCarthy,
Formerly Known as The Justice League and I
Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League by Keith
Giffen, J.M. Dematteis and Kevin Maguire, Timequake,
Palm Sunday, Hocus Pocus and Palm Sunday
by Kurt Vonnegut, Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman
and he promises to read The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn before the summer is out. Scott’s
movie recommendations include: No Country For Old
Men, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, There Will Be
Blood..., Juno, Indiana Jones and The Kingdom
of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man, and
The Darkness. Music: Magic, Bruce
Springsteen; Icky Thump, The White Stripes;
The Black and White Album, The Hives; Bitchin',
The Donnas; Consolers of The Lonely,The
Raconteurs; Accelerate, R.E.M.
Jim Minick
is reading Sharyn McCrumb’s St. Dale and Ghost
Riders, Ted Kooser’s latest, John Lane, and Cormac
McCarthy’s The Road.
Michele Ren
is reading Strange as the Weather Has Been by Ann
Pancake and is happy to recommend music and films from
the nineties to interested parties.
Jeff Saperstein
has been reading Flight by Sherman Alexie and
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen
Butler. Jeff recommends listening to Viotti, a classical
composer of violin concertos, and watching
Shakespeare Behind Bars, a documentary about inmates
in a Kentucky prison performing The Tempest.
Rick Van Noy
is finishing up the "last and best" of Richard Russo, Nobody’s Fool, and plans to read Loren Eiseley for a research project.
Additionally, Rick will read The Future of
Environmental Criticism by Lawrence Buell,
Ecocriticism by Greg Garrard, Gain by Richard
Powers, and Strange as the Weather Has Been by
Ann Pancake for a graduate ecocriticism class. You can
find Rick listening to David Lindley, Steely Dan, Little
Feat, The Allmans, Eric Clapton, the reggae channel of
Sirius, new stuff from Wilco, fellow Jersey native Bruce
Springsteen and anything from Greg Brown. Rick holds
that movies come and go, but Sunday Night Baseball is
forever.
Jolanta Wawrzycka
is immersed in Joycean scholarship, alas, mainly because
of her publishing commitments and her Irish Studies
seminars centered on Ulysses and other
Joyce/Yeats works. But she greatly enjoyed revisiting
the stylistic treasures of Wilkie Collins’s Lady in
White over the break. Recent new books by J. M.
Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, and by Nadine
Gordimer, Beethoven was One-Sixteenth Black, are
considered great reads. She also found a neat book
called Descartes’ Secret Notebook, a fascinating
account of the history of “modern” mathematics and
Cartesian concept of the Universe. Books like these help
Jolanta "re-wire my brain and give her food for thought
as she re-pots her plants and refurbishes her yard
furniture."
Ann Yearick
read Paddy Clarke HA! HA! HA!—a different kind of
coming-of-age story—by Irish Writer Roddy Doyle over
Spring Break. She also read a couple of David Sedaris's
books of essays: Naked and Dress Your Family
in Corduroy and Denim. |
