Art
Suggestions for Summer Reading: Unspeakable Origins
For our first reading list three summers ago, Phong and I asked contributors to provide the author and title of five “most important” works that, objectively considered, everyone should read: the result—no doubt—was a Grand List. Last year, however, already marked a subjective turn in our summer recommendations. Contributors were again asked to provide five “most important” works, but this time five that each dreaded never ever finding time to read before the big reading lamp is snapped off for keeps. This was a somewhat Tragic List of summer readings forever mise en abyme.
This year, our third, we have directed the gaze of our contributors more inwardly still and asked each to divulge author and title of five books remembered as having once been decisively “most important,” but of which our contributors could never ever bear to again read a page. This, no doubt, is to date and by far our most Introspective List.
Confronted with the vision of this 3rd collated landscape, we expect, the gaze of our readers will itself be compelled to diverge inwardly. For if it was difficult even with the Grand List to figure out what to do with a catalog of hundreds of books that nobody could plausibly get through in any number of summers, so that one might have easily concluded it was hardly worth starting one of them; and if the next summer, faced with the Tragic List, it was by magnitudes again more dispiriting to seek a reason to read any of several hundred volumes that 30 deeply studied contributors had compulsively remaindered from their life plans; then, in this, our most Introspective List, the puzzle of mode d’emploi obtrudes most ominously, demonstrating perhaps a streak of nihilism.
For what, after all, is one to do with these suggested hundreds of readings that every named contributor long ago jettisoned, while maintaining only a secreted, perhaps rueful, even humiliating affinity known only to each? Here our most inward list, weighted by dialectical ballast alone, reverses once again into the most outward and objective of concerns, the meaning of history itself in the puzzle of our unspeakable origins, as a list of suggested readings, actually no more, no less grim than any other such list, itself for summer reading in a summer—as we all know—that, cold or hot, is no longer so very much that season.
—Robert Hullot-Kentor
2012 Summer Reading List:
1. Paul Taylor (dancer, choreographer)
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
The Ants by Edward O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler
2. Sylvère Lotringer(philosopher, writer, editor)
Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization (1858-1954) by Pierre Brocheuz and Daniel Hémery
The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras
The Femicide Machine by Sergio Gonzáles Rodríguez
Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism edited by Jeff Khonsary and Melanie O’Brian
Sloterdijk Now edited by Stuart Elden
3. Su Friedrich (filmmaker)
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
4. Clayton Eshleman (poet, translator)
The Complete Poems of Hart Crane by Hart Crane
The Four Zoas by William Blake
Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown
The Dream and the Underworld by James Hillman
The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion by Weston La Barre
5. Michèle Gerber Klein (writer, art lover)
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde
La Bas by Huysmans—so scary. (I found it under my parents’ bed.)
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
6. Bob Holman (poet, poetry activist)
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry
Kita Kan by Kandia Kouyaté
7. Paul Greengard (neuroscientist)
The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey by Homer
The Greek Tragedies (considered as a unit)
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
8. Bryce Dessner (composer, musician)
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
L’immoraliste Andre Gide
The Technique of My Musical Language by Olivier Messiaen
Ecrits by Edgar Varèse
9. Gamal al-Ghitani (novelist, journalist)
The Book of The Dead (Pharaonic Heritage)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
One Thousand and One Nights
The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
The Way of Lao Tzu by Wing-tsit Chan
10. Joseph Masheck (art historian, critic)
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
The Accumulation of Capital by Rosa Luxemburg
Culture and Society by Raymond Williams
Abstract Art by Dora Vallier
11. Barry Schwabsky (art critic)
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
Classifying, The Thousand Longest Rivers in the World by Alighiero Boetti and Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti
12. Donald Breckenridge (novelist, editor)
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Black Spring by Henry Miller
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.
Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
La Maison de Rendez-vous by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by Richard Howard
13. Malcolm Morley (painter)
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History by Norman O. Brown
Ulysses by James Joyce
The First and Last Freedom by Jiddu Krishnamurti
A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
Outline of History by Oswald Spengler
14. Johnny Temple (publisher, musician)
Native Son by Richard Wright
The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. Ursula von Rydingsvard (artist)
Kurt Schwitters by John Elderfield
Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn by John Lobell and Louis I. Kahn
Africa: The Art of a Continent edited by Tom Phillips
Arshile Gorky by Janie C. Lee and Melvin P. Lader
16. Will Ryman (sculptor)
Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
17. Barbara Rose (art historian, critic)
Stilfragen by Alois Riegl
On the Sublime by Longinus
The Art of Memory by Giordano Bruno
Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson
Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
18. Robert Haller (film archivist)
One Two Three… Infinity by George Gamow
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem (by the way, the Soderbergh film version is superior to the Tarkovsky film version)
Blonde By Joyce Carol Oates
La Maison de Rendez-Vous by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Witness by Whittaker Chambers
19. Britta Le Va (writer, photographer)
A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
Kitab alf laylah wah-laylah (or The Arabian Night's Entertainments) by Sir Richard Buron
Das Schloss (or The Castle) by Franz Kafka
Invisible Cities Italio Calvino
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
20. Merrill Wagner (artist)
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyesky
Hiroshima by John Hersey
21. Pierre Joris (poet, translator)
Die schönsten Sagen des klassischen Altertums (or Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece) by Gustav Schwab
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Nietzsche (3 volumes) by Martin Heidegger
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
22. Lynne Tillman (novelist, cultural critic)
A Stone for Danny Fisher by Harold Robbins
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
The Virgin and the Gypsy by D.H. Lawrence
23. Fred Tomaselli (artist)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Timothy Leary
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
24. Constance Lewallen (curator)
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
25. Bill Berkson (poet, art critic)
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Tradition of the New by Harold Rosenberg
Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry
Les Caves du Vatican by André Gide
26. Joe Zucker (painter)
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Thomas Edward Gibbon
The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck
Painters of the Italian Renaissance by Bernard Berenson
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
27. Chris Martin (painter)
History of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism by John Rewald
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Life Goes to War: A Picture History of World War II by David G. Scherman
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda
28. Carlos Brillembourg (architect, writer)
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan
La Pensée Sauvage (or The Savage Mind) by Claude Lévi-Strauss
Words and Pictures by Meyer Schapiro
29. Vincent Katz (poet, art critic)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
The Rolling Stones On Tour by Terry Southern
The Poems of Sextus Propertius translated by J. P. McCulloch
Archie Comics created by John L. Goldwater and written by Vic Bloom
Dennis the Menace
30. Raymond Foye (curator, publisher)
A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Catcher in the Rye (but of course) by J. D.Salinger
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone by James Baldwin
Anything by Hermann Hesse
31. Eléonore False (artist)
Moi, Christiane F., 13 ans, droguée, prostituée by Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck
Une femme by Anne Delbée
La vie sexuelle de Catherine M by Catherine Millet
Ether by Bénédicte Puppinck
Un certain sourire by Françoise Sagan
32. Barbara McAdams (writer, editor)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe
Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse
I’m Not Stiller by Max Frisch
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
33. Francis Cape (sculptor)
The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt
Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
The Anti-Aesthetic edited by Hal Foster
The Life of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini
The Bible
34. Robert Bergman (photographer)
The Trial and Death of Socrates byPlato
Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno
Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Beethoven: His Spiritual Development by J. W. N. Sullivan
35. Mary Ann Caws (professor of comparative literature)
The Loser by Thomas Bernhard
The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen
Marshlands by André Gide
Nadja by Andre Breton
The Power of the Center by Rudolf Arnheim
36. Antonio Y Vasquez-Arroyo (political scientist)
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
The Castle by Franz Kafka
The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
The Theaetetus by Plato
37. Alex Demirović (social philosopher)
Old Surehand by Karl May
The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust
Geschichte der deutschen Revolution (or History of German Revolution) by Richard Müller
Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
38. Marjorie Welish (painter, poet, writer)
The Book of Knowledge (a children’s encyclopedia) edited by Holland Thompson and Arther Mee
Art in Our Time: An Exhibition to Celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art (exhibition catalogue)
Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau, translated by Pierre Rosenstiehl
The High Valley by Kenneth Read
Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated by Richard Howard
39. Robert Hullot-Kentor (philosopher)
The Moving Target by W. S. Merwin
One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse
Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine by Jay Williams
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
The Tower and the Abyss by Erich Kahler
40. Phong Bui (artist, publisher)
Lust for Life by Irving Stone
Irrational Man by William Barrett
Young Man Luther by Erik Erikson
Le Grand Meaules by Alain-Fournier
Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
