Today was the first day of summer vacation and I spent the first 30 minutes trying to decide what book I want to read first. For the last couple of weeks I have been perusing book stores, libraries, and various online sellers, compiling my summer reading list. No matter that I have gathered more books than I will ever be able to read in three months, let alone three months in which I will be taking a class and trying to supplement my meager income with freelance writing gigs. Half the fun is in the gathering.

My first literary conquest of the summer (not including The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I read while I was completing my final paper and grading my students’ final projects) is Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. Even though I have officially dedicated my life to British Victorian lit, I still have a soft spot for 19^th Century American. Other books appearing on my reading list, in no particular order, are:

• Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism by Paul Youngquist
• Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London by Seth Koven
• Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell
• The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise
• Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky
• Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan Tyler Hitchcock
• Kafka on the Shore by Murakami
• Discipline & Punish by Michel Foucault (Someone has questioned my patience when it comes to reading this book. Now I have to finish it just to prove a point.)
• The Detective and Mr. Dickens by William Palmer (The author is one of my professors. I’m very curious about his mystery novels.)
• Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach
• A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke (This is a guilt read. One of my professors found out I had never read it and her distain still gives me nightmares.)
• Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

And a bunch more, but I am tired of typing and no one cares but me anyway. This hording of books may seem silly, since it’s a free country and you can read anything you want at anytime. This is not true for literature grad students, who almost always love reading, but must bow to the cruel literary whims of their professors and dissertation committees. The freedom to choose what I want to read is so rare that it’s intoxicating.

In a trip to the library today, to gather more books for my ever growing army, I ran into a student. His surprise at seeing me away from Purdue reminded me of how I felt when I was 10 and I saw one of my teachers at the movies. This surprise might have been enhanced by the fact that I was covered in dirt from weeding my yard, and both my jeans and my shirt had holes in them. I really need to take more pride in my appearance. Anyway, he told me he was going to spend his summer “reading the classics.” He only had one book in his hand, Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country. Far be it for me to discourage a student from reading liberal rhetoric; I have read it myself and thought it was great. But I do wonder what list of classics he is going off of.