I like to do a quirky year-end round-up of the non-academic books I read. This page is where I will share what I’m currently reading as a part of my research.
Week of August 3: I made my last visit to my office for a while; I’m not going to go to campus once the students get back. These are the last few books I grabbed for my teaching and research.Week of July 20. I’m still working on the section of my book chapter about Black reception of Judah Halevi. I’m catching myself up on Black medievalism, beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois. It’s embarrassing, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by him. His prose is gorgeous, though, and I’m both enjoying and learning a lot from it. Caliban’s Reason, in particular, is a reminder to me that there’s always so much more to learn. The poetry anthology, while it does have translations of Halevi’s poetry, is actually in the stack for something non-academic that I’m writing.Week of June 8. I’ve read parts, but not all, of the three books besides Freedom Readers, which is new to me. I’m returning to all of them as I write about Cedric Dover as a reader of Judah Halevi. The book chapter I’m working on has been in the works for over a year, but the fact that I’m seriously digging into it now is one of the ways I’m trying to better understand the things that the last two weeks have, again, shown us need better understanding by a large portion of the population, and I include myself there.
