I thought I’d take the time to just talk about things I’ve been reading. Especially since it’s been a couple of weeks: sickness, end of semester marking, general adjunct fatigue. Anyway, here’s things I’ve read or am reading, over the last 6 months.
English
I read sparingly in English. I’d like to read more, but I have to furtively steal time to read anything in English. This past 6 months I’ve read or been reading:
Burning Chrome (William Gibson) – an anthology of Gibson cyberpunk. I thought it would be useful to get me excited for writing some of my own cyberpunk fiction in Latin.
Deep Work (Cal Newport): I have a lot of problems with controlling my attention and dealing with technology. But I’m quite well aware of those issues and always trying to outsmart my brain before it outsmarts me. This helped.
The Adjunct Underclass (Herb Childress): about just how messed up colleges and adjunctification is. I wrote a review back here.
The Honours (Tim Clare): a fantasy book set in 1935 Norfolk. I read a recommendation on a news site, and decided to indulge in some fiction. I didn’t regret it.
Bringing our Languages Home (Leanne Hinton): I’ve just started this and already fascinated. It’s the stories, written by the people, of people involved in home-based language revitalization. This interests me on multiple levels. 1) Because I think language revitilization is truly valuable work. 2) Because it seems to me that minority language survival depends on both (a) home, and (b) school, transmission (for very different reasons, 3) it’s just fascinating work, 4) these are also fascinating stories, 5) some of this applies to Latin and Greek, indirectly.
Ola! A guide to Oral Language Acquisition (Hali Dardar): this is a kind of handbook for how to work on oral acquisition of, e.g., a traditional language. It’s built of some of the stuff that goes into monolingual fieldwork, but it’s not a monolingual context necessarily. This stuff has much more overlap with Latin/Greek, though again with big differences. But it gets me thinking, “how to do you do oral language acquisition/transmission in a way that isn’t so textbook/classroom/”teaching” oriented?” And that’s good.
Greek
When we turn to the classical languages, my reading is very largely shaped by students (a lot of school texts below). I wish I had time to read Greek and Latin for pure selfish reasons, and I do have some leeway, but not that much. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been reading in various contexts.
Aristophanes, Frogs
Plato: Critias, Ion, Apology of Socrates
Xenophon: Anabasis 1
Lysias: 12.
Euripides: The Trojan women
Thucydides
Athenaze (Italian): vols 1 and 2 (and gee the Italian version is good, just in case I haven’t told you)
Demosthenes, On the Crown
Not strictly in Greek, but I have been reading slowly, on and off, through Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek.
Latin
Latin, like Greek, is often guided by students (which means I read a lot of Oxford Latin Course).
LLPSI: Familia Romana, Colloquia Personarum, Fabella Latinae, Fabulae Syrae, Epitome Sacrae Historiae, Sermones Romani, Roma Aeterna.
Cicero, Pro Archia, Pro Roscio.
Vergil, Aeneid book 1
Livy, AUC book 5.
Tacitus, Agricola.
Gaelic
I don’t do as much Gaelic reading as I’d like, but I do get some done. I’ve been slowly reading Air Cuan Dubh Drilseach (Tim Armstrong) which is a Sci-Fi book. I am only a few chapters in, but need to get back to it. Lately I’ve been reading Fo Bhruid (Torcuil Crichton) which is much easier going, and probably a lot shorter I suspect.