My Reading Program

This summer I have stacks of books to get through, some for research and some just for fun. There seems to be an 'end of Empire' theme here, starting with Pelikan's The Excellent Empire, and continuing with Aldo Schiavone's The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West, Bryan Ward-Perkins The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, followed by Peter Heather's enormous The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Since Heather is an historian of the Goths of considerable reputation I am looking forward to that one the most. That should occupy some time.

For research I have started on The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: the Indo-Aryan Migration Debate by Edwin Bryant. It's a good book from several standpoints. Bryant surveys the origin of the notion that the Aryans of India originated from outside India in some Proto-Indo-European homeland located close to Europe, if not actually in Europe. He then shows how this notion was used to shore up the British colonialist project in India and is now assumed to be, at least in the West, unassailable. But what is original and fascinating is that Bryant then goes on to look at the rejection of this narrative by Indian scholars and intellectuals and why they are so hostile to it. Unlike most western scholars, he is willing to look at their arguments in detail, noting carefully where they make good points. This is a contentious issue, and one that I would like to know more about while I work on my projected article on the origins of chariot warfare in the Bronze Age.

I try to get in my fiction reading by listening to novels read on tape and CD while I commute, walk the dog, or work in the kitchen now that I am once again Captain of the Kitchen. I am finishing up Horizon Storms by Kevin Anderson. Characters and dialogue are hopeless, but he creates a future clash of civilizations on a scale so vast it can only be compared to Doc Smith's Lensman and Skylark series of decades ago. Not sure that is a complement.

I am also listening to An Instance of the Fingerpost, a very good murder mystery set in Cromwellian and Restoration England. It is set up as a Rashamon style story told from several viewpoints, with the reader left wondering just what the truth is. Just before I started these I finished listening to Baudolino by Umberto Eco. Since it also dealt with the nature of truth and storytelling, and set in Constantinople when it was being sacked by the Fourth Crusade, I was completely engaged by it. Not least because last semester I taught a course on medieval warfare and we read a chronicle written by an eyewitness to the sack of the city. Truth was a lot stranger than fiction in this case.

Next week - Stephen King's The Dark Tower.