Sunday, May 29, 2005
(12:44 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Rereading
Discussing books one has never read is something of a blog cliché, particularly for this blog. This time, though, I would like to discuss books that one regrets not rereading. For those of us who are "academics," I am particularly interested in works that are not relevant to one's "work," but that one still wants to reread simply because it feels important to understand the work for its own sake. Such regrets seem to be inherent to the academic condition itself -- less than a regret of not having gotten around to something, since we do become efficient text-processing machines over time, we are faced with the regret of not having gotten to linger.Here are some books that fall into that category for me:
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
- The non-religious Žižek works, particularly Tarrying with the Negative
- Agamben, Homo Sacer
- Various works of Edmund Spenser
- The Old Testament
- [ADDED: Piers Plowman
- Sir Gawain]
