Things I’m Reading… Summer 2025.
Good Books.
A few good books with dust jackets currently tucked partway through, scattered around my house:
Is a river alive? by Robert McFarlane
Ours, a novel by Phillip B. Williams
Erosion: American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance, by Gina Caison. A nonfiction book about ideas about land, erosion, ownership, and belonging. Theoretically grounded in American Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Regional Studies.
Beyond Disaster: Building Collective Futures in Puerto Rico by Melissa Rosario.
Good Articles.
Though my reading for scholarly work is often shaped by what I’m teaching, or a research project I’m working on, I also stumble across unrelated and fascinating writing that I love.
I love the Anthropology and Environment Society’s blog, “Engagement.” They collaborate with authors to publish short and middle length scholarly work that remains very accessible - to the point that I use many pieces from this blog to teach early-stages undergraduates how to write better!
This month, they’ve crafted a Highlighted Series entitled “The Environment in Electoral Politics.” In it, the editors have curated excellent pieces that touch on the theme broadly.
I’m especially excited by their selections from Disputed Water Worlds (2024). Laura Betancur Alarcón (Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems-IRI THESys at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) and Ana María Arbeláez-Trujillo1 (Water Resources Management Group at Wageningen University and Research) wrote “Caminando por los ríos, sintiendo sus infraestructuras/Walking Along Rivers, Feeling Through Infrastructures” for that series. The article is available in both Spanish and English.
Another piece from The Environment in Electoral politics that’s worth checking out is Ryan Christopher Jones’s article “Volatile Waters: Federal and State Water Politics in the California Delta.”
My recent research with the Rural Rivers Project I helped found has led me to thinking with infrastructure like culverts, ditches, and drains. These articles really resonate with the conversations I’ve been having as my ethnographic fieldwork unfolds!
Audio.
I tend to listen on my drive to and from work, or on other long drives across New England, but not much when I’m home.
This month, an audiobook.
Evenings and Weekends, a novel by Oisin McKenna. This was a great book. The phrase “character drama” doesn’t do justice to the exquisite skill with which McKenna tacks back and forth between the jungle-dense internality of her characters’ experiences navigating the intimate tremors of family/friend/enemy/stranger affairs, on the one hand, and the striking simplicity of what is said and done aloud. The inadequacy of language, big questions about what honesty is, and what it means to know someone are at the heart of this story.
Weird Stuff.
If you’ve never been, you must go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology next time you’re anywhere near Santa Monica or Los Angeles California. Well-kept secret is the tearoom at the top of the building. Don’t read too much about it before you go - part of the delight is the surprise.
The Museum Of Jurassic Technology, 9341 Venice Boulevard, Culver City, CA