This is my list of books I’d like to read, garnered from bibliographies, recommendations, and reshelving (from my library assistant days). I’m putting it here so I can access it from anywhere (anywhere with a computer/phone and internet connection, at least), and so that you can follow up any that take your fancy too.
The Cheese and the Worms, trans J and A Tedeschi, 1980.
Abelard: A Medieval Life by M. T. Clanchy, 1997.
The Holy Greyhound: Guinefort, healer of children since the 13th century, trans M. Thom, 1983.
Birdscapes: Birds in our Imagination and Experience by Jeremy Mynott, 2009.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Tom Wills – His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall by Greg de Moore
Captain Cook: Voyager between Worlds by John Gascoigne
Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido
The Manual of Detection by Jebediah Berry
Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men by Holger Kalweit
The Innocent Anthropologist: notes from a mud hut by N. Barley
Waiting for Foucault by Marshal Sahlins
Our Interpretations of Self in Everyday Life by Goffman
Ethnography and the Historical Imagination by Gomaroffs
Politics of Piety by Saba Mahmood
Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man by M. Taussig
Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay
Death without Weeping by Scherper Hughes
Aztecs: an interpretation by Inga Clendinnen
Death by Theory by Adrian Praetzellis
The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen
Broken by Karin Fossum
Reflective Playwork by Jackie Kilvington and Ali Wood
Journal of a Solitude and At Seventy by May Sarton
The Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten
Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell
Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark by Jane Fletcher Geniesse
Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff by Rosemary Mahoney
The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by Linda Colley
Literature and the Gods by Roberto Calasso
Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives by Tim Soutphommasane
Hillel: If Not Now, When? by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
Why We Cooperate and The Origins of Human Communication by Michael Tomasello
Us and Them: The Science of Identity by David Berreby
Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal
German: Biography of a Language by Ruth H Saunders
Still Life by Louise Penny
Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks (+ every other Culture novel I’ve yet to read)
The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks
Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
In the Valley of the Shadow: The Foundations of Religious Belief by James Kugel
The Happiest Refugee by Anh Do
Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn
After Midnight by Irmgard Keun, trans. by Anthea Bell
Getting Things Done When You Are Not in Charge by Geoffrey M Bellman
The Palm at the End of the Mind by Michael Jackson (anthropologist)
What Makes Civilization?: The Ancient Near East and the Future of the West by David Wengrow
The Statues that Walked by Carl Lipo and Terry L. Hunt
Witness to an Extreme Century by Robert Jay Lifton
That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott
A Merciless Place: The Fate of Britain’s Convicts After the American Revolution by Emma Christopher
Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest by Rudy Wiebe
Across Many Mountains by Yangzom Brauen
Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown by Julia Scheeres
Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
The Journal of Hildegard of Bingen: Inspired by a Year in the Life of the Twelfth-Century Mystic by Barbara Lachman
Is that a fish in your ear? by David Bellos
Part Wild by Ceiridwen Terrill
The Girl with Three Legs: A Memoir by Soraya Miré
Wicked Autumn by G. M. Malliet
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm and Other Adventures in Parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and everywhere in between) by Mei-Ling Hopgood
The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to be a Better Husband by David Finch
To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
