What Our Contributors Are Reading This Summer

In between sets

Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants

I adored A Walk in the Woods--it's one of those books I wish I could read again for the first time. I've been meaning to start this one for some time and I'm excited to finally dig in. From what I know about it, it mixes Bryson's brilliant writing and wit with actual feal (and sometimes delightfully odd) facts about how our bodies function.

Maggie Mertens's Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women

I just received a copy of this book in the mail from the publisher and it seems like exactly the kind of book I love! It's about how women broke into competitive running and the many hurdles (pun sort of intended) they have faced along the way. 

—Alyssa Ages

My kids would say I have my nose in a book all year round, and they would be right. But much of my reading in the school year is driven by a kind of frantic energy, because it's to prepare for class or to stay on top of our ever more stressful news cycle. The summer, by contrast, is all about slowing down and taking time with a text (or ten). The first sign school is out is that I am reading fiction or memoir. So far this summer, I have read (and really enjoyed) The Memo by Lauren Mechling and Rachel Dodes, a new time-travel novel that is a real sendup of our girlboss/productivity culture, and I just started Miranda July's All Fours, which I can't put down. Even the books that are more work-related are not necessarily historical monographs: I am working on a new curriculum on Jewish-American history for the New York City Department of Education, and in that vein, just finished A Bag Of Marbles by Joseph Joffo, a memoir that was assigned as part of Holocaust education in France for years, and I am about to start work on a podcast that is in my wheelhouse of sport and leisure, but requires that I immerse myself in the unfamiliar world of mountaineering, so I also have Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air (I know, it's terrible I haven't read it yet) in the queue, as well as a few other climbing memoirs. The two topics of the book projects I am working on--the educational culture wars and eastern Long Island, aka "the Hamptons"--have spawned so many interesting reads, and I am excited to dive into Mike Hixenbaugh's new book They Came For The Schools as well as some painstaking local histories of East End towns like Montauk and Sag Harbor. And yes, I plan to do as much of this reading as possible on the beach!

—Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

My reading has been focused on resolving a project on the Eugen Sandow Sculpture. To do this certain reading has had to get more expansive that I originally imagined. The basics of anatomical knowledge became essential. It seems comically obvious, but don’t underestimate Gray's Anatomy, offering intricate details on muscle and body functions that are absent in typical bodybuilding or fitness books. For those who have only explored anatomy through training books, I highly recommend this to elevate you to the next level. 

In addition, Donna Haraway's Primate Visions has been instrumental in contextualizing the Sandow Sculpture within London's Natural History Museum. The museum's current mission emphasizes the climate crisis, issues most acutely felt in global areas exploited by empires. The Sandow Sculpture, created in the tradition of the “object lesson,” served to affirm these values. Haraway’s deconstruction of museum displays, our relationship to animals and nature, is an excellent way to consider how all aspects of physical culture old and new are connected to both the environment and issues of global equality. Lastly, Taste and the Antique, by Haskell and Penny, explores the study of classical idealized bodies in sculpture, like those Sandow sought to emulate, such as the Farnese Hercules and the Doryphoros. This is a discussion of repetition and copying—fundamental activities in the gym where we lift, count, repeat, learn movements, copy, and teach. This mimetic process is part of human nature, exemplified by the very limited sculptures from the Greco-Roman canon, which, enabled by plaster cast technology in an era preceding photography, became ubiquitous in the nineteenth century. This book outlines the facts as to how a Western culture become obsessed with a select few bodies originally produced by a society long lost to time.

—Graham Hudson

I generally have two books going at once, one fiction and onenon-fiction. For the first part of summer, I’m reading Emma Cline’s The Guest, a limpid and engrossing novel about a young woman adrift in the Hamptons during the final week of summer.A great literary beach-read. My non-fiction tends to be work-related. At the moment, I’m swimming through Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming, by the philosopher Agnes Callard. She’s wonderfully readable, insightful, and persuasive. But, so far, I don’t know that the book will significantly contribute to theproject that prompted me to read it: an examination of the ways people try to perfect themselves, and how individual perfectibility both contributes to and inhibits civic perfectibility.

—Daniel Kunitz

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