Associate Professor Andrew Scheil is currently the Director of the Center for Medieval Studies. His first book, The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England (2004), won both the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists Best First Book award and the John Nicholas Brown first book prize from the Medieval Academy of America. He has also published on Beowulf, saints' lives, and Old English religious verse. He is currently finishing a book on the image and understanding of Babylon in western culture from the ancient world to the present.What are you reading, Professor Scheil?
As Director of the Center for Medieval Studies, some days it seems all I read is email. But in the realm of soul-nourishing reading, I have a wide variety of tastes and like to keep several different sorts of reading going in (fairly) systematic rotation, depending on my needs and moods.
I always keep some poetry close at hand and read at least one poem per day. At the moment I'm working on three volumes: the late, much-lamented Seamus Heaney's Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 is next to my bed, along with Classical Chinese Poetry: An Anthology, translated by David Hinton; and our very own Peter Campion's new book El Dorado is near my living room chair. I saw Heaney give a poetry reading in Dublin this past summer, about two weeks before his sudden death; I think Opened Ground is the best introduction to his work.
I also like to nibble on at least one classic non-medieval book at any given time. This summer I read Aeschylus's Oresteia, translated by R. Fagles (hadn't read it since high school), working through it on my iPad in between innings of my son's Little League Baseball games. My summer Dublin trip also led me back to one of my favorite authors, James Joyce. I re-read Dubliners in Dublin; I know those stories inside and out, but reading them during my first visit to the city was a wonderful experience. I then started and am currently re-reading Ulysses, a book that meant a great deal to me as an undergraduate. I am also reading that one on my iPad, in tandem with Declan Kiberd's wonderful Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce's Masterpiece.
As far as reading related to medieval research goes, I've recently been tasked by a journal to write an annual review of all published Beowulf scholarship. So at the moment I'm reading a pretty interesting history of Beowulf translation by Hugh Magennis (Translating Beowulf: Modern Versions in English Verse) and a new translation of the poem by Craig Williamson. I am beginning a contracted essay due soon about the Anglo-Saxon author Ælfric of Eynsham (ca. 950-1010); as inspiration for that I'm reading Jay Rubenstein's much-praised biography, Guibert of Nogent: Portrait of a Medieval Mind. I also just finished an essay on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels as examples of 20th-century medievalism, focusing particularly on A Princess of Mars (1917): a great read if you like early pulp fiction, but made into a disastrous movie in 2012. In spring semester 2014 I'm looking forward to reading Daniel Heller-Roazen's The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (MIT Press, 2011) with an interdisciplinary faculty/graduate student reading group.
I also have two recent general works of nonfiction I'm enjoying: David Mikics's excellent new Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (another one on my iPad) and David Thomson's wonderful The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (2012). I love Thomson's writing and have read almost all of his work.And finally, for me, pure escapist recreational reading usually means science fiction or horror literature. I just read Neil Gaiman's new novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane--short, wonderful, easy to burn through in one day. I'm now reading Gene Wolfe's subtle 1975 sf novel Peace in a handsome, irresistible new reprint. With his notoriously unreliable narrators and fine prose Wolfe is truly an underestimated novelist, transcending the boundaries of "mere" science fiction.
