If I was to guess when it was that I fell in love with reading I’d probably guess it was around when I was eight. There’s no special event I remember, but I also can’t really remember reading books by myself before then. According to others I’ve been a book worm since bed time stories were a thing. As like most people, how much I actually read ebbs and flows - although I still buy books at the same rate, which has lead to some overburdened shelves holding some very clean books.
At the beginning of this year I decided to try and read 52 books. I simultaneously believed that I could definitely, and yet probably wouldn’t, read that many books - but either way, I really wanted to just track what I’d read and try and read something in the double digits. Currently I’m reading Tim Ingold’s Lines: A Brief History.
The Big 2018 Booklist
Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine - Last Chance to See
Dodie Clarke - Secrets for the mad
Ursula K. Le Guin - A wizard of Earthsea
Anna McNuff - The Pants of Perspective
Terry Pratchett - Lords and Ladies
Terry Pratchett - Maskarade
Terry Pratchett - Carpe Jugulum
Terry Pratchett - Jingo
Andrzej Saphowski - The Last Wish
Andrzej Saphowski - Sword of Destiny
J. R. R. Tolkien - The Two Towers
Where I’ve read multiples from one author I’ve listed the books in the order I read them (just to make things a little more complicated).
The slightly long to-be-read list:
Naomi Alderman - The Power
John Boughton - Municipal Dreams
Robyn Davidson - Tracks
Anthony Doerr - All the light we cannot see
Reni Eddo-Lodge - Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race
Lauren Elkin - Flâneuse: Women Walk the City
Ruth Fitzmaurice - I found my tribe
Keith Fosket - High and Low
John Green - Paper Towns
Frédéric Gros - A Philosophy of Walking
N. K. Jemisin - The Broken Earth Trilogy
Scott Jurek - North
Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
J. Anthony Lukas - Common Ground
Helen Mort, (et al. editors) - WAYMAKING: an Anthology of Womens Adventure Writing, Poetry and Art
Liz O’Neill - Asking for it
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half of a Yellow Sun
Garth Nix - Sabriel
Shirley Read and Mike Simmons - Photographers and Research: the Role of Research in Contemporary Photographic Practice
Edward Said - Orientalism
Nan Shepard - The Living Mountain
Keri Smith - The Wander Society
Rebecca Solnit - Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Emily St. John Mandel - Station 11
Cheryl Strayed - Wild
Ranne Wynne - The Salt Path
As I’m heading back to college to start a research masters …
… I decided to do a very general google search for reading lists, and stumbled across the page of IMMA reading lists. The one it has for photography lines up very very closely with the reading list for most of the BA Photography course in IADT that I did (which means I might start trying to read them now!).
Reading while walking this summer was both enjoyable, but also tricky as most of the time when we stop I just want to sleep. If I did manage to dig my kindle out of my backpack I really did enjoy reading. I just didn’t often have the strength to go find it. I’d love to get a wider range of books, so please send me on a recommendation or two!
And lets how quickly I can grow my read list before the end of the year!
Also, I went to the botanic gardens with my sister recently, which is always a favourite place of mine. It’s magical getting to share favourite places with other people. So I’m dropping a couple of photos from there throughout the blog post (queue me adding more photos of plants than books).
In the upcoming weeks I plan to finish sharing my BA thesis: so far I’ve shared the Introduction and Chapter One, so lots to revisit still.
IMMA Reading list - Photography
Martin Lister (ed.), The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, London: Routledge, 1995. (✓)
J. J. Long, Andrea Noble and Edward Welch (eds.), Photography: Theoretical Shapshots, London and New York: Routledge, 2009.
Nathan Lyons (ed.), Photographers on Photography: A Critical Anthology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966.
Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconography: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present Day, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982.
Fred Ritchin, After Photography, London and New York: W. W. Norton, 2009.
Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, New York: Abbeville Press, 1997.
Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs, London: Phaidon Press, 2007.
Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.
John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007.
John Tagg, The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009.
Alan Trachtenberg (ed.), Classical Essays on Photography, New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980.
Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader, London: Routledge, 2002. (✓)
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.
Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: the Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1973, pp. 219-253. (✓)
Richard Bolton (ed.), The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography, London: Macmillan, 1982.
David Campany (ed.), Art and Photography, London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2003.
Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art, London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004.
T. J. Demos, Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives on Photography, London: Phaidon Press, 2006.
Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski (eds.), Cruel and Tender: The Real in Twentieth-Century Photography, London: Tate, 2003.
Steve Edwards, Photography: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. (✓)
Jessica Evans (ed.), The Camerawork Essays: Context and Meaning in Photography, London: Rivers Oram Press, 1997.
Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, London: Reaktion Books, 2000.
Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography, Cologne: Konemann, 1998.
