Summer Reading

I had a bad experience with summer reading once. It involved Theodore Dreiser and it caused me to stop reading altogether for nearly 10 years. I'll tell you about it sometime.

Despite the suffocating New York heat, I have fond memories of last summer, scouring the first six Harry Potter books for clues. Harry Potter was pretty much the thing that made me like reading again, after Dreiser made me hate it. I loved the grand, mythic scale of Harry Potter; I loved how it followed the exact formula set down by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Summer is a good time to read that kind of story, I think, because it's so hot and hazy that you just want to get lost in another world.

So this summer, I'm going to concentrate on mythology.

First, some re-reads:

1. The Iliad.
2. The Oresteia.
3. Iphigeneia at Aulis and Iphigeneia in Tauris.
4. Medea.

and I'm going to read, for the first time, some of those epic cycles I should have maybe already read:

1. The Dark is Rising. (A more modern myth, I know.)
2. Le Morte d'Arthur.
3. The Mabinogion or the Ulster Cycle. I'm not sure which just yet...I read Yeats in college, so I feel a bit closer to the Ulster Cycle, but I can read a bit of Welsh so that might be fun too. Decisions, decisions....

Do you have a summer reading strategy?