Over cocktails a few nights ago, a colleague commented wistfully that she hadn't read a single scholarly book in a specialty other than her own since she entered graduate school in 1995.  

"After you take away all the time spent on teaching, supervision, committee work, and--oh yeah--family, I can barely keep up with my own research.  If I have any free time, I don't have the willpower to waste it on bad academic prose.  I'd rather read about sassy vampire detectives, or watch Project Runway. I'd be thrilled to spend a few evenings reading a first-rate book, the kind that makes you feel like you're gaining IQ points every few pages.  But Lord save me from books staging interventions, subverting the status quo, and problematizing identification matrices."

How do you know what's fantastic humanities scholarship these days?  Scholarly journals typically have specialists review books in their own fields, a habit which, no surprise, usually results in pieces that speak primarily to other insiders.

Venues such as the TLS and the NY Review of Books and Bookforum can be more useful for the would-be interdisciplinary interloper, but they discuss only a teensy fraction of the academic books published.  They concentrate almost exclusively, too, on new and recent publications, which limits their ability to make sound judgments about a work's lasting value.  And they have a depressing tendency to confuse a non-specialist audience with an anti-intellectual one.  Woe unto the book that dares refer to deconstruction with a tone other than sarcasm-laced disdain!  It shall be flamed by a reviewer till toasty.

It seems to me that blogs are a possible place to encourage cross-fertilization.  In that spirit, I offer below a short list of books from the last decade that have stuck with me.  I frequently find myself referring to them in conversation, footnoting them in articles, and recommending them to students as stylistic models for their own future scholarship. None are in my field, 20th century poetry and poetics.

(1) Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Pealle: Still Life and Selfhood 1812-24 (Univ. of California, 2001).  Nemerov has an amazing eye and writes wonderfully.  He takes an unpromising body of work--very small still lives with cutlery, fruit, eggs, cheese, and such--and by the end you're convinced that Pealle was something of an antebellum George Romero, a visual artist in touch with the uncanny goth madness that was the flipside of the era's go-getter Protestant work ethic.

(2) Bryan Jay Wolf, Vermeer and the Invention of Seeing (Univ. of Chicago, 2001).  Another sustained interpretation of a body of work, although this time it's all about teaching you to see anew a set of images so often reproduced that they've become anodyne.  A true lesson in how understanding the broader visual culture of an era enriches the study of high art.

(3) Wu Hung, Remaking Beijing:  Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space Univ. of Chicago, 2005).  What an incredible book.  It retells the spatial and spiritual geography of Beijing over the last 500 plus years.  You learn about the art and architecture of the imperial era; the continuities and revisions under the communists; the events of 1989; and emergent avant-garde art practices in dialogue with all of the above.

(4) Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves:  American Minimal Music as a Cultural Practice (Univ. of California, 2005).  Fink studies side-by-side two musical forms that involve hypnotic repetition, the pulse-based minimalism of Steve Reich and Philip Glass and the disco-era recordings of Donna Summer.  He explores the states of desire that these musics evoke, and he connects them to changes in audiences' experience of time itself in the age of network television.  An amazing, highly suggestive study of American culture in the 1960s and 70s.

OK, enough for now.  The rest of my day is booked with meetings.  I've used up the half hour this week that can spared for this sector of my brain.