I will be on sabbatical until the end of the year; below is my first batch of readings. (Note: my listing is in alphabetical order, by author.)

1. Peter S. Canellos, The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero (Simon & Schuster, 2022) — I am already halfway through this massive biography (over 600 pp.) of one of North America’s greatest judges, and even more fascinating than his life is that of his half-brother Robert, whose mother was an enslaved woman. (Added bonus: my copy of this book was signed by the author.)
2. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard, 1999) — I picked a used copy of this title at “The Last Bookstore” in Los Angeles a few weeks ago.
3. La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxism and Other Reflections (Oxford edition, 2008) — I have always wanted to read this timeless classic.
4. Steven Johnson, How We Got to Where We Are: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World (Riverhead, 2014) — I am especially interested in the chapters on “glass” and “time”.
5. Daniel J. Levitin, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (Dutton, 1999) — among other things, a good refresher on conditional probability and Bayesian reasoning.
6. Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (Random House, 1993) — I picked up a first edition of this massive tome at the Blue Bottle coffee shop in downtown L.A. last month and finished reading it in three days; my verdict: although Posner builds a strong case for the lone-gunman thesis, his explanation of the “magic bullet” is less than persuasive.
7. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (University of Chicago Press edition, 2005) — I picked up a copy of this book a few days ago at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco.
8. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Signature Classics edition, 2022 [1831]) — I am reading this classic for the first time as part of the virtual #HotFrankSummer book club (see here), and I am loving every single page!
9. Brian Skyrms, Evolution of the Social Contract (Cambridge, 1996) — this work (the cover of which is pictured below) has been on my radar for many years, so when I found a copy of it by chance at a used bookstore on Cedar Street in Santa Cruz, California, I grabbed it.
10. Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (Routledge, 2011) — although I haven’t decided what I will do with my sabbatical yet, I may write a travel book directed towards college students, so I decided to add this book to my list of summer readings.