A Reading Goal For 2022 and the January List

In recent years I have become almost obsessive about tracking what I read. I have kept a running list of what I read for “fun” since 2013 (and intermittently before that) and started tracking the books I read for academic purposes in 2020. Beyond mere obsession, this habit allows me to visualize my reading diet, which has led to a dramatic shift in what I read over the past few years.

In December last year, it occurred to me that my academic reading skewed overwhelmingly to books. I read articles, of course, when they are related to my research, but I had largely gotten away from reading articles as a regular practice. Coming into the year, therefore, I set an ambitious reading goal to fix this, but withheld saying anything until determining whether it was even remotely doable.

The goal is this. Every work day this year—roughly every week day outside of holidays and vacations—I aim to read one article. If I am successful, this will amount to roughly 20 articles a month, or 240 articles for the year. Some of these will be research related, many others will go toward informing how I teach, and I am prioritizing articles from the past decade. I suspect that I will fall often fall short (I did in January), but, as with many of my other reading goals, this is as much about building habits as winning a prize. My reward is being a better teacher and researcher.

At the end of every month, I will publish the list of articles I read and highlight a few honorable mentions.

Here is January’s list:

Honorable Mention

• Debby Sneed, “Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece,” Hesperia 90 (2021): 747–72
• Matthew Simonton, “Stability and Violence in Classical Greek Democracies and Oligarchies,” Classical Antiquity 36 (2017): 52–103

The List

• Bill Caraher, “Documenting Wesley College: A Mildly Anarchist Teacher Encounter,” [posted to his blog]
• Samuel Ellis, “Greek Conceptualizations of Persian Traditions: Gift-giving and Friendship in the Persian Empire,” Classical Quarterly 71 (2021): 77–88
• Walter Scheidel, “Building Up Slaveries in Ancient Italy and the African Savanna,” [posted to Academia.edu]
• Deborah Levine Gera, “Themistocles’ Persian Tapestry,” Classical Quarterly 57 (2007): 445–57
• Jessica Romney, “Women in an Ancient Greek History Course: From Cameo to Part of the Whole,” Classical World 114 (2021): 227–48
• Daniel Unruh, “Loaves in a Cold Oven: Tyranny and Sterility in Herodotus’ Histories,” Classical World 114 (2021): 281–308
• Georgia Proietti, “War and Memory: The Battle of Psyttaleia Before Herodotus’ “Histories”,” British Institute for Classical Studies 58 (2015): 43–54
• Naoise Mac Sweeney, “Regional Identities in the Greek World: Myth and Koinon in Ionia,” Historia 70 (2021): 268–314
• Julia Kindt, “Personal Religion: A Productive Category for the Study of Greek Religion?,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 135 (2015): 35–50
• Valeria Pratolongo, “The Greeks and the Indigenous Populations of Eastern Sicily in the Classical Era,” Mediterranean Archaeology 27 (2014): 85–90
• Denise Demetriou, “What is an Emporion? A Reassessment,” Historia 60 (2011): 255–72
• Lela M. Urquhart, “Competing Traditions in the Historiography of Ancient Greek Colonization in Italy,” Journal of of the History of Ideas 75 (2014): 23–44
• Nicolette Pavlides, “The Sanctuaries of Apollo Maleatas and Apollo Tyritas in Laconia: Religion in Spartan-Perioikic Relations,” Annual of the British School at Athens 113 (2018): 270–305
• Graham Shipley, “Sparta and its Perioikic Neighbors: a century of reassessment,” Hermathena 181 (2006): 51–82
• Charlotte Dunn, “Messene Besieged,” Acta Classica 61 (2018): 190–200
• Valerij Goušchin, “Solon’s Law on Stasis and the Rise of Pisistratus,” Acta Classica 59 (2016): 101–13