Summer Reading, Reading List XIV
Cleaning in my office last Friday I came upon the type of document one comes upon cleaning one’s office (if one is a librarian). It is titled “Joshua Foer on Memory: The Best-Selling Author and 2006 Memory Champion Picks Five Unforgettable Books About the Art of Remembering.” I must confess to not knowing really anything about Mr. Foer, but he’s picked five very interesting books about the physiology and cultural significance of memory:
- The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates
- The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture by Mary J. Carruthers
- Memory in Oral Traditions: the Cognitive Psychology of Counting-Out Rhymes, Ballads, and Epic by David C. Rubin
- Metaphors of Memory by Douwe Draaisma
- The Mind of a Mnemonist by A. R. Luria translated from the Russian by Lynn Solotaroff
The one title we don’t have by Draaisma is available through ConnectNY. I might also add the 1805 version of The Prelude by William Wordsworth. Memory and its relation to how we build our personalities was of central importance to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, and The Prelude articulates their collective study with the most eloquence. But not the 1799 Prelude, not the 1850 Prelude, the 1805 Prelude, trust me.