End-of-summer reflection

It's been four months and I've been reading hard and blogging away the whole time. What have I achieved?

Here's what I had hoped to do over summer [this list was compiled during my end-of-year exam period last year].

• The Invisible Religion by Thomas Luckmann
  This came up early in SOSC 205 [like, about eight months ago] and I've been wanting to read it ever since. It's about how things like sports and politics can take the place of religion in society. By the time I'd finished with the textbook I'd had enough of SOSC 205 nostalgia for one summer.
  
• Michelle Remembers by Michelle Smith
  The story of a woman who allegedly suffered Satanic ritual abuse as a child, and 'recovered' her 'repressed memories' of the abuse with the help of a psychiatrist. Could be described as the book that sparked off the Satanism scare of the 1980s and 1990s. Was described by my SOSC 205 professor as 'a side splitting read'. The above comment about nostalgia applies to this one, too.
  
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  
• Lost Souls by Poppy Z Brite
  
• Moral Panics by Kenneth Thompson
  See The Invisible Religion. This one will be applicable to my current SOSC course, too, so its time may come again.
  
• The Collapse of Globalism by John Ralston Saul
  My other SOSC course last year was about globalization. I didn't do enough reading for it, so felt all virtuous when I added this to my reading list. But it's too scary for me as yet.
  
• The Roaring Nineties by JE Stiglitz
  Stiglitz is the economist I some day aspire to emulate, and I read one of his books - Globalization and its Discontents - in 2003, and have been intending to read this one ever since. Not yet, alas.
  
• Religion in the Contemporary World by Alan Aldridge
  
• Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus by John Gray
  
• The Answers Book
  
• Choke by Chuck Palahniuk
  
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  
• Unbridled Power by Geoffrey Palmer
  It's legendary to anyone involved in public policy, politics or government in New Zealand in the last 20 years. More importantly it's sitting around on my bookshelf gathering dust. I can't now remember why I wanted to read it, but I'll get to it some day [after all, some day I will be seriously employed in the public sector and it would probably be a good idea to have read it by then].
  
• TS Eliot audiobook
  
• Mercy, Mistress, Mercy by Christopher Harder
  Three words: Peter Plumley Walker. My smutty side was drawn to the idea of a guy being killed by the services of a dominatrix. I just never got around to going to the library for this one.
  

Tally: 8 read from list, 7 unread from list, about 7 read not from list, 1 day of holiday left.

From here on most of my reading will be course-related. I'll blog about anything particularly interesting that comes out of my textbooks, and a bit later in the year I'll see about adding some 'social' reading to my mix. If I feel like blogging about movies that come my way, there might be a few extra updates. Otherwise things will be pretty quiet here for a few months.