All The Books I Haven’t Written (Yet)

A day or so ago, I remarked that one reason I take a “that’ll do” approach to writing books is the fact that there’s always the next thing that I want to move on to writing about. Yes, butterfly mind and all that. This thought was then powerfully reinforced by the remark of a friend on Facebook: “Anyone else at that age when they think ‘that would be a great project, conference, grant, book…’ and then, ‘hmm, I wonder how much longer I’ve got?’” Oh god yes – and I’m not thinking about retirement, because (1) I suspect retirement ages are going to retreat endlessly into the future as we approach them, as in one of Xeno’s paradoxes, and (2) I have every intention that retirement will enable me to write much more, whatever my wife thinks about finally getting the garden sorted out.

No, we’re talking about death here. It could be decades away, as body and mind are only just starting to deteriorate (I think), BUT IT’S THERE. Or maybe a diagnosis arrives giving me just six months, and I’m left wondering why I spent so much time writing worthy articles about ancient economic history when I could have done that screenplay for a rebooted-BSG-style science fiction Peloponnesian War series… Just to focus the mind, in the hope of firing myself up with energy and enthusiasm rather than blind panic, this is the list of all the books I have in mind but haven’t got round to writing yet.

(1) In progress (ish)

Yes I will finish this bloody book about Marx and bloody antiquity

(2) Developing out of current research activities

Reception of Thucydides; just to make life more complicated, this now seems to want to become two different books, one on Thucydides and political thought and one on his wider cultural significance.

Roman Economic Thinking: at the moment, just a series of meditations on the Roman agronomists, but at some point I’ll broaden the focus and attempt to talk about all of it.

(3) Related to stuff I’ve done in the past

Ecology and History in the Ancient Mediterranean: at one point this looked like being the next major project, drawing on a final-year UG course I taught for years; there are certainly people out there better qualified to write this than I am (though of course that’s true of most of my work), but someone needs to write an accessible, polemical guide to this topic..

(4) Really want to do, no idea when

Christa Wolf and Antiquity: I was asked several years ago if I was interested in writing a proposal for this, and the answer is still yes, but I can’t see myself getting time to do the research for years to come. Unless I do get the “six months to live” diagnosis, in which case this is up there with Thucydides as a priority.

The Novel: no, I don’t know what novel, but I always meant to become a creative writer rather than an academic, and I want to leave some evidence of this.

(5) Fun, and possibly lucrative

Thucydides’ Guide to Business Success: I have no idea why this hasn’t been written yet, but since it hasn’t…

(6) May have missed its moment, which would be a shame

The Spartan Mother: taking its cue from that ghastly Tiger Mother book, which from a Spartan perspective is ridiculously soft on children.

So, that’s only six proper academic books, several of which are at least partly researched already; if I can manage one every 2.5 years, and fit some of the more humorous and/or creative stuff into my train journeys, along with keeping up the blog posts. The positive view is that this is much more of a plan than I ever had in the first twenty-five years of my academic career, which has often consisted of writing books that someone else suggested and seemed like a good idea at the time. Death does concentrate the mind…

Update: Well, I have now done the maths, and things could be…a little tricky. Seven books in just over twenty years of academic career looks okay, except that one of those was the book of the PhD so really I need to include the research time, so seven books in c.28 years is pushing towards four years each, so even if I can accelerate my rate of production on the basis of experience, to counteract the inevitable slowing of mental facilities, I still need to keep doing this until well into my 70s…