Why Johnny Won't Read

I love the smell of a new textbook, the sort of bleachy, chemical headiness that comes only from the freshest of soy ink and the slickest of paper. I love the charts, the maps, the illustrations, the fonts, and the chapter headings. Then there's the promise that floats over every book, that by the time you finish reading through its pages, you will know something that is shared only by the people who have thought deeply about the subject of the book, whatever it is.

This love is almost undiscriminating. I adore history books, particularly those about the history of small things, like clothing or cookware or farming tools. I lust after cookbooks, much to the chagrin of one of my professors, and I long for books about Paris and architecture. I want every book on Greek philosophy ever written, and I have a panting desire for biographies of obscure poets and famous clothing designers. A used book store can make me almost faint from all the siren calls from the mystery and literature sections. Mathematics, on the other hand, are not my thing.

In other words, my T-shirt should read: "English Major: You do the math." I have no warmth for numbers and sometimes ask store clerks to count out the coins I hand them because I just never got the hang of counting change. But even I could tell when a social sciences professor tried to put one over on his class. Names are being withheld to protect the not-so-innocent PhD who had the nerve sometime in the past two years to tell our class that he would be assigning "under 100 pages every week, so you shouldn't have any trouble getting the reading done." This was right after he had distributed a syllabus that made it clear that the reading for the first week totalled over 130 pages. We could see in black-and-white that he seemed to think that if 70 pages were due on Monday, and another 75 were due on Friday, that somehow came to 100 a week.

Even to an English major, this seemed a little outlandish.

So, if you take my advice and enroll in even one class, consider your reading workload and make room for it in your life. Consider renting your textbooks and invest heavily in Post-its, so you can make extensive notes.

A lot of traditional students do the math, totalling up all their class reading assignments, and then hyperventilate for a while before they go off to buy some pizza and a few beers. Most of the assigned reading on a college campus these days doesn't get done because of professors like the one I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Be prepared, do the page counts, and use the professor's office hours to help him check his math. And then discuss the reading with him, so he knows you're doing it. No matter what his research grants say, that's what he's there for, and that's what your tuition is paying for.

Looks like it's time for me to go read a novel.

Two Falls out of Three

Thoreau and I are still working on our relationship. I am refusing to regard him as a mentor and guide and he keeps coming up with opinionated gems like, "I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked . . . we need never read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?"

No wonder he lives alone in the woods -- his utter disrespect for just about anything that people do, either because they like their occupations or because they need to make money, probably makes him unwelcome almost everywhere. Plus, he's not at all shy about hating the Irish, who were the most recent wave of European immigrants to reach the U.S. Thoreau was anti-slavery, but not at all pro-people unless they were either intellectuals (in his opinion), or he could somehow exploit them.

On the other hand, he does like reading. Whatever you do, though, don't offer him a book in English. The classics, read in the original Latin or Greek, are the only books for him. Thoreau points out that, at least while he was alive, none of the great thinkers, like Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and so on, were translated into English. Good for him -- I'm glad the little snob can read the great works, and I'm glad that we can now read them in English, or just about any other language. The translations would no doubt infuriate him.

And I'm really glad that I can go out to lunch without Thoreau. I may learn to love him, but right now he's such a pain!

Books!

Perhaps the best and worst thing about the approaching semester is the opportunity to buy more books. Since the expense is so high, around $500, the pleasure is mixed with a lot of pain. Even buying used editions leaves me in the hole economically. Most of them look interesting, so I feel pretty lucky this time around.

Here's the list:

ENG 201: The American Dream
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Crime and the American Dream
Facing up to the American Dream
Plus a coursebook by the professors

ENG 351: Renaissance Studies
The Duchess of Malfi
The White Devil
'Tis a Pity She's a Whore
Women Beware Women
The Changeling
Maria, or the Wrongs of Women
Mary, Queen of Scots
This last one is around 550 pages, and I'm on page 341, with diminishing hopes of finishing it by the first day of class as the professor requested. It's a marvelous story, about a real-life queen who found herself surrounded with bloodshed, family and clan conflict, and political jealousy. It's hard to tell just how much of this was the result of her own flaws.

ENG 358: 18th Century Novel
The Rise of the Novel
Pamela
Gulliver's Travels
Robinson Crusoe
The Vicar of Wakefield
Moll Flanders
The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman

HIS 217: History of Chinese and Japanese Civilization
Zheng He: China and the Oceans of the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405-1433
Fukuzawa Yukichi: From Samurai to Capitalist
A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilization

Please note, as they say, that anything that claims in the title to be brief probably isn't. If it is brief in the number of pages, the book is likely to have been printed in an extra-small font. That's just the way academic authors are.

It's hard to imagine how all these books will fit into a single semester, let alone into a single brain. Gotta try, though.