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!

Lazy, Hazy, Crazy . . .

Just because it's summer, I assumed that I would have a lot of time to myself. After all, I'm taking only three credits, in American Literature before 1870. Just me, Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson, whiling away the summer days on the patio. Read a little, nap a little, think a little, write a little: doesn't that sound wonderful? Silly me.

For one thing, it's been too chilly and windy to spend much time on the patio, now that it's been furnished and accessorized on the cheap. For another, the reading load has gradually increased. Here we are, only a three weeks past finals, and all my mentors have made reading suggestions for my summer of enlightenment.

My senior thesis advisor has suggested that I develop a bibliography, as I may have mentioned before. This is taking a lot of time, since every book and research paper must be skimmed at the very least, so that my journal reflects some understanding of the work's thesis and related sources. A few weeks ago, this did not seem like any kind of problem at all.

This was before Mentor One (I like how his nickname reminds me of The Cat in the Hat) started suggesting fiction that would enrich my unfurnished brain. He's right, of course, as he always is: Cutting for Stone is enthralling. I wish I could write that way and get a passing grade on my next research paper.

Then Mentor Two suggested that I read an article from Commonweal Magazine, in addition to a book by Rae Langton. Also not a problem, except that I still want to read a bunch of papers and book chapters that came up during Bioethics last semester. The matter of finding Commonweal was resolved, after I ran all over town today, through their free online subscription for college students. Hey, I qualify for the student special!

Then, of course, there are Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I'm approaching the Woolf novel with some anxiety, since it is such a simple story on the surface, and seems so easy to read. The story is reputed to have great depths, which my trivial mind may not be able to perceive without guidance and a stick. Crime and Punishment has another type of unintended effect: it makes all shorter works look easy to tackle in comparison.

I've tried stacking all this material in order of attack on my study table, but then there's no room to actually sit down and study. It looks like a small paper mountain. At least there are no cougars lurking in the thickets around the base of the mountain, except of the dualistic secularist variety (please note: this is a joke based on an article about philosopher Gilbert Meilaender -- you may laugh now).

That last paragraph is a fine explanation of why philosophy students can't make a living on the comedy club circuit. Anyway, the only way out is through the stack of reading material, so here I go!