Summer reading II

So on the heels of my last post, I've been thinking, and have decided that the first thing I want to ask my new students on the first day of class is: So what did everyone read this summer?

No preamble, no hey-I'm-the-prof. Just ask the question, point-blank. This will be an interesting experiment. I figure I run a certain risk of alienating some students who will see this as professorial posturing or condescension, but then, knowing my classroom style, it's pretty even money they would end up thinking that about me anyway. Remind me some time to do a blog about course evaluations I've had.

I've been thinking about my summers in undergrad. I sometimes miss that clean break from the academic world, the four months of summer employment that allow for a brain decompression and enough of a taste of the working world to make you desperate for school again at the end of August.

But the best part about those summers was the reading list I'd compiled throughout the year -- all of the books whose titles intrigued me, those books I'd picked up on a whim at the university bookstore but never had the time to get to, the "further reading" suggested by professors ... when I worked for my uncle doing housepainting and reno work, I'd often spend anywhere between 1-2 hours a day on transit making my way around Toronto to our work site. Luckily, I'm not one to get motion sickness, so I'd pass that time reading. I'd usually be early, so I'd stop at a Coffee Time or Tim's for a coffee and muffin and read there for another half hour. That was the best part of the summers ... now that I don't have that same break as I did before, I get very nostalgic for it. There was something beautifully incongruous about sitting on the subway in filthy paint-spattered clothes reading Faulkner.

So I wonder ... will any of my students be summer readers? I will ask them out of interest, but also to start laying a certain amount of philosophical groundwork for my courses: namely, that reading is the whole point, not just of an English degree but of a liberal arts degree generally; that if you ever want to be a good writer, I can teach you the mechanics of it but only reading a wide range of styles and texts and subjects will lend your own style and vocabulary sophistication; and that the best way to a more subtle and nuanced (my word again!) understanding of the world is to learn as much about it as possible. Of which reading is, granted, but one strategy ...

Sorry about this lengthy meditation, but it really does proceed from a consistent bafflement that so many university students I've encountered in the past have so very little curiosity and so little desire to explore the wealth of stuff a university education holds out to them beyond what they need in order to maintain their required average.

(A quick apology to Alex and Sylvia, who were subjected to a more upbeat version of this tirade day after day this summer and last for SAO).


Part of the Signal Hill hike I do every saturday takes me through the Battery, a small village right down by the harbour. On the gate of one of the more flamboyantly decorated houses there is a sign (one of many) declaring "Education is not the same thing as intelligence!" Now, I do have to agree wholeheartedly with this: I've know far too many well-educated morons and far too many incredibly intelligent people whose schooling stopped well short of university to ever claim the opposite. I wouldn't want to give the impression that I think the more degrees a person has, the better they are (or to put it a better way: can you imagine the disastrous consequences if professors ran the world? the mind cringes).

So what has everyone been reading this summer??