On the performativity of "What have you been reading lately?"

So, for some reason they seem to have made me a full professor since the last time I posted here, and the new president of Misnomer U. hosted a dinner for everyone who had just been hired, tenured, or promoted, which was nice of her. There was one bit where we were supposed to go around the room and introduce ourselves, and also say what we had been reading lately. Forthwith, some observations:

-- If you are a humanities professor, you say something that is clearly pleasure-reading, but at least vaguely cerebral. Witty mysteries about British academics are good, or the sort of science fiction that doesn't have aliens on the cover.

-- If you are a scientist or social scientist, you name a book related to your field of study.

-- If you are nursing faculty, you disclaim having any free time at all for reading, and pivot to talking about your children or grandchildren.

-- If you are in business, you also disclaim any time for leisure reading, but you make a joke about spreadsheets instead of talking about grandchildren.

-- If you are a university administrator, you say that you are reading the university Common Reading book, or something by one of the writers who will be visiting for the Writers' Symposium in October. Either way, it is very interesting and you are enjoying it very much.

-- If you work in tech support, you are allowed to read the kind of books with aliens on the cover.

The new Norton Anthology, by the numbers

Years since the last Norton Anthology: 6. This seems awfully short, and I can't help wondering if we really NEED a new edition at all, but on looking up the publication dates for the last three editions, I guess it is their usual interval.

Versions of the Norton Anthology I will have used in my entire teaching career, once the new one comes out: 3. This is making me feel old.

Number of werewolves, compared to the last edition: +1. Yay! Who doesn't love a werewolf?

Number of plays about living with integrity in a world where the king is old, mad, and capricious, his vicious and venal children and children-in-law are running the kingdom, and the world is lashed by violent storms: -1. I will grant that I would never actually teach Lear in a survey course, and its replacement, Othello, is undoubtedly more accessible, but the timing seems unfortunate.

Number of gay Elizabethan poets with a taste for elaborate mythological allusions and silly wordplay: -1. (What the hell, Norton? Am I the only one who likes Barnfield?)

Number of other texts I will miss: No idea. They mark the stuff that's new with stars, but they don't call attention to the texts that have quietly disappeared. However, it looks like this revision is less of a bloodbath than the last one, in which at least FOUR pieces that I used to teach regularly, including a full-length play that is still under copyright and not available online, suddenly vanished.

Number of texts that survived the axe, but I have no idea why: Several, starting with most of the longer works by nineteenth-century poets. Like, does anybody actually teach Manfred or "The Scholar Gypsy"? (Undoubtedly, after the last edition, some Victorianist somewhere wondered whether anyone actually taught Richard Barnfield. Sigh.)

Number of texts I asked for on Norton's faculty survey that actually made it in: Two! "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" and A Christmas Carol. Woo hoo!

Number of new short stories by contemporary writers whose works I have actually read voluntarily: 3. (I don't know any of the stories, but given that I dislike most contemporary "literary fiction" and haven't really taken to ANY of the Norton's prior selections, this is a hopeful sign.)

Tempestuous

So, slightly crappy used bookstores in towns where there is a Big Box MegaUniversity? It turns out that they are GREAT if you are collecting secondhand copies of texts that have been assigned many, many times at the Big Box MegaUniversity over the years. I'm now the proud owner of nineteen copies of The Tempest, assorted editions, at an average cost of around $1.50 a pop. Nice.

(And yes, the books are for my students, and no, I don't usually buy their textbooks myself! But I am directing a really exciting Honors project involving The Tempest in performance, and I realized rather late in the game, too late to order textbooks through the usual channels, that it would be a great opportunity to get her and her actors into the Brit Lit I classroom. The fact that the play is apparently subversive enough to be banned in Arizona is a nice little side bonus, although I didn't know about that at the time.)

Plus, I get to show them Helen Mirren as Prospero/a! This is going to be so much fun!

Secondhand

The Friends of the Library held their semi-annual book sale this weekend. I always like it when I get home with the books and discover traces of their previous lives:



David, I am sure, must have been a perfectly charming houseguest! Here are a few more of my favorite inscriptions:

The Old Dramatists: Webster, first printed 1857, picked up in a used book shop in University of Basketball town. Allan H. Gilbert, the meticulous annotator whose notes are at the left, was also the prior owner of my copy of James Shirley; a still older owner (John somebody?) has signed his name at the right:



The Diary of Mr. Pepys. I was also in grad school when I acquired this one, during the course of a delightful and impecunious summer wandering around the UK. Inscription at top left reads "HONOURS PRIZE SENIOR CAMBRIDGE (SCHOOL CERT.) 1930. Below Eric WR Warm's name is what appears to be his entire genealogy.



Sonnets from the Portuguese, bought at the Bruton Parish Church book sale in Williamsburg, VA, in 1997 or 1998. I find this one tantalizingly poignant, and have always wondered about the story behind it.



The Student's Catullus, bought secondhand at the Beloved Alma Mater's bookstore. (Unlike the others, I do in fact know the person who wrote this one. Ah, good times.)

Influential Writers Meme

Tagged for this by Undine. If you want to be tagged, consider yourself tagged, as I'm not sure I actually know twenty-five people who haven't done it already.

I have adopted Horace's idea of dividing the list into stages of life, and Undine's caveat that not all of these are current favorites. I'm not, for example, totally sure what was up with the Antonia White obsession, but an obsession it definitely was.

Preschool:

1) A. A. Milne

Elementary / intermediate school:

2) Elizabeth Janet Grey
3) Gordon Korman
4) Shakespeare (this particular Unholy Obsession started early)

High school:

5) Douglas Adams
6) Joseph Heller
7) Bob Dylan ("writers" includes writers of other things than books, yes?)
8) Walt Kelly
9) Federico García Lorca
10) Stephen Jay Gould

College:

11) T. H. White
12) Ludovico Ariosto
13) Emily Dickinson
14) Charlotte Brontë
15) Emily Brontë
16) Anne Brontë
17) John Webster
18) Antonia White
19) Sir Thomas Malory

Grad school, and after

20) Dorothy L. Sayers (whom I encountered for the first time in high school, but didn't really get until grad school)
21) W. B. Yeats (again, didn't really get him until grad school)
22) J. K. Rowling
23) Thomas Heywood
24) Wilfred Owen
25) Guy Gavriel Kay

Hmm, this appears to be a somewhat eclectic list. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Long-ass book meme, from Heu Mihi

... because I clearly can't do any actual work during office hours.

BBC Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

I'll be using a lower-case x for partial reads, because I can't resist splitting hairs.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkein - X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X+
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible – x (I think I have read the vast majority of it at some point or other.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X+
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – x (barring Timon of Athens and Henry VIII, which I really should get to one of these days)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks * (Picked this up at the thrift store, really should get to it)
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot – X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Man, I'm not doing well on the Russian novels.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - x (I've read two, I think; TLTWaTW was required reading in elementary school, and I'm pretty sure I read one of the others in college, when I went through a phase of really trying to like C.S. Lewis. It didn't work very well.)
34 Emma - Jane Austen - X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X+
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X+ (In fact, I think this may be the first "chapter book" that I ever read)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (I've never even heard of this.)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X+
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - X
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold * (Another thrift-store pickup I've been meaning to get to)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – x (Got maybe 5/6ths of the way through, wrote a paper on it anyhow while pounding vodka screwdrivers and watching Pulp Fiction, got an A-. Sometimes I'm not sure I deserve my college degree.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - x (No, I didn't read all of it, and yes, I somehow faked my way through an exam on it in grad school. Hmm. Maybe I don't deserve my master's degree either.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - X
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - X
80 Possession - AS Byatt X
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Curiously, I'm only familiar with this one because the LibraryThing Unsuggester lists it as among the top five books that you will not like if you really, really like the Orlando Furioso. I have not tried the experiment, but I think this is probably true.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - *
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

wherein I attempt to weed out my library

The English club at New SLAC is having a book sale to raise money for Cool Trip That I Seem To Be Organizing This Year. (This is a little alarming, as I do not normally do organization, and my usual approach to travel is along the lines of "buy a plane ticket to City A, and another one returning a month later from City B, and see what happens in between." I suspect that Travel With Student Groups takes a bit more planning. But I digress.)

Anyway, I thought I would donate some books. I already donated a bunch of books to their last book sale, and brought a boxful to the Free Market in Crunchy Granola Town before I moved, so I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here. And yet, I probably should not be. I have lots of books I will probably never read again. I have some that I've had for years and have never read at all, but I don't want to part with them before I've had a chance to ascertain what they might contain.

My books fall into three broad categories. There are the books I genuinely like and / or find useful for my work, which I obviously want to keep. There are books that I haven't actually read, or read long ago for an undergraduate course, but keep around in a vague hope that I will find them useful someday. These are the ones with titles like Teach Yourself Thai, Orthography in Shakespeare, and Oral Presentations in the Composition Course: A Brief Guide. I might, actually, give serious thought to donating some of these, except I suspect that undergraduates are even less likely to find them useful or interesting than I am.

And then there are the books that have, broadly defined, Sentimental Value. Pretty much all of my travel guides fall into this category, although most of them are outdated. So does the trashy paperback that I bought at the hotel when I visited the University of Basketball as a prospective student; the Shakespeare authorship conspiracy books that a friend gave me as a graduation present; and the copy of The Duchess of Malfi that used to belong to my undergrad American lit prof (whose class was memorable solely because it inspired me to write a short story about a killer copy of Moby Dick that flew around the English department clubbing boring professors over the head, but somehow those memories seem to have acquired a patina of sentiment with time).

In short, everything has sentimental value. I tried an experiment today where I chose a bookshelf at random and tried to remember when, how, and why I acquired each of the books; there were only three or four that stumped me. The rest all had stories. And I find it very, very hard to get rid of a book with a story. Sigh.