Reading over spring break is not blasphemy

By: Chris Pellegrini

Posted: 3/5/09

Spring break beckons and Foresters' thoughts turn towards debauchery. Alas, life does not have to be this way, even with official classes in recess the quest for knowledge can continue. While you sit on the beach, at the pool, or the bar longing for the days of lectures consider throwing a book into the beachbag. In this spirit, The Stentor asked members of the English department for their recommendation and a sales pitch selling their choice.

Prof. Benjamin Goluboff
I recommend Colm Toibin's The Master. This novel on the life of Henry James is both beautifully informed by generations of scholarship on James and his milieu, and powerfully attuned to the novelist's sensibility.

Prof. Richard Mallette
I recommend Colm Toibin's The Master. This Irish novelist imagines the life of the great Anglo-American novelist Henry James in the last years of the nineteenth century, when James is emerging from the humiliations of a failed play to become universally recognized as one of the greatest writers of the era. Toibin dramatizes, as elegantly as could be hoped, James's coming to terms with his American past and the demands of his peculiar sensibility. This is a book-lover's novel.

Prof. Carla Arnell
For fans of the English novel, I have two Venetian tales to suggest: I continue to recommend Jeanette Winterson's 1987 The Passion to those who have not yet discovered the delights of Winterson's fiction. The love story of a web-footed woman named Villanelle and a French soldier named Henri, whose lives and narratives magically intersect in Venice, France, and Russia during the era of Napoleon's exploits. Another worthy novel about Venice is Sally Vickers' 2000 Miss Garnet's Angel; it features a solitary schoolteacher's six-month sojourn in Venice-- a psychological and spiritual journey which Vickers sets against the ancient apocryphal tale of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael. For those not in the mood for fiction, I recommend Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom--a book that attempts to synthesize ancient cultural insights about human flourishing with modern psychology. Recommended to me recently by my old college classics professor!

Prof. Joshua Corey
Well, my two cents: I've been singing the praises of the late Chilean poet and novelist Robert Bolaño for a while now to anyone who will listen. I am close to finishing his masterpiece, 2666, a long and astounding novel about literary obsession, insanity, serial murder in northern Mexico, World War II, boxing, and many other subjects-I can't say enough good things about it. More manageable perhaps for spring break would be one of his shorter works-I'd recommend By Night in Chile, a short novel that takes the form of a confession by a priest and literary critic who collaborated with Pincohet's regime in Chile, or Last Evenings on Earth, a collection of short stories. Whatever book you choose, you'll find it to be unlike anything else you've ever read. Oh, and he has one book of poems that's been translated into English, The Romantic Dogs, that's not bad either.

Prof. Robert Archambeau
I in no way endorse any activity that stands in the way of a modicum of debauchery. However, I can recommend something for spring break reading: I Remember, by Joe Brainard, which on the surface sounds entirely unpromising: it's simply a list of things Brainard remembers about growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It's organized as a series of short sections each of which begins "I remember..." But the guy's got an eye for detail, a great sense of deadpan comedy, and a way of arranging the memories into clusters that have a wonderful music to them. Also, since the sections are so modular, it makes for good airplane or beach reading. You can catch a few sections between flights or between margaritas (for those over 21, of course).