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As every Christian blogger around has used “The Bible” as the answer to most of these questions — rightly of course — but to make it all the more interesting, I’m excluding that answer for the time being.

1. One book that changed your life: Theologically it would have to be Michael Horton’s Putting Amazing Back into Grace; sadly I can’t seem to remember the first book that awakened the literary geek in me, but confirmations of my fascination with stories came with Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady.

2. One book that you’ve read more than once: I’m currently re-reading with Bryce the Narnia books; the next book I plan to re-read is Alistair Macleod’s No Great Mischief.

3. One book you’d want on a desert island: Something like Surviving on a Desert Island for Dummies, or didn’t Restoration Hardware have some such book at one point?

4. One book that made you laugh: Anything by Bill Bryson.

5. One book that made you cry: Most Chaim Potok books, but especially The Chosen. Oh and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (which if you haven’t read, you simply must!).

6. One book that you wish had been written: Literary aesthetics and why it matters in your daily life

7. One book that you wish had never been written: The Prayer of Jabez

8. One book you’re currently reading: Alex Zwerdling, Improvised Europeans: American Literary Expatriates and the Siege of London

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read: Yikes, there’s too many of those. I haven’t made my way entirely through that great tome of the 19th century, Moby Dick; also I’d like to finish War and Peace.

10. Now tag five people:
David and Neyir Urminksy
Bryce
Mr. T (in the comments section of course)
Any of the Uni girls back at Edinburgh

One of the memes going around the blogosphere has to do with books and reading — which book you’d take with you if you were stranded on a desert island, which book made you laugh/cry and which book you keep coming back to to re-read.

Rereading is an interesting phenomenon. Why do we re-read? It’s obviously not for content. (Well, I suppose it sometimes is, if we are teaching the book and forget the characters’ names…*clears throat*). However, I imagine we re-read in part to take us back to the past moments in which we read the book in the first place. Is this the sort of thing we do with songs as well? Listening to music from our “golden days”?

What do you think? What books have you found yourself going back to and why do you think this is?

Nathaniel Hawthorne spent 7 years abroad, most of which was spent in England and Italy. The end of his last major novel, written with his ‘abroad-ness’ fully in view, is The Marble Faun (1860), a novel that concerns the nature of art, representation, and a fall from grace, all within a prose which delights in the ambiguities inherent in life and art. (Coincidentally, if you’ve only read The Scarlet Letter, give this book a shot for a totally different Hawthorne). On the last several pages, the narrator makes his presence known while telling the story of two American expats who return home. I think it is an apt, although certainly melancholy, understanding of the phenomena of being ‘transatlantic’:

‘And, now that life had so much human promise in it, they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years, after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by-and-by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all, or only that little space of either, in which we finally lay down our discontented bones. It is wise, therefore, to come back betimes—or never’ (357-8).

But there you have it. A small post of mine is up on Intellectuelle.

Check out Calvin and Hobbes on academic writing.

Okay so today my 10 am class was very talkative and participatory and enjoyed making connections between Frankenstein and Charlotte Temple. However my 12 o’clock class sat there all clammed up. I figured last week their reticence to answer questions must have happened because I was trying to reproduce the first tutorial and it may have seemed too forced. Today I was asking super easy questions like, “Describe the main characters’ family lives” in efforts to discuss different ideas of gender and they were silent for a good while. I don’t know what’s up; a few weeks ago they were the chatty class. Here are my options for their quietness:
1. They have the mid-semester blues and don’t care so much anymore.
2. They were hungover from Halloween parties the night before.
3. I was incredibly boring and asking completely wrong questions.
4. They are reticent to talk after having a new student in their class the last few weeks.
5. Any or all of the above.

What do you think? What made your college classes interesting and engaging? How did your lecturers/tutors/professors get you to think of your own questions on the text?

Thanks for your input! If it fails next week, I’m going to make them do group work and/or let them go early. I hate blabbing to myself.

Sadly, I’ve just now read Frankenstein. One would figure being the literary geek that I am that I should have read that book before, that, along with Moby Dick (which, coincidentally is not yet finished and is awaiting my next bout of holiday reading). But alas, you all must have grander visions of who you think you’re dealing with. I am not “reader extraordinaire”, but simply a reader (who also happens to be paying people to do it in the form of another degree).

Anyway on to Frankenstein. Thinking of classic 50s horror movies I expected the “it’s alive! it’s alive” mantra, but was disappointed. I also expected to be scared and yet was again disappointed. The novel is rather of the “what happens if humans had the power to create life” variety of scariness rather than the things that go bump in the night kind of scary. The novel (for those who haven’t read it) is the story of a man who has grand plans to make something of himself. This narrator runs into Frankenstein (who is the scientist NOT the monster contrary to popular usage) in the northern climes. Frankenstein has been chasing his monster in order to destroy him and is found nearly dead. He revives and tells his story of his idyllic childhood and the various stages that lead to his doom to create life. The monster finds Frankenstein a few years after he was created (and after he’s murdered Frankenstein’s brother) and is extremely lonely — after having learned culture (including reading Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives and Goethe’s Werte) he feels unconsolable as humans seek to kill him after seeing his grotesqueness. All he wants from Frankenstein is a mate and he swears he’ll leave the habitations of men (and will lead a virtuous rather than vicious life) if he will have one thing which will sympathise with him. Frankenstein acquiesces and then revokes his promise fearing that the new monster might endanger all of humanity. The monster kills his family one by one as revenge. It ends with Frankenstein dying amidst his revenge of fever and starvation in the northern pole while the monster is finally repentent and vows to kill himself. Thus ends a rather sad story.

I have a few thoughts after reading the book. One is, should Frankenstein have created a mate for the monster? Is such a thing selfish (he thinks he’d be prizing his family above humanity) or not? Should one take pity on something entirely “evil”? Secondly the book brings out the depravity innate within all of us — it’s not so much about science and sympathy but about the baseness of humanity and the dangers of “playing God.” It seems that current issues of cloning and stem cell research could quite easily be our modern day Frankensteinian problem — we’re all in a fuss to get it done but the moment of realisation — the “it’s alive” phrase — will/may be as utterly horrifying as it was for Frankenstein. In the end, I feel sorry for the monster and yet there doesn’t seem to be a way out of a moral quandry that Frankenstein created and without a rescuer, we’re doomed to the same destruction. How’s that for a rather downer post?

“When it’s time to turn the page, you will hear the chimes ring like this {insert chime noise}. Now let’s begin…”

Flashbook from childhood audio books on a Fisher-Price record player has ended now.

Per Neyir’s comment below, I thought I’d try to find the books we’ll be reading in my American Lit tutorial online if you’re interested in reading along, or just getting a taste of each book by reading a few pages (as you all are very busy people and not full-time students like myself).

1st week of October — Franklin Autobiography, available here and Edwards, “A Personal Narrative”, available here
2nd week — Brown, Wieland, available here.
3rd week — landscape and the sublime, Burke’s Enquiry available here
4th week — Wordsworth and America, WW’s “Prelude” availabe here

1st week of November — Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple, available here and Mary Shelley Frankenstein, available here
2nd week — J. Hector St John de Crevcoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, availabe here
3rd week — Henry David Thoreau, Walden, available here
4th week — Emerson Essays, especially “Nature”, available here
5th week — Irving, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, available here

(’baubs’ as in baubles, I’m so adept at British slang…not).

I taught my first tutorial this week; it can only get better from here. About half the students didn’t show — couldn’t make the time slot — and they all didn’t bring their anthologies, so I rambled about Enlightenment, Romanticism and Jonathan Edwards. Add to the fact that the secretary wrote down the wrong room for my tutorials and it was pretty messy. It’s hard teaching a class that someone else has made up; the tutorials are intended the bridge the gap between the lectures which are largely theoretical and contextual to the period (1760-1830) and classic works of American literature. This is a pretty hefty order for us grad students to fulfil in a 50-minute weekly slot. I didn’t get a chance to talk about the generalities of literature, why reading is important, why literature more specifically is important and how it opens up our imaginative space of identification — all these things I think are crucial to discuss so that students can put the class into a larger framework (perhaps I’ll blog about these sorts of things later). This coming week we’re looking at Edward’s “Personal Narrative” alongside Franklin’s Autobiography. Feel free to read along. The following week (2nd week in October) we’re looking at Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Wieland, which is gothic and pretty fun.

Also I’d like to direct you to a new blog I found via Intellectuelle called Christian Aesthetic. It looks like a place where a few Christian bloggers are thinking and writing about as well as posting their own art. It looks to be a really exciting place of interaction.

Lastly, there were a few women who stepped down from Intellectuelle for various reasons and so the “Elles” have taken up personal appointments. Laura kindly recommended me and I’ve jumped in on the posting there. Make sure to visit regularly for a dose of good thinking about life, literature, the Bible, culture and pretty much anything else you could think of. Oh, and it’s pretty funny too.

Catalog all your books online here for free, or if you want to catalog more than 200 books, it’s just $10 for lifetime membership. This is so exciting!

EDIT: I have now catalogued all my books I have in this country, minus any that friends are borrowing. I have 195, much more than I thought I had here. I can’t wait to catalog all my books in CA next time we’re there (which I hope is this Christmas!). If you’re interested you can browse my virtual library here.