Suggested Reading, Part I

Montaigne

What follows is an eclectic selection of some of the sentences that I think will inspire, educate, and occasionally intimidate students of any age. While some of the works may not seem to have a direct connection to my ventures, part of what I am teaching is that making unusual imaginative and rational leaps is what is essential to great writing.” Only Connect” (the epigram from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End) is the tag phrase that runs throughout the entire site. The order is anything but random, but it came about as I just walked around my place and picked out a few books and skipped through my kindle. I have always said as long as I have a bed, books, family and friends, then I am rich beyond compare.

I.                    Introductory Texts

Crazy U, Andrew Ferguson. This book was on several top 10 books of the year in 2011. Well-written, well-researched, and funny too. The U in question, which is never named, happens to be the one I worked at for nearly thirty years so it has a special resonance for me.  It is a great overview of the way the entire process of applying to Universities has gotten completely out of hand.  Too many people are trading on students’ and parents’ fears.

This Will Make You Smarter, edited by John Brockman

A book filled with more geniuses than you will likely see anywhere else. The short essays they write are examples of how science writing can be moving, beautiful and enough to convince you to change your academic interests again and again. Brockman’s website edge.com is one of the best out there.

Sontag

Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag. Sontag’s ground-breaking essay made her the leader of the intelligentsia in New York. She combines the ability to connect across times, places, and modes of thought that many have tried (and failed) to imitate.  Learning to write well is in part learning to read well. She is a great place to start. “The anthropologist as hero” has stood the test of time. In fact, to me, it is even truer today than when she wrote it 40 years ago.

II.                  Sentences

How To Write a Sentence and How to Read One, Stanley Fish

A New York Times contributor and world famous English professor (his Surprised by Sin is one of the best books on Milton yet written). He knows that essay begins not with words and no with paragraphs but sentences. Throughout my blog I will be giving examples of great sentences. A single great sentence can save an essay. In fact, a single great sentence is often better than some entire books. 

Neitzsche

Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufman

Controversial. Tragic and one of the greatest stylists in German or any language. His sentences, even in translation touch the mystic chord of being. Even if you disagree with what he writes it is hard not to admire a sentence like this:

The truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

As I have said most books don’t reach the depth of some sentences. Anyone who despairs at the short length of college essays (and there are a few) should look to people like him for inspiration.

All Gall Is Divided, E.M. Cioran

This philosopher is virtually unknown in English. This book was just translated this month. He is a master of the dark aphorism: Mystery—a word we use to deceive others, to convince them we are “deeper” than they are.” Again, quit a bi of intellectual work in one sentence. I bring him up here as I have only met a handful of people who have actually read him. One was 4 years ago. I was visiting one of the top high schools in China and my tour guide, a senior student, gave his name as one of the people she was treading. I was stunned. In fact, I did not believe her. But she could quote from The Temptation To Exist, another book of aphorisms. For those who thing Chinese students are automatons (and I will get to one in a minute) they Bette visit the schools and talk to the students. Once when a Chinese student said Joyce’s Ulysses was her favorite book, I challenged her via internet as I have taught this book to University students. She sent proof via words and photos of a seemingly unending stack of pages of notes on the book. I have never seen another student do anything like this.

Gass

Life Sentences, William Gass. Pound for Pound, the king of the Anglo-Saxon hard syllables punching past the game gloves of the alliterative rhythms Gass loves. His prose approaches poetry and he mixes philosophy with the dark arts of metaphor, mimesis, and form. Given his age, the title is suggestive. I find his words intoxicating and inspirational at the same time. The first pages of On Being Blue are one of the great unknown prose poems of our time.

III.                Paragraphs

Kafka

The Complete Stories, Franz Kafka.  Once again, a short piece of prose can lead to some of the most provocative and endlessly dissected words of the 20^th Century. I think his short pieces are better than many of his novels which were left incomplete. (He wanted all his work burned but his friend could not bring himself to do it.  For once not listening to a dying man’s last wishes has helped us live in the world with new eyes-- a transplant we needed.)

Here Kafka reinterprets the meaning of one of our oldest western myths: the Sirens

These are the seductive voices of the night; the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to think that they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful.

Devastating. And perhaps more accurate than Homer knew to know in the Bronze age.

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino. In this infinitely complicated yet simple retelling of the Khan meeting with Marco Polo, each small story invents a new city, one which may live in dreams or form a part of an allegory of one city, or tell the truth of the city that cannot be told with facts. Or all three.  

Barthes

A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes. This book is part philosophy, part art lover’s lament, and part secret autobiography. With footnotes. Each paragraph echoes some larger theme and love is understood in new ways. There have been recent attempts to come close by the competitive French philosophical corps (Badiou’s, In Praise of Love), but nothing approaches his subtlety and dexterous use of words.

IV.               Essays

The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame.  How would it be to wake up one day and say I think I will invent the essay? While this is not quite accurate, Montaigne did invent the word and the work we now know as essays. And like much of writing the first often is among the best. His willingness to sacrifice his outward life for a room in a tower devoted to an inward gaze has resulted in one of the most exceptional views into any human consciousness. His nearly endless ability to draw on literary sources and on subjects never before thought of as fit for others means he is not only an innovator but also a creative genius of the highest level. He changed the way we now think, write, and attempt to persuade. He is thoroughly modern in his willingness to move according to the motion of his mind rather than to follow a straight and narrow narrative. Anyone who reads him will agree with me that there are precious few who have come close to rising to the level of this master. In addition, when he says, “These are my fancies by which I try to give knowledge not of things, but of myself”, we know he is only half-right. We all shape things through our consciousness (he was way ahead of Kant), and he, despite this sentence, knew that too.

Note: This list is not even close to comprehensive. Throughout the year I will be update this list with brief reviews of books, most of the hot off the press, which address issues pertinent to education. Some of them will have a clear connection to the topic. Others may seem tangential. I will try to explain why books on neuroscience, business strategy, philosophy, astrophysics, and creative fiction and non-fiction are important places to learn about issues in higher education.

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