Required Reading

Reading is my favorite preoccupation.  Take one look inside our house and this is obvious:  the house is flooded with books in every imaginable subject, as my choice of reading material has moved well past the valley of eclecticism and is now scaling the craggy heights of schizophrenia.  I’ll read just about anything.

I love libraries and have a large collection of library cards to prove it.  Whenever I’m doing research in a library, I have a strict rule:  Whenever you have scoured the stacks until you have located the volume you are looking for—turn around and take a book at random from the opposite shelf and spend at least a few minutes reading it.  You’d be surprised how often this serendipitous research pays off.

There is, however, one kind of book that I absolutely hate to read:  the book that I have to read—particularly one that has been assigned as part of a course curriculum.  Being forced to read any book is a chore that dwarfs the labors of Sisyphus.

Decades ago, I worked for a major Fifth Avenue publishing house and part of my job was to read some of the new books brought on the market.  One of the books that was currently popular was Watership Down, which I dutifully tried to read at least a dozen times.  If you have never read this monstrosity, it is hundreds of pages of cute, lovable rabbits who are hopping around and hopping around and hopping around—until I would fall asleep while on page 15, dreaming of blowing them all to smithereens with a good Remington shotgun.  Anyone who has successfully finished the book should be tested for diabetes.

The quality of the book doesn’t really matter, since any book designated as required reading automatically becomes a horrible book.  A professor once assigned me the task of reading The Education of Henry Adams, since it was his opinion that any student who graduated from college without having read the book was due a full refund of his tuition.  God, I hated that book.  About a dozen years later, I came across my copy of the book and reread it and discovered that in the years the volume had lain idle in my office, the prose had fermented into excellent literary wine, becoming a great book that everyone should read.

Note.  I am the “great uncle” to a young man who is just off to college now.  I sent him a copy of the book with a note containing the advice of the professor who had assigned me the book.  I suspect than my “great nephew” will feel somewhat obligated to read the book, almost guaranteeing that he will absolutely hate it, too, and will remember that his grandfather had frequently stated his brother was crazy.

Naturally, when I became the professor—the “sage on the stage”—I only assigned books that I was absolutely certain that my students would love.  Yeah, and Elvis didn’t do no drugs.

Since I was teaching at Enema U, the Harvard on the Rio Grande. Surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert, I assigned my students Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey.  This is a fantastic book, one of the most popular books dealing with environmental issues that has been published in the last 50 years.  My students, living in the southwest, would immediately bond with it.

Nope.

My student treated the book like it was bound cancer.  No one liked the book and over half the class mentioned “the horrible desert book” in their end of class evaluations.  From the classroom discussions, it was clear to me that only half the class had actually finished the book and even that low number may be a wild overestimation.  

In a class I taught on the Mexican Revolution, I assigned The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes, the great Mexican historian and author.  This is a book so well written, so moving and human that it does for the Mexican Revolution what Hemingway did the Spanish Civil War.  Since major battle of the Mexican Revolution occurred less than 50 miles from the campus of Enema U, and at least a quarter of the class had family in Mexico—the book had to be a success.

Also nope.

The book spans multiple decades with frequent flashbacks and even though I furnished the students with a list of chapters and the dates involved, most of my students seemed to find the events incomprehensible.  Few students understood how the years of fighting had embittered the idealistic young man, changing him into the epitome of what the youth had originally been fighting against.  The only real lesson from the book?  Well, I learned to never use the word “dichotomy” in an exam question since a sizeable percentage of the class wrote essays about the horrifying battlefield torture of what they presumed was a “dick-ectomy”.

Then there was that Civil War class.  Besides the usual textbook, I assigned The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara.  Surely, this time I had got it right.  The book won the Pulitzer Prize, is required reading at West Point, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, The War College, the Citadel, the U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment Officer Qualification Course, The Basic School for Marine Officers, and is one of only two novels (the other being Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer) on the U.S. Army's recommended reading list for Officer Professional Development.  And most importantly, Joss Whedon says the book was the original inspiration for the TV series Firefly.  

Even more noper.

Unfortunately, the great book was made into the movie, Gettysburg, which would have been a great movie if they hadn’t cast that damn Yankee, Martin Sheen, as Robert E. Lee, complete with a southern accent about as authentic as Velveeta Cheese.  For most of the students, watching the movie was preferable to actually reading the book.  Since Ted Turner was the movie’s director and decided to make a movie more than four hours long, it might have been quicker to read the book.

As with most of the books I assigned, the students complained about the book bitterly in class and noted their frustrations in the end of the semester evaluations.  Almost none of the students reported that they enjoyed reading the book.  

A curious thing happened a few months after the class was over, however.  I got several emails from the parents of my students who had happened to find a pristine copy of Killer Angels laying around the house and had picked it up just to see what it was.  They read the book and enjoyed it enough to take the time to write me a quick note in gratitude.

Of course, they liked the book.  They weren’t required to read it.  So, they did.