When Should A Student Take On The Readings For The Non-Course?

Let's begin this post with a reminder of the philosophy that informs both the Non-Course and the "Meal Plan Readings" that were featured in the prior posts and that likely precede starting with the Non-Course.  Everything here is meant as suggestions only.  The student drives the bus!  This means that the student can do whatever the students wants, whether that is to start with the Non-Course straight away or stick with recreational reading and never start into the Non-Course. Further, even when some transition is contemplated, it can be partial rather than all or nothing and the pace of transition is entirely up to the student.  So in what follows I'm going to use qualitative variables rather than temporal variables to discuss the transition issue. 

One thing to observe, there is only one of the Non-Course readings that is fiction.  The rest are non-fiction.  Further, the approximate order in which they should be read, which does not coincide with how they are listed is to read several essays first, followed by a couple of comparatively easy to read books.  So one should take note about how the student is doing with the pieces given in the Salads post.  If you feel comfortable that you can make good meaning of those pieces, you are ready skill-wise.  If you are struggling with those pieces, maybe you should focus on raising your skill level first.  Coaching from me is available for that, if you want.

Next, assuming you are ready skill-wise, you might project forward by asking the question: what if I made good progress on self-teaching and learning to learn?  What would I do with that knowledge?  Is there any downside for me to being so aware?  If you think of this as to how it relates to the courses you will be taking thereafter, what will happen to how you go about those courses if you find out that your prior approach is inconsistent with self-teaching.  (I think such a discovery is likely, but not certain.)  Now, let's add to this that self-teaching will feel rewarding to you, because you are really learning, but it will be time consuming, and that surely will be part of the issue.  Here are some possible ways to manage this new perception:

• Continue with the approach in classes that you had been using previously and indeed, suspend trying out self-teaching till after you graduate, for fear that you'll mess up your GPA or otherwise create some unintended consequence. 
• Continue with the approach in classes that you had been using previously.  Start in on the self-teaching but restrict it to things you learn outside of formal coursework. 
• Decide on one or two "favorites" among your classes and do self-teaching there. In your other classes keep with what you were doing before. 
• Try to do self-teaching in all your classes.  Capture the additional time you need by doing less in the non-course arena.  (Please don't try to capture the time by sleeping less.  That surely will be self-defeating.) 

Regardless of which of these you opt for, you may experience some angst in looking back at what you had done in college.  In some sense, that angst has been there all the time, but it may have been hidden.  This might very well bring it to the surface.  

Recognizing that such projection is far from perfect, it does give you an alternative to compare with sticking with the Meal Plan Readings.   I want to assert that with life decisions of this sort, there are no right answers.  But let's make one more point before we close.  If you expect to use self-teaching in an outside the class setting, you'll need some project to work on to give it a try.  Do you have such a project in mind?  That's got to be part of the decision process. 

Desserts

Desserts don't provide much in the way of nutrition, but they make you happy when you eat them.  Likewise the selections here, mainly part of a genre called page turner fiction, may not make you grow intellectually from reading them, but the read itself is quite enjoyable.  When I was working, I used to read at least one of these during each winter break.   

Once the authors of such books have developed a reputation with their readers and a first movie has been made that did well at the box office, it's almost as if from there on they are writing in full anticipation of a subsequent movie contract.  So, unlike what I said before, I think it's okay in this case to watch the movie first.  It might motivate you to read the book.   Alas, because of the commercial success of each of these books, there isn't a freely available version online.  

A Sampling:

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
I feel more than a bit guilty in admitting that I became a big Thomas Harris fan and read all his books, not all of which deal with Hannibal Lecter and serial killers.  The guilt comes from truly enjoying macabre characters and their interactions with more normal people, when this is presented in fiction, where if it were non-fiction I'd be horrified.  This seems a personal inconsistency.  Yet others must have it too, as there is a new TV series now called Clarice which is also based on this book.  Like the other books on this list, the reason I didn't read this sort of thing while working is that I like to do nothing but read when I've got a book of this sort and you just can't do that when you have a job.

The Firm by John Grisham
Grisham is the master of Lawyer Fiction.  This is one of his earlier books.  I started to read it on a flight back home after my family visited my parents in Florida.  The kids were quite young then and I had the younger one asleep on my chest with his head on my left arm through the flight.  He didn't wake up on the trip and I was absorbed the entire time in the book.  I never had an experience of that sort before where the distractions were evident yet the book held me captive.  The movie, which features a young Tom Cruise, still comes on TV now and then.  

Contact by Carl Sagan
Sagan was a very well known astronomer and a Professor at Cornell while I was an undergrad there.  He would sometimes go on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  This story is based on real science, regarding the theoretic possibility of traveling to a planet in a remote star system, via a "wormhole" that enables faster than speed of light travel, and then speculation about getting in touch with societies from outside our solar system, ergo the title of the book.  For whatever reason, after reading the book and/or watching the movie that features Jodie Foster, I went on a jag about space travel and read some book by Kip Thorne about it that I don't much remember now.  The movie did not get great reviews, if I recall, and now it's from more than 20 years ago so might not stir current college students the same way it stirred me.  Yet the book might get kids to think about space travel now as a possibility and the story is quite good, even though as a fiction writer Sagan was an amateur.  

The Natural by Bernard Malamud
The movie became so popular that the musical theme would be played at major league ballparks during what seemed like a pivotal moment in the game.  But I'm guessing most people haven't read the book, which is quite different from the movie, much darker in the story it tells, yet engaging in its own right.  By darker I mean that the Roy Hobbs character was selfish, so not a good guy the way he is depicted in the movie.  Malamud is an interesting writer.  I recall reading The Fixer in high school.  As with other recommendations made here and in the previous posts, they are partly there as introductions to the authors.  Non-course students are free to explore other works by these authors if they so desire.  So it may be a bit unfair to characterize The Natural as page turner fiction.  It did read that way for me.

The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood by Jane Leavy
This is the only non-fiction book on the list.  It is a biography of Mickey Mantle, written well after his playing days were over.   While Leavy did a lot of background research as well, she had several extensive interviews with Mantle, and since he had been out of baseball for a while with quite a different perspective than when he was a player.  This book depicts him as a charmer, but also as a flawed human being, leading a tragic life because of his own self-destruction.  Yet he was a hero to us.  When I was a young kid in New York he was the best player on the Yankees, who were then in their twilight.  And you could see him on TV in commercials, such as this one for Maypo.  To make a connection between Mantle and The Natural, Mantle came up to the Major Leagues in 1951.  Willie Mays came up the same year.  The Natural was published in 1952.   This seems more than a coincidence to me.

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov 
I'm not a big fan of science fiction and read it only sparingly.  In this case, back in summer 1987, for one month I was a visiting scholar in the Economics Department at the Nova University in Lisbon, Portugal.  My hosts were quite good to me, but on the weekends I was left to my own devices.  Eventually I found a bookstore which had some English language books, though not a large selection.  I bought The Foundation Trilogy there and read the entire thing over one weekend.  Truthfully, I don't recall much of the story and, looking at the Wikipedia entry for it, nothing in the specifics of the story jumped out at me. So here is another example where I'm basing the recommendation entirely on the experience of reading it all the way through rather quickly, rather than on the particulars of the narrative.  For the latter, you'll have to get a recommendation elsewhere.  

On the Road by Jack Kerouac
This is another book that might be classified as serious fiction rather than the page turner variety.  I read it much earlier than any of the other books on the list, while I was a junior in college.  I had a housemate who became a very good friend that year.  He was a Deadhead.  We spent a lot of time listening to the Skull and Roses album.  Eventually, he suggested that I read On the Road (and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Neal Cassady is a character in both and serves to connect the two) to give context for the music.  On the Road is about the Beat Generation, the artistic generation that preceded the Hippies.  The book creates a romantic view of the lifestyle and offered a challenge to someone like me - could you live on the road?  This challenge is also in Bob Dylan's song, Like a Rolling Stone.  At the time of reading On the Road, I really had little idea of what I'd do after college (ultimately, I went to grad school in economics) so these thoughts engaged me much more than they would if I had my future well plotted out.  Covid would seem to put thoughts of living on the road at bay, at least for now.  But if non-course students are reconsidering their own future plans, On the Road may offer a romantic diversion for them.  

Alternative Entrees

This post will be devoted to book length works, fiction and non-fiction, but not those listed on the site's Reading Habit/Reading List page. These are also unlikely to be found on other reading lists students will get in their college courses.  But they are compelling reads and might completely engage non-course students.

For several of these there is a movie version.  My suggestion is to read the book first.  Then either don't watch the movie at all or watch it only after having read the book.  Nowadays, many people view watching the movie as a substitute for reading the book.  For those in the non-course, it is not a substitute.  And quite often the movie excludes so much from the book that the story is lost.  I will provide brief movie reviews after giving the annotated list of books.

Full Length Books:

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel 
This is historical fiction.  Other references will say it is about the Armenian genocide by the Turks.  My view is that while it is about that era, it is more about casting the Armenians as a noble people.  I learned about this book from my mother, a Holocaust survivor.  It is said that the Armenian genocide is what gave Hitler the idea to kill the Jews.  My mom wanted me to read it when I was a teenager.  I eventually read it sometime in my 50s.  Werfel is a very skillful storyteller and this book is a great adventure story, quite apart from the historical context.  I felt sad when I got to the end of the book and there was no more of it to read.

Lust for Life by Irving Stone
This is biographical fiction about Vincent van Gogh.  Before he became a painter he was a member of the clergy, assigned to a very poor mining region called the Borinage.  What he had been trained to do in his religious studies seemed unreal to him in providing spiritual guidance to these people, so he actually went into the mines to minister to the miners.  This passion presaged how he would go about his painting, which he did as a hobby while a minister, but which he turned to full time after his health failed and he was kicked out of the church.  Van Gogh is famous for cutting off his own ear, an externalization of the mania that haunted him, but that may also have been a big driver of his creativity.  At the time, the mania was diagnosed as a kind of epilepsy.  Recently other alternative explanations have been proposed.

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar (This book is too recent for it to be freely available.) 
This is biography, non-fiction.  It is about the life of John Nash.  If you study economics or mathematics, you will immediately recognize Nash as a giant in the field.  His noncooperative equilibrium concept is central in game theory and in its application, such as in the study of imperfect competition.  But if you're outside of those fields, you might not have heard of him, which makes him unlike van Gogh, a household name.  But like van Gogh, Nash too had mental illness, in this case schizophrenia.  His most creative worked happened before this was diagnosed.  So, this is another example of a seeming tie between genius and mental illness, a theme that can be captivating.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (I could not find a free version online.  I did see several recent sites (within the last 5 years) that discuss the relevance of this book to the present.  So it might very well appear in a current college course.  Nonetheless, it satisfies the other criteria for my choice of books here, so I'm keeping it on the list. 

This is a fantastic novel, recounting the life of the main character, a Black man, from one episode to the next, as he grows older and as he moves generally in the direction going north.  The full trip from the deep south to Harlem gives the path of the adventure.  Invisible in the title is a metaphor from how Black people appear in the larger society and how they see themselves in that society.  It is not a protest book, but it does offer a scathing critique of America as a supposed society where all are equal.  

The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
This is non-fiction. I read this book in college, I think it was the spring semester 1975.  It was one of the required readings in a course on American political thought.  Some of the readings were over my head (particularly a book by Heimert) while other readings were manageable and engaging.  But this book went to still  another level for me.  I thought it a revelation.  It is one of the main texts of the Progressivist Era in American politics.  In Croly's book, the hero is Abraham Lincoln, for he saved the Union.  I confess not to remember it much beyond that, but the emotional impact it had on me is something that stays with me even now.

Network by Paddy Chayefsky
This is a screenplay, so fiction but not in novel form.  It was published in 1976.  It is all the more amazing in retrospect, since a feature of the story is a news media star, Howard Beale, telling members of his audience to get madder than hell and not take it any more. This idea that media personalities influence their audience, in a way to make them very angry, was quite alien at the time Network was published.  Most of us watched TV News on over the air channels (these required rabbit ear antennas to pick up the signal).  The most famous newscaster of the day, Walter Cronkite of CBS, was very staid in his demeanor.  The newscasters on NBC and ABC also were very staid.  Cable began to change that, particularly the show Crossfire.  Rush Limbaugh then changed it for radio.  Of course, stoking the audience is a normal feature of news programming now.  It's as if Chayefsky knew that was coming.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
This is science fiction, but not in the mold of Star Wars.  The title is a reference to the temperature at which paper will burn spontaneously.  And the theme is that society is now searching out books to burn them, in effect to nullify reading.  There is a small group of like minded people who are committed to preserving books. They are the heroes of the story.  Literally, the science part of the story is dated, as many people read online now and digital preservation is a different animal from paper preservation.  Metaphorically, the story still works quite well.  Smart phones, Twitter,  as well as TV and online programming that stokes the audience, all seem aimed at getting people to make snap judgments about things and not read anything slowly and carefully.  Indeed, this book might serve as the flagship for the non-course.

Dubliners by James Joyce
This is a collection of short stories, so conceivably could have been included in the Appetizers page, but Joyce is a challenge to read, even as he is considered among the best writers of the 20th century.  (I've read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and started Ulysses twice, but never made it very far.)  So I'm including it here, as the last item on the page.  Readers need practice with other works before trying this one.  Joyce grew up in Ireland, but then left to live in France.  I believe these stories were written while in France, based on earlier memories he had from growing up.  Some of those memories were bitter (otherwise, why leave?) and the stories might be seen as criticism of Irish society at that time.  But there is an elegance and artistry in writing, that makes it a pleasure to read.  

Movie Versions:

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh - the movie is terrible.  I only watched it a little.  That was enough.

Lust for Life - the movie stars Kirk Douglas, who looks somewhat like Vincent van Gogh.  I thought the movie was rather well done, but it is an old style, unlike contemporary movies. 

A Beautiful Mind - quite a lot is omitted from the movie that is in the book.  Further, the movie makes a certain device for showing the hallucinations that Nash had, they become characters in the film, that shows the difficulty of describing hallucinations that are fundamentally inside the head of Nash.  The movie is entertaining, but is somehow other than the book. 

Invisible Man - Ellison apparently didn't want a movie made of the book.  He has since passed away.  From my little bit of online searching, I learned that Hulu will be releasing a TV series based on the book in the near future. 

The Promise of American Life - there is no movie associated with the book.  

Network - the movie is excellent.  Peter Finch, who played the character Howard Beale in the movie, and who died soon thereafter, won the Academy Award for best actor.  The award was given posthumously.

Fahrenheit 451 - I may have seen the movie from 1966, but I don't remember doing so.  (In trying to remember it, I started to recall Jules and Jim, another film that starred Oskar Werner.) Another movie version was made in 2018.  I haven't seen it.  

Dubliners - The last story in the collection is called The Dead.  Some have called it the best short story ever written.  John Huston, the famous director and I believe of Irish decent, made a movie of The Dead, the last movie he made.  The production is meticulous in following the story and the sets are perfect.  Yet at the crucial juncture in the story, I thought the movie failed, again because the action was happening in the head of the protagonist, and it's impossible to convey that in a movie.  I don't know whether there have been movies made about any of the other stories in Dubliners.  That would be something to check out. 

Salads

In this post we'll consider essays, the non-fiction analog of short stories, which we sampled in the previous post.  But I want to first consider the issue, for me this is the crux of the matter, whether students make good meaning of what they read.  As was mentioned in the previous post, the difficulty of  the piece they are reading might matter as would the intended audience for the piece.  I want to focus on pieces meant for a general audience and at the difficulty level at or near that of a New York Times article, an Op-Ed piece, or a somewhat longer piece in the Sunday Magazine.   Nowadays, there are free online tools that measure reading difficulty, such as this one.  I used it on Gail Collins' latest column called, Trump's Dreaded Nickname.  The results are below.  

The results suggest that college students should be able to make good meaning of Gail Collins humorous piece.  Yet my experience in teaching over the years, dating back at least to the mid to late 1990s, when the New York Times first appeared online, is that there would always be a handful of students who had this ability, but a majority of my class would not.  I developed this impression from some Q&A done in the live class session, not by formal testing.  Believing that my conclusions were typical of instructors, at least of college students who study economics, one wonders why it is true.  I got some insight on this four or five years ago from a student who was brutally honest with me, much more so than I'd have been were I in her shoes.  This was in regard to a piece I wrote that was posted on the course Web site.  She reported that she had skimmed it, but hadn't read it carefully.  Skimming works can be a rational response to information overload.  I'll give her that.  But if it precludes reading anything slowly and deeply, then a second reason emerges for not being able to make good meaning of a piece of reading.  The student, lacking practice in doing that, doesn't have the requisite skill.  I fear that far too many college students don't read anything meant for a general audience in a slow and deliberate manner.

For students in the non-course, the skimming argument should be irrelevant, as the students need to be time abundant to participate. With that as precondition, my motive for offering the non-course is to see whether students can get that requisite practice in reading, and reflecting, and learning in the process.  Part of that experiment is finding reading materials that might resonate with the student to encourage such practice.  On this, I confess that I'm out of my element.  I don't have the mindset of a current college student.  So I'm making a rather large assumption, suggesting works that appealed to me in the hope that they'll also appeal to current students as well.  Another part of the experiment is giving feedback, once the students do write about their reflections, with that type of coaching keeping the students engaged in the reading activity.  On this I'm somewhat more confident, as I've done this sort of thing in my economics teaching where each student would write a weekly blog post  and the majority of students expressed that they valued the feedback a lot. But, in the economics course the students wrote to a prompt I provided to them ahead of time.  What if students were to read something that I hadn't read and write reflections on that?  Would my comments on those reflections then only be worth a hill of beans?  I don't know.  

There is still another issue to confront.  What makes a piece truly for the general interest or, alternatively, what makes the piece more specialized for a specific interest?  Put a different way, what is the reader expected to already know before reading the piece?  If most readers don't know what the author expects them to know, then the author will have failed in writing the piece for the general interest, unless the author produces a version of the piece that includes all the necessary background information to get the readers caught up.  Part of general education is giving the student background information of this sort, so the reader already is conversant with it or can do a quick research to become conversant with it. But across generations and across cultures, there surely will be disagreement as to what constitutes the right type of general education.  I only want to note here that in making good meaning of a non-fiction piece, the reader needs to understand the context in which the author is writing.  Getting that understanding may require reading other things than just the piece in question.  

Apart from making good meaning of a piece, there are several reasons why a reader would find reading the piece a difficult thing to do, even if it is a small step (as compared to a book length work).  Here are some possible reasons the reader might find it difficult to do, though I'm sure this is an incomplete list.  

• The reader has no interest in the subject matter that the piece deals with. To avoid the retort that the reader is closed minded, let me posit that all of us limit our interests somewhat and it is okay to do that.  For example, the last video game I can recall playing was in 1999.  A piece about current video games would be of no interest to me. 
• The piece is meant to be persuasive.  The style of the author is much akin to the style of a salesman.  The reader is offended by being sold something where ahead of time the reader expressed no interest in buying. An alternative that is more readable is to make the argument the author wants to make but also make the counterargument and let the reader chose from among them.  The reader should find that more balanced approach less offensive.
• There are errors in the piece - logical, evidentiary, spelling and grammar, etc.  The reader feels that she could have written a better version of the piece than the author did.  I want to note here that I'm referring to a piece written by a so-called expert.  As an instructor reading student writing, I expect errors of this sort.  We all learn by making mistakes.  Part of my task as instructor is to encourage the student author from not making the same mistake a second time.
• Somebody who is close to the reader suggested that the reader have a go at the piece.  The reader has issues with that somebody and that clouds the view the reader has of the piece. 

Some of these situations can be avoided, at least to some degree.  If the reader is open to trying new things as far as what to read, the reader may find after the fact that the subject matter was not interesting.  That will prevent trying other pieces on the same subject, but not the first one.  Sometimes it only takes a paragraph or two to feel that a piece is a sales job.  Putting the piece down after that can make sense and then is not indicative that the reader lacks follow through.  Pieces in well regarded publications have been reviewed by others and might very well have been copy edited.  So the error risk is far less.  I'll leave the managing of close relationships and reading to somebody else who can speak to it more intelligently than I can.  Here, I'm just acknowledging that it can matter. 

Let me close this discussion part of the post with the observation that I read fiction and non-fiction quite differently.  I don't know if that is true for others, but I think it worth describing how these types of reading differ for me.  With fiction, after I've gotten into the story, which unfortunately takes longer now than it used to, I'm completely absorbed in it and my mind has tuned out everything else that is going on.  With non-fiction, however, I have an argument with what I'm reading.  Really, it's an imagined argument with the author of the piece.  I certainly did this for reading economics papers submitted for review at a journal, where I was one of the referees of the paper.  Then it is very much like reading and reflection interspersed, rather than the reading coming first.  I might pause in the reading and develop an alternative model, or look for an alternative way to exposit the model that the author put forward.  If I thought that overall there was something I was learning from reading the paper, then my goal was to improve the paper and tell the editor to encourage a revise and resubmit.  If I thought the point the author was making was trivial, I'd content myself with one way to illustrate that to the editor.  I find that I read other non-fiction pieces somewhat in this manner, even when I'm simply a reader, not a referee.  After I've done that I will often write a post in my blog Lanny on Learning, to externalize my formative thinking.  In that sense, I do practice what I preach.

I hope that the recommendations which follow get over these hurdles and the non-course readers (and others too) find them engaging.  

Readable General Interest Pieces:

Writers on Writing from the New York Times
This is a collection of essays from a series the Times ran more than 20 years ago, featuring some of the best known writers of the time.  Each author writes about some issue with writing that the author found was of central importance.  Many are authors of well-known novels.  While the entire series is excellent, I want to specifically mention two of the pieces.  The one by E.L. Doctorow considers the effects that movies and TV had on the novel.  He bemoans this as a matter of style, but recognizes that more contemporary novels have less description and are less wordy.  Reading older fiction may be a way for students in the non-course to slow down the world and get their minds more engaged in a single thing. The other piece is by Saul Bellow, who talks fondly of his relationship to readers, those that give his works serious reading.  Conversely, he is not interested in the reader who might open the book, but soon put it down, never to pick it up again.  Bellow feels a debt to serious readers, but not such obligation to these other readers, even if they buy his book.   This makes the mindset of an author in the mold of Bellow different from the mindset of a profit maximizer, who would want the largest audience possible.  Book publishers are more in that second category, as are movie producers.  For an author with a well established reputation, there is no problem.  But for an author writing the first novel, it's a real challenge to get recognition. 

The Overprotected Kid by Hanna Rosin

There has been an argument floating about for the last five or ten years, maybe a bit longer, that current college students are fragile, since they didn't learn to take the normal hard knocks of life during childhood.  A big reason for this is that they were mainly in activity supervised by adults, and only rarely in play with other kids with no adult present.  In turn, parents who are well meaning may have thought the adult supervision necessary, to make sure the kids were safe.  In the immediate term, that makes sense.  But in the longer term, the parents were smothering their children.  This piece makes the argument specifically in regard to playgrounds, but the theme of the piece can be readily extended to all sorts of other play kids (should have) engaged in.

In Front of Your Nose by George Orwell

Orwell was one of the most prescient thinkers and writers of the 20th century.  This essay is a rather harsh reminder that even thoughtful people have tendency to believe in things that taken together are self-contradictory - if one is true, the other can't be true.  So we must be constantly diligent to purge our beliefs of such inconsistencies and arrive at a worldview that is not evidently wrong from the get go.  The piece can be taken as a rather harsh commentary on our politics today. 

The Streak of Streaks by Stephen Jay Gould

On one level, this is a fun baseball piece about Joe DiMaggio's famous 56 consecutive games hitting streak.  At a different level, it servers as a foundational piece for behavioral economics, although Gould himself was an evolutionary biologist.  The issue is the "hot hand" in sports.  Is it just like an optical illusion when it's really just that a very good player will have a hot streak now and then?  Or was the player really hot.  Can statisticians decide that for us in a way that will convince the rest of the population?  If you find this piece a good read, you might have a look at a blog post I wrote some time ago that makes mention of several other things to read which are connected to these ideas.  

The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem

Students are taught a rather mechanical view of plagiarism - cite your sources when writing a paper - but it is delivered as more rules to follow, like not driving over the speed limit.  On a much more fundamental level one should ask, where do the ideas of a creative person come from?  Are they hatched out of nothingness? No, they aren't.  Invariably they come from what was before, then considered in a new way.  But if we've been thinking about something for quite a while before producing a work, do we recall when we first started and what was the catalyst for that?  In this fantastic essay Lethem takes us through several well known pieces where there are possible antecedents that are not as well known.  Perhaps that's the rule, not the exception. 

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is a provocative piece about how the country might repair itself and own up to all the damages it has done because of Slavery, then Jim Crow, and then Separate but Equal.  There have been some more recent pieces on the same subject.  This one was written while President Obama was still in office and Black Lives Matter had only recently happened as a movement.   Since my mom was a survivor of the Holocaust, and ultimately received pensions from both Germany and Austria for denial of her education, I was probably more disposed than most readers to the arguments made here.  But if you asked seriously, how can we in America get past our own divisiveness, wouldn't something like this be part of the answer?

How Inequality Threatens Civil Society by Angus Deaton (If your university library has access to Scientific American, maybe you can view this for free.  Otherwise, I'm afraid, there's a charge for access.)

Angus Deaton is a Nobel Prize winner in economics.  He and his wife Anne Case have done fundamental research on the social consequences of inequality in economic circumstance.  This piece is written for non-economists to give them an appreciation of all the pernicious consequences of inequality.  Having so many people live with a sense of hopelessness is terribly destructive.  This piece was published prior to the 2016 election.  The economy was in reasonably good shape and there was no pandemic.  Yet these issues existed, even then.  Sometimes, when the economy appears healthy, we tend to ignore the plight of those who are suffering.  Now that may be more evident, as we are all suffering to some degree.  Yet those who lack income suffer much more.  

The Lesson of Tal Afar by George Packer

This piece is from 2006 and is about the Iraq War.  It is one of the very few pieces I read at the time that suggested some optimism as to outcome, and explained the mechanism for achieving that, having tea with the locals and being respectful in those interactions.  Since the piece appeared in the New Yorker, it wasn't from a place that was cheerleading for the war.  It's interesting to read from that perspective.  

Longer and More Specialized Pieces:

Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities Boyer Commission Report

This report is from the late 1990s.  It is thoughtful on the following question/issue.  The lifeblood of research universities is research.  That's what professors focus on.  That's what administrators promote.  However, most undergraduates live outside of the research environment.  This is not true of graduate students in doctoral programs, who do become part of the research culture.  The question is, how can undergraduates become insiders in this environment rather than persist as outsiders?  I believe the reality is that little to no progress has been made about embracing the recommendations in the report.  However, the report does define the issue well and may still be quite relevant regarding what research universities should be doing. 

The Bonds of Nationality by Albion W. Small

I believe that Albion Small was the initial President of the American Sociological Society, so this paper reads partially like one aimed at academics.  It was published in 1915, before America had formally entered into World War I, and near the end of the Progressive Period in American history.  It is interesting with thinking of nationality, specifically for America, as a kind of religious feeling.  As the piece was written after a very large wave of immigration, mainly from Europe, where most of the immigrants were running away from threats in the Old Country, it is interesting to consider what they were running toward and how they each could feel part of the same whole in spite of strong differences in their origins. 

Appetizers

At the start of a regular regime of reading during leisure time (or other time that hasn't been planned for some specific activity) it is useful to view this as the forming of a new habit.  The obvious question then is this. What can you do to make the behavior stick, so it does indeed become a habit?  Conversely, what behavior will encourage you to give up too early?  Of course, the answer may depend on attributes specific to you; you may differ from others that way.  Let us try to focus on behaviors that are quite common and you can be the judge whether these apply to you. To aid the discussion, let us distinguish a "plunge right in" approach from a "lots of small steps" approach.  I will focus mainly on one issue here - procrastination.  We all procrastinate from time to time, primarily in certain tasks that we find uncomfortable in some way.  Which approach will make you procrastinate less with reading during leisure time?

I subscribe to the lots of small steps approach.  Here's why.  Each step seems not so difficult, so you're apt to complete it once you've gotten started with it.  Even if in the middle of the step you find some blockage that makes you want to stop, you can already see the finish line so can put in the necessary effort to complete the race.  And if you do have success of this sort with the early steps, then you likely have built up some confidence that you can complete subsequent steps.  

Now I want to add a wrinkle that might not be obvious in prospect, but certainly should be evident in retrospect.  If you are taking a step, are you more likely to complete it if it is work or if it is play?  

For our small steps we will begin with short stories, most that were written to entertain the reader - pleasure reading, if you will.  What gives you pleasure this way may change over time, but let's begin with some short stories that have appealed to a broad audience.  Mainly, our appetizers have been selected from that set of short stories.  

A Bit of Reflection Now and Then

After reading two or three of these, you might take some time to consider questions: (a) about what you have read, (b) about how the reading went for you, and (c) anything else where the reading piques your interest.  The reading suggestions have been deliberately chosen to be from the past, some from more than 100 years ago.  Nonetheless, does the story somehow connect to the present, either to you personally or to the events of our time?  Are you able to make a mental image of what the protagonist in the story describes? If so, does doing that give some sense of traveling, geographically and temporally?  Once you started in the reading, were you absorbed by it or did you check your phone/laptop for messages in the midst of the story?  Did you force yourself to complete reading or was it enjoyable to do near the end?  

At this point, I suggest trying to keep the reflection light, so don't feel obligated to write something about your reflections.  (That would make the steps larger than they should be at the beginning.)  We'll talk about this again when reading some non-fiction essays.  Let me note one other thing here.  It would be good to know whether you found the stories readable, a bit challenging, or too difficult.  Some of the longer pieces listed at the end might be in the challenging category.  I intended that with their selection.

Selected Short Stories:

The Lady, or the Tiger by Frank R. Stockton
I like this story because it offers a puzzle, but not one that is logical, rather one that requires projecting the internal views of another character in the story.  We're often told to walk in someone else's shoes.  Can we really do that?  Stockton wrote a sequel called The Discourager of Hesitancy.  If you liked the story, you might try that as well. 

The Ransom of Red Chief by O. Henry
The story is humorous in an ironic way.  It is an example of the phrase - the best laid plans can go astray.  They certainly do in this story.  It also gives a particular setting for considering the following proposition.  We tend to be optimistic when we initiate a project, but then we must be realistic when we manage it.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe
This is not Poe's best known short story.  I chose it because it is an example of detective/mystery fiction.  The story offers clues about what is actually going on.  Can you take those clues and figure it out for yourself?  Indeed, this story was the first of the genre, written before Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie about Hercule Poirot, and many other very entertaining and compelling story tellers wrote mystery fiction.  For us, making good meaning of a story, fiction or non-fiction, is a big deal.  In that sense everything we'll be reading is a mystery, for us to make sense out of it.

The Enchanted Bluff by Willa Cather
What parts of childhood stay with us as we become adults?  Are our hopes shaped by the stories we heard as kids?  This is a delightful story that illustrates how that might happen.  A good part of it is describing the Midwest outdoors from the perspective of kids.  There is a certain enchantment in their perspective.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber
Is daydreaming pure escapism? Or is it a necessary part of the creative process?  Why is it that when we star in our own daydreams we are seemingly heroes, though we are not heroes in our own day to day reality.  This is probably Thurber's best known work, though he was also quite well known for his illustrations that accompanied many of his stories. 

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
Surprise is a key element of many stories. It wakes the reader up to possibilities not previously considered, but more than that, it strongly suggests that we should not lock ourselves into our initial assumptions and must stay open to alternative possibilities.  If you read through The Lottery a second time, you will see that Jackson makes no attempt to hide the surprise.  It is we readers who inadvertently do that, by our implicit assumptions we make at the outset of the story.

Somewhat Longer and More Somber Stories:

Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville (Because the Web version at the link didn't have margins, I copied it into Word and posted it here.)
Each of these longer stories is full of angst, a word that seemingly should be part of the working vocabulary of most college students, as they too are going through difficult times as of late.  Bartleby is in a somewhat different circumstance than current college students, but maybe the similarities still are evident.  Melville, of course, is most well known for Moby Dick, a very long but quite a good read.  This is his best piece of shorter fiction. 

Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin
The story is from the early 1950s (before Brown v. Board of Education) and describes life in Harlem as well as how an older brother hurts for his younger sibling, who has gotten hooked on heroin, only to detox some and find his true calling, making music.  That music gives meaning to those who suffer so is something we all should reflect upon.  I wondered reading this whether things were much different then or if mostly they are still the same.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
This is one of Kafka's most famous stories.  He tends to write in abstractions, in this case the protagonist turns into a cockroach, and it is the reader's job to understand what the abstraction affords the writer and what the writer expects the reader to take from that.  As I was trained in economic theory, I'm prone to think in an abstract manner.  As a general statement, abstractions get one to focus on a few particulars, while ignoring many others.   Some people have a taste for this sort of thing.  Others might be put off by it.  Let me note one other thing about this particular translation.  There are several small errors/typos.  It shouldn't block your ability to read the piece, but you might have to reread a sentence or two to make sure you are getting the meaning.