Professors suggest reading list beyond the syllabus

It's Sunday night. You're facing several hundred pages of reading, and you haven't read something for fun in ages. You can't help but wonder, "What's the point of knowing the definition of Kant's moral imperative? What's the point of knowing what the life of a midwife in the 17th-century was like? And what's the point of memorizing the first 50 lines of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English?" Presumably, a liberal arts education is intended to do more than give you a cocktail-party knowledge of philosophy, history, or English. Surely, you think, your professor would want you to read something other than the books on your syllabus, something that would teach you about life beyond midterms. With that in mind, The Yale Herald sought some Yale professors to find out exactly what they like to read in their spare time, and what they would have us read outside of class.

When was asked what book he would want everyone to read at some point in his or her lifetime, political science professor H. Bradford Westerfield, TD '47, adamantly refused to name one book. In the category of fiction, he began with Herman Melville's Moby Dick: "[The book] has the superb character of Ahab, the embodiment of a driven hero, into which one could read much at both a psychological and social level." But he also pointed to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov for "its sweeping feel of social, political, and cultural problems of the 19th and 20th centuries."

Westerfield also noted the importance of George Orwell's 1984 for people facing the state of the world today. "It expresses, better than any other book in English, the potential and real horrors of the 20th century," he said. "In a way, we've moved beyond the issues outlined in this book, but in many ways, we haven't."

Westerfield, rumored to have been a CIA recruiter earlier in his career, suggested--after much hesitation--that in the category of non-fiction, everyone should read the selected (he emphasized "selected") works of Marx and Lenin. "This is not because I am a Marxist," he said, "but because Marx and Lenin have had a great influence on the world, and because they express more of the essential life of the 19th and 20th centuries--even the 21st century."

Allan Stam, a political science professor who has taught classes on war and society, didn't pick a sweeping war saga, but quickly chose John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. "It's the best book written by an American novelist," he asserted. "It's a fictional work, but it provides accurate historical commentary on an important period in American history and on issues and problems that still persist. The novel discusses the problems of poor people in a way that's more nuanced than `poor people have problems.'"

Biology professor Nicholas Ornston didn't pick the biochem textbook. "I think every person in academia should read Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire," he said. "It's fun, a great send-up of academic style. For example, there's an index in the back of the book in which one reference is cross-indexed to another reference which is cross-indexed to another reference. It basically cross-indexes forever."

History professor Cynthia Russett, GRD '64, also had social issues in mind when she picked Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. She said she considers Invisible Man to be a great book because it's well-crafted, and also because of its enormous social significance. "It speaks out on the anguish of African American experience before the consciousness of the general public was widely raised," she said. "Written before the civil rights movement, its balance, wisdom, and sanity are remarkable."

History professor Frank Turner, who teaches the works of writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke, picked a novel about New York high-society life by Henry James. "Portrait of a Lady is a wonderfully structured book, which says a lot about the nature of human relationships and how they operate in a world of shadows, of reality and unreality," he said.

Chinese history professor Jonathan Spence, SY '61, GRD '65, recommended his favorite literary slice. "Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education is a great book about love and war and misperceptions about both," he said. "If you read it, you'll know why it's a great book."

English professor Wai Chee Dimock, GRD '82, carefully stated that she didn't believe that literary critics were better qualified at picking great literature than other widely read people. "Literary critics have theories in which they're heavily invested, and that can skew their view of literature," she remarked. That said, she chose William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. "It's very funny," she said. "It manages to be very difficult and very funny at the same time, and it reveals the complexity of ordinary people's minds. I think it's the closest approximation of what actual people's lives are like."

Of all the professors surveyed, English Professor Laura King had the current political situation most in mind in her book choice. "I don't believe there's a book that every single person in the world should read, but right now, Americans could read Mark Twain's late anti-imperialist writing, such as `To the Person Sitting in Darkness,'" she said. "Savagely witty yet driven by compassion, exasperated by politics yet deeply engaged, Twain inspires us to stay focused on the big problems and to devote our diverse talents and best energies to solving them."

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