ENGL 175: Literature and Ideas: Literary Reads

Glory Edim launches her Well-Read Black Girl Library with this vital anthology celebrating stories from such luminaries as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Since founding the Well-Read Black Girl Book Club in 2015, Glory Edim's profile has skyrocketed. From her roots in a Brooklyn-based community to a massive online following, she has been heralded as the literary tastemaker for a new generation. With On Girlhood, Edim has beautifully curated a canonical work centering around the voices of young Black characters as they contend with innocence, belonging, love, and self-discovery.

Reflecting on her own reading life, Nancy Malone examines the role that reading plays in defining ourselves. Throughout, she likens the experience of reading to walking a labyrinth, itself a metaphor for our journeys through life. The paths within the labyrinth are not straight, but winding, and in the end, it is not the small circle in the center that defines the self, but the whole grand design of the labyrinth--every experience, every person we meet, and every book we read--that makes us who we are. Malone draws from diverse sources, both spiritual and secular--Augustine, George Herbert, George Eliot, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Paul Tillich, Elie Wiesel, James Agee, E.E. Cummings, Tom Wolfe, Patrick O'Brien, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Atwood and Sue Grafton, to name a few. The author's analysis of influential books covers a broad range of subjects, including childhood reading; books as sacred objects; reading and social responsibility; "dangerous" reading (that challenges us to examine our prejudices and beliefs); poetry; and erotic literature. The book includes a bibliography to inspire readers to seek out the unfamiliar or return to old favorites. In Walking a literary labyrinth, Malone invites readers of all religious traditions, or none, to consider the influence of reading in their own lives.

Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom. Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. Always dazzling in his ability to draw connections between texts across continents and centuries, Bloom instructs readers in how to immerse themselves in the different literary forms. Bloom not only provides illuminating guidance on how to read a text but also illustrates what such reading can bring -- aesthetic pleasure, increased individuality and self-knowledge, and the lifetime companionship of the most engaging and complex literary characters.

Robert DiYanni's You Are What You Read is a guide for readers that seeks to restore the pleasures of reading lost in the digital age.

A series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy. Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection.

While traveling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the novel he was reading (Goethe's Elective Affinities) seemed to reflect the social chaos of the world he was living in. An article in the daily paper would be suddenly illuminated by a passage in the novel a long reflection would be prompted by a single word. He decided to keep a record of these moments, rereading a book a month, and forming A Reading Diary: a volume of notes, reflections, impressions of travel, of friends, of events public and private, all ellicited by his reading. From Don Quixote (August) to The Island of Dr. Moreau (February) to Kim (April), Manguel leads us on an enthralling adventure in literature and life, and demonstrates how, for the passionate reader, one is utterly inextricable from the other.

What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey? Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface--a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character--and there's that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you. In this practical and amusing guide to literature, Thomas C. Foster shows how easy and gratifying it is to unlock those hidden truths, and to discover a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain is never just rain. Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, How to Read Literature Like a Professor is the perfect companion for making your reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.