For the next few days, you have the rare luxury of no immediately pressing assignments—I elide the vocabulary quiz, for which I assume you can study efficiently.
What to do with all that spare time?
Answer: read.
A great student distinguishes him- or herself from the great mass of undergraduates at UW–Madison by carrying a book around everywhere: s/he is always, always in the middle of a book.
You want professors to see you waiting for class with a book in your hands, and you want them to ask “What’re you reading?” Your answer doesn’t have to be impressive—a student who reads Moby Dick in her spare time will seem a bit kooky, or at least destined for grad school; it’s impressive enough that you are so intellectually curious that you use your off time to read.
And with 7.3 million books in UW–Madison’s libraries, there’s not a book in the world you will actually have to pay for.
So, what to read?
- Did you like something we’ve read this summer? The short story writers we read have books of stories out; several of them have novels as well. Charlotte Brontë has another fantastic novel—Villette—that picks up many of Jane Eyre’s themes, or you might try her sister Emily Brontë’s extraordinary, extraordinary Wuthering Heights.
- If you’re more into the music we’ve been listening to this summer, how about Leonard Bernstein’s The Joy of Music?
- Or if you’ve been enjoying this week’s movies, how about a biography of Alfred Hitchcock? Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Light and Darkness by Patrick McGilligan (2004).
- Or try a friend’s recommendation—it is my personal mission to tell everyone I meet to read Junot Díaz’s new novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. (It might be the Wuthering Heights of our lifetime.)
- Or pick up a book you’ve always heard about but have never read—I do this all the time (right now I’m reading A Tale of Two Cities, which I’ve always meant to get around to).
Tags: 2008
