My own peculiar worry about Academe 2020, offered with less than 20/20 foresight, may seem less catastrophic: the death of the book as object of study, the disappearance of “whole” books as assigned reading. Does that count as a preposterous figment of extreme academe, or is it closer than we think?

I don’t mean the already overwrought debate over the crisis of the book as codex—the daily New York Times announcement that electronic readers stand primed to eliminate paper books. (This shift, of course, plays into the problem, since any shrewd publishing type can see how the paper book’s demise might make it easier to digitally trim, abridge, and repackage texts in more “appealing” forms than their benighted authors envisaged.) The issue isn’t the decline in book sales, though it, too, remains an element of the big picture. I am talking about the growing feeling among humanities professors—intuitive and anecdotal, shared over lunch like an embarrassing tale about a colleague—that for too many of today’s undergraduates, reading a whole book, from A to Z, feels like a marathon unfairly imposed on a jogger.

When I finished reading the article I felt the need to read only really long novels for the rest of my life.

When you get used to a routine that means most of your time every evening is spent doing homework with only a few minutes to read before bed and then there is suddenly no homework to do it sort of throws one for a loop. It took me awhile to figure out what to do with myself last night. But of course when it dawned on me that I can read, all was right with the world.

So I finished Mansfield Park and will let that sit in my brain another day or so before I write anything about it. This was book number 15 in Emily’s TBR Challenge. I have five and a half more to go:

• The half is Hermione Lee’s bio of Edith Wharton. I am planning on finishing it while I am on quarter break.
• The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley. This is as fat as the Wharton bio. I have serious doubts I will be able to finish it this year but I will try.
• A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland.
• Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman.
• 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.
• A Human Eye by Adrienne Rich.

Not too bad. The year isn’t over yet, right?

This morning on the way to work I noticed a tree already turning red. And then I checked in at Carl’s to find out that it is time for the R.I.P. Challenge. Today is a good day. I am going for a combo platter of sorts this year of novels and short stories with no set goal of reading a certain number by October 31st. My time once school begins again becomes uncertain. So, here are a few things I plan to draw from:

• Dracula by Bram Stoker. My Bookman insisted I add this to my list this year when he discovered I had never read it. I’ll be partaking of the Norton Critical Edition.
• Various ghost stories by Edith Wharton. I’m still working my way through Hermione Lee’s mammoth biography of her and I would love to sample her ghost stories, especially since Wharton herself did not like to read ghost stories because they frightened her. Oh irony!
• I’d also like to try some ghost stories by M.R. James. I have never read him but I hear they are pretty good.
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I think I might be the last person to read this one.
• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. If time allows I would love to reread this. It has been a very long time since I first read it and Colm Toibin’s The Master has a fictionalized telling of the novella’s creation which has had me wanting to read it since Toibin’s book earlier this year.

That seems to be enough. I could add more but that would really be going overboard since I said at the beginning I didn’t know how much time I would have to devote to the pleasures of reading come mid-September.

Until then, here is a little humor that one of my classmates posted to lift our tired spirits:

You can get this on a t-shirt from Neatoshop.

And for the scinetifically inclined gardener there is the Lawn Gegnome Project.

Recent studies are showing that people who don’t have words for certain concepts in their language can still understand the concept perfectly well (and it might be that they just express it in a different way). However, studies are finding our language does influence the way we see the world not because it doesn’t allow us to think about certain things but because of the things it obliges us to think about.

Take for instance languages like German or Spanish in which the nouns are gendered. People who speak those languages have to think about gender all the time and it appears to influence the ways they describe objects and the sort of characteristics they attribute to them.

Like I said, I haven’t finished reading the article yet, but so far it is quite interesting and I just had to share it with you since readers, I think, find language to be an especially fascinating topic.

Bookman and I just made our very first batch of nondairy ice cream thanks to our new play and freeze ice cream ball. It was fun and easy and preliminary taste tests say yum! We made vanilla for our first attempt. Bookman, my kitchen wizard, is already planning future variations. Have a good weekend everyone!

The other project is a group photo indexing project and that is moving along quite well. I get to be the lucky one who writes the section of the report about all the things we learned from the project. Yay (she says with heavy sarcasm).

The only reading I’ve been able to do outside of school work is during my commute and work day lunch break. I’m in about the last quarter of Mansfield Park. I must say my reaction to the book this time around is much different than when I read it in college. I actually am liking it this time, not loving it, but that is a significant improvement over hating it the first time I read it.

My projects for school will all be turned in by Thursday next week and I will then be free until my fall class starts on September 20th. The weekend of September 4th is a three-day holiday weekend here and I am so very much looking forward to it. I have decided to have a completely unplugged holiday. My computer will not be turned on once during those days. I am still planning my reading and other activities, but I am very much looking forward to it. I pre-ordered Jonathan Franzen’s new book Freedom and that should be here by then. Perhaps I will read that. Or maybe it will finally be time to read Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Or maybe I will finish some of the books I am in the middle of. Or maybe something else remarkable and currently unknown to me will sweep all other books away. Just thinking about it is absolutely delicious and is the only thing sustaining me through the tedium of my thesaurus which I now need to go spend some time with.