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2011-2012
January 27, 2012
A Serious Way of Wondering: The Ethics of Jesus Imagined
by Reynolds Price
Presented by Melissa Malouf, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of the Practice of English, Melissa Malouf earned her Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University of California at Irvine. She is the director of the Office of Undergraduate Scholars & Fellows, Duke’s umbrella organization for our premier merit scholarship programs. In 1997 she was selected by Duke students as winner of the Distinguished Undergraduate Alumni Teaching Award. Professor Malouf has been a Breadloaf Fellow, a Pushcart Prize winner, and is the author of a collection of short stories (NoGuarantees), a novel (It Had to Be You), three one-act plays, two opera libretti, and numerous book reviews. She has been the director of the Arts in Contemporary Society FOCUS program since 1998.
Why I chose this book
I am not in any sense a scholar of religion. And I can't claim, either, to share Reynold's acute sense of the presence of "the Risen Lord." But I am fascinated by the story-telling that takes place in this book--the "imagined narratives," as Reynolds calls them, that call upon both what he knows (Reynolds is a scholar of religion) and what he wants to know, what his study of the Gospels doesn't reveal. Over the years, Reynolds and I had conversations that covered just about everything--he was as attuned to and delighted by all things low-brow as he was about all things "high." And he knew that I was doing some serious wondering in my mid-forties when I entered the Catholic Church. I continue to wonder--and Reynolds's imagined narratives in this book are, dare I say, a god-send.
November 2, 2011
The Fire Next Time
by James Baldwin
Presented by Professor and Duke Alumnus,Timothy B. Tyson Ph.D.’94, visiting professor of American Christianity and Southern culture at Duke Divinity School and senior scholar of documentary studies at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies
Why I chose this book
James Baldwin once said that he left the church to preach the gospel. The Fire Next Time is a case in point. It remains one of the best books this country has ever produced, in my view. It uses a letter to his nephew, an autobiographical account of growing up in Harlem, and his story of a visit to Elijah Muhammed in 1961 as a pulpit on the meaning of race in American history. A powerful act of citizenship when it vaulted Baldwin to the front rank of interpreters and spokesmen of the civil rights movement when it was published in 1962, this book speaks as clearly to its topic today as it did then. It offers both a dire warning and a beacon of hope in language transcendent and stirring.
See discussion points as well as comments and questions from our readers.
October 6, 2011
Dingley Falls
by Michael Malone
Presented by Maureen Quilligan, R. Florence Binkley Professor of English
Discussion points:
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How did the novel speak to the time when it was first published (set in 1976, pub 1980)?
How does it speak to this present moment?
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What is the function of the explicit sexual content – what has this to do with the "secrecy" of the secret base?
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What is the significance of the 7 day structure and the religious framework?
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What is the relationship of the poetry of the prose to the politics?
Why I chose this book
Dingley Falls was the novel by my husband Michael Malone (his third) that made me realize he was not merely a very good popular novelist, but a writer whose work will endure for the ages. As one of my Yale University junior faculty colleagues said when she read it "How do you live with him?" I understood this to mean that she also knew how much of a classic the book is. I had a real struggle at that point: should I sacrifice my life to help him make great art? I decided that the art that needed to be made in the last quarter of the 20th century should not require a woman's self-sacrifice. I would continue to expect that he would help raise our child, cook, do the dishes, housework and so on. I would have my career and he would have his. I worked very hard at my career therefore, because I was asking him to support it when he was at writer of rare gifts who would be able to give the world literature that would last through the centuries. I knew this as certainly as I knew the sun rose and set each day, as part of my own professional expertise as a literary critic.
At first I didn't like Dingley Falls at all. It seemed heartlessly and ironically cold about the four women who are the focus of the opening pages who seemed middle aged and silly and all too much like each other, so that I had a hard time telling them apart. I actually went to church to meditate about what to do/say in response to my reading the first chapters. I think I decided just to say "let's see what happens" and to have faith that it would all turn out right. After I read it through for the first time, I thought it was an amazing but flawed novel, the satirical political parts about the government "Secret Base" not well integrated with the sagas of all the people living in the town. When I reread it recently I realized that it was not at all flawed, but perfect. I had completely missed the architectural elegance the first times through. I am a scholar of Renaissance literature and I reread Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser every year to teach their work to new generations of students. I see something new each time I read them. Every time I go back and read one of Michael's novels again, I have the same feeling of revelation of some new layer of experience I missed before, some new perfection that I had not yet seen. The book is a one of those perfect things that gleams in new ways every time you twist it differently to the light. How could he have anticipated HIV Aids, anthrax, the dissolution of the Republican center, the post-sixties turn in American society in the bicentennial year of 1976? I don't teach twentieth century fiction and this is my one chance to "teach" Dingley Falls.
2010-2011
Summer Reading
Eating Animals
by Jonathan Safran Foer
Presented by Jonathan Safran Foer
Watch the video of Jonathan Safran Foer discussing Eating Animals on August 25, 2011, as part of the Class of 2015 Summer Reading program.
At Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art: Eating Animals: a thematic installation of art inspired by the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, August 18-October 16, 2011. For the first time, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is collaborating with Duke Summer Reading and Duke Reads Online Book Club. An installation in the museum’s education gallery presents more than 30 works and will challenge visitors—whether carnivores, omnivores, vegetarians or vegans—to think about what eating meat means to them. It includes works in a variety of media spanning more than 2,000 years. For more information please visit www.nasher.duke.edu.
April 19, 2011
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
Presented by Sue Wasiolek
Why I chose this book
I remember reading this book more than 40 years ago and feeling so impacted by the overall story, the characters, and their relationships to one another. Harper Lee addresses issues in "To Kill a Mockingbird" that were important to me then and are even more important to me now. I found that each of the characters taught me many life lessons and felt that the book's 50th anniversary provided a unique opportunity to revisit this classic literary work.
March 8, 2011
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes
Presented by Oscar Hijuelos
Why I chose this book
This is the kind of book that I, as a teacher of writing, would recommend to anyone who wants to see how a narrative can be put together. In other words, though I am neither a historian or a scientist, I simply admired its craft.
February 8, 2011
The Plague
by Albert Camus
Presented by William H. Chafe
Why I chose this book
I chose The Plague because it represents for me the strongest statement I have ever encountered on the moral imperative of standing up to evil when it appears. The Plague is a metaphor for the assault by Nazism on the values embodied in every major religion and all humanistic traditions. It thus crystallizes the choices posed to every person when confronted by evil.
Ostensibly the options are between immediate self-interest versus life-threatening sacrifice. In reality, the choice revolves around the survival of humanity as a species worth belonging to.
January 11, 2011
Ninety-two in the Shade
by Thomas McGuane
Presented by Michael Valdez Moses
Why I chose this book
Following in the footsteps of Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway, McGuane portrays both the will to violence and the will to be free that lies at the heart of the American soul. Tom Skelton, the sometimes feckless but ultimately determined hero of Ninety-two in the Shade, takes his place alongside his literary forefathers, Melville's Captain Ahab, Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, and Hemingway's heroes, who seek both their doom and the deliverance in a seemingly pointless but nonetheless principled final act that defines them and the republic in which they live.
November 17, 2010
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Presented by Thomas Katsouleas
Why I chose this book
I chose Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, largely because I enjoy the way Jared Diamond frames key questions about our history and the future around simple questions. He answers by bringing to bear his great powers as a synthesizer of knowledge from across archaeology, anthropology, geography, evolutionary biology, linguistics and more. In "Collapse," Diamond explores the possible future of our society, humankind, and the planet by looking at several examples of isolated societies that have flourished and disappeared – from the Easter Islanders to the Vikings in Greenland to the great Mayan culture in South America and the small society of Pitcairn islanders. He frames the book with a question posed by an undergraduate student in his class at UCLA: "What was the person thinking who cut down the last palm tree on Easter island that then led to the loss of deep water fishing with canoes and ultimately to starvation?"
October 5, 2010
The Children's Book
by A.S. Byatt
Presented by Kimerly Rorschach
Why I chose this book
A.S. Byatt is a wonderful writer, but I was especially drawn to this novel because its opening scenes take place in a great museum, and that immediately pulled me in. As a museum director, I love to visit other museums of course, but I also love to go behind the scenes and understand more about what makes an institution tick. I am also interested in the history of our great museums, and the history of the Victoria and Albert Museum is a fascinating one that is important to understanding the modern conception and evolution of museums in Europe and the United States. The novel is so much more than this, of course, but that is what immediately drew me to it and why I was excited about sharing it in this context.