I’ve always thought that being in college is the greatest obstacle to a good education, because nobody has time to read outside of class. Economists are not fond of Thomas Carlyle, a curmudgeon who called Economics “The Dismal Science,” and classed us with “sophists and calculators.” But I do agree with him that “What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”

For my first entry, I have decided to attempt the impossible, and present a list of my favourite works of fiction, biographies and essays. The list is in no particular order. If I have to recommend just one to Bowdoin students, I’d select Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. She of course most inspires us with her ability to survive the endless winters in a small town in Maine, but she was also the first woman inducted in the French Academy. And for good reason.

(Print: Utamaro Kitagawa)

A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE THINGS

West with the Night – Beryl Markham
Vol de Nuit; Terre des Hommes; Le Petit Prince – Antoine de Saint Exupery
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Woman in the Dunes – Kobo Abe
Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler
Le temps, ce grand sculpteur; Mémoires d’Hadrien; Nouvelles Orientales – Marguerite Yourcenar
Alexandria Quartet – Lawrence Durrell
Lord of the Rings – Tolkien
Goldbug Variations – Richard Powers
Villette; Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte / Cranford – Elizabeth Gaskell / everything by Jane Austen / Middlemarch – George Eliot
Magister Ludi & Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
The Pearl – John Steinbeck
Candide – Voltaire
Sons & Lovers – D. H. Lawrence
Small World – David Lodge
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler (“Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place”)
Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula Leguin
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Make Way for Ducklings – Robert McCloskey (a picture book for young children set in the Boston Public Garden; I used to live on the other side of the street)
Winnie ille Pu (it’s in Latin; after all, you don’t want the public to know that you’re reading Winnie the Pooh) – A. A. Milne
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham
Farenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury (about burning books: each person in a radical group memorizes one book. Interesting to think about which book one would choose. Most likely a short one!)
Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Autobiographies & Diaries: Baghdad Burning – Riverbend; Unended Quest – Karl Popper; Diaries of Anais Nin, Sarah Morgan, May Sarton, Sylvia Plath; The Road from Coorain – Jill Ker Conway
The Republic; Statesman – Plato
La Peste, L’Etranger – Albert Camus
Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene
Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius / Handbook of Epictetus
Short stories: Somerset Maugham, Soseki, Guy de Maupassant, O. Henry, Chekhov
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
Perfume – Patrick Suskind
Beauty & Sadness – Kawabata
Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?; Ubik – Philip K. Dick
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys (a riff on Jane Eyre, about the first Mrs. Rochester)
Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance— Robert Pirsig
Golden Gate; A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth (a poetic economist!)
Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami
Boda de Sangre — Federico García Lorca
The Pillow Book – Sei Shonagon
L’élégance du hérisson — Muriel Barbery
The Three-Body Problem — Liu Cixin

And, of course, The Statistical Abstract of the United States!  (Yes, I know that it is not fiction, but I just couldn’t resist…).  The federal government stopped publishing this indispensable resource, to the horror of librarians everywhere.  Fortunately, the reliable free market came to the rescue, and continued its publication.