Life is yet another reason to add to the endless list of why people read books. Some people enjoy reading because they want to feel as if they are living the lives of the characters. This can be seen in the types of books Joseph Bartolotta, Lecturer III of English, said are his five favorites.
1. “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman” by Laurence Sterne
“That book is so crazy. The way the book starts is he’s going to narrate his life, and so he’s going to start with his birth, but every time he tries to go a little further in the story, he has to go back to something that happened before his birth. He’s this guy that really wants to tell a story but keeps getting sidetracked by all these other stories that make up his. It moves forward and backward in time; it just blew my mind that (he) could do something narratively with that ... I can’t imagine what it was like for people to read that when it first came out.”
2. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” by Haruki Murakami
“It’s about a man ... First his cat goes missing, then his wife goes missing, and he’s just stuck in this weird place in his life where he’s really not quite sure what to do. He’s not sure how to interact with people or where he fits into the world. This definitely has Western influences. (Murakami) does a really good job of trying to capture this weird existential angst amongst (the people) in Westernized societies where things like consumerism and capitalism are done to individuals ... (and) they’re really not sure where their place is when things get taken away from them.”
3. “Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory” by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
“It was one of the first handbooks on how to teach rhetoric and oratory. If it wasn’t the first, it was the best of the first. There’s a lot of that that I borrow for my teaching, and without that book I have no idea what I would be doing here. It was written for people to learn how to become teachers. (Not) everything in there is something I would do today; there were certain issues of misogyny and racism, because it was tuned toward the populace of Rome. But there are some things in it that are still important.”
4. “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism” by Angela Davis
“A lot of my social consciousness has come from
music ... I struggled with understanding concepts such as black feminism because it seemed very distant from me. But she was talking about this through music, and I could connect to it ... and come to a better understanding of where that music comes from because of the work that she did.”
5. “The Partly Cloudy Patriot” by Sarah Vowell
“It’s a collection of essays (that) touch on the challenges of trying to be patriotic and have a love of country while looking around and seeing everything that happens in your country. They’re just good essays; they’re very thoughtful. She has a particular take on things that are quite unique.”
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Skylar Griego is a freelance reporter for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
