It's International Somewhere in Time Day! (The 100th anniversary actually - sort of. Maybe the 31st - hard to say. It's time travel, people!)
Celebrate this momentous occasion by screeching the name of the person you love enough to travel through time for.
I could go into great detail about the significance of this movie in Rexburg Mormon culture and the story of how I saw it for the first time at the "little theater" at Ricks College where they showed the whole movie except for the (ahem) inappropriate parts.
But I won't.
Suffice it to say, it is an awesome piece of early 80s super-dramatic cheese, and I love it dearly. Christopher Reeve's character, Richard Collier, travels back in time to June 27, 1912 in order to meet Elise McKenna. They fall in love and overcome all the obstacles in their path, only to be thwarted by a penny from the future. Ol' Richard dies of a broken heart but is reunited with his groovy lady love in the afterlife. (The joke in the "little theater" was that the part they cut out of the movie was Richard and Elise getting married in the temple.)
Live it up, people! Reeeeeee-chard! Reeee-chard!
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
For the Record
The body shop guys kept the trailer hitch for a week, repeatedly heating, soaking, and pounding it - to no avail. Apparently, it never budged once.
So, for the low, low price of 264 dollars, I got a brand-new trailer hitch, labor included. They didn't charge me for the week's worth of work they did on the other one, and they had the hitch reattached in the hour it took Suzy and I to go to Jimmy John's for lunch. So I guess there's that.
I'm sure I don't need to point out that I would have preferred it if I could have just, you know, USED THE HITCH THAT CAME WITH THE CAR! But I couldn't. So we say "okay" and we move on, happy that it wasn't worse.
So now we have a hitch, we have a bike rack, we have bikes. We are ready for action.
At least 264 dollars worth of summertime fun. I insist.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Convicted
I've always found it ironic that teachers can be (or at least were in their younger days) the worst students. I always encourage my students to sit up front, never be late, and always ask questions. But when I am on the other side of the desk, so to speak, I almost always sit in the back, doodle in my notebook, and keep to myself. What's good for the goose isn't always what's good for the composition teacher gander, I guess.
I also have wondered at how little writing actually gets done by writing teachers. Seriously, I've been a professional, full-time instructor of writing for nearly ten years now and yet, how much writing do I do myself? Every semester, I go on and on about writing as a tool of discovery, about how essays are little attempts at figuring out life's questions, about the necessity of daily writing. And yet...how often do I do anything about these frequently spouted beliefs?
Suzy is teaching her first college-level class this semester and, while she is doing great at it, she regularly says that she feels like a fraud. I laugh and tell her that every teacher feels that way at first. (I sure did. When I taught my first classes at Boise State as a TA, I was positive my students were going to see right through me and just stop coming to class because they wouldn't think they should pay to be in a class taught by a dorky know-nothing.) Over time, new teachers come into their own and feel more confident in their body of knowledge, in their capacity to convey the important material, in their ability to address and resolve student concerns. But, for myself, I wonder sometimes if I have become too comfortable in what and how I teach. I happily rattle off my formulas and strategies for writing. I give tips. I describe simple, easy techniques for creating quality writing. I spell it out.
And yet, how often do I use any of the knowledge I'm spreading around like so much fertilizer? How often do I prove that I know what I'm teaching because I actually do it? How often does this writing teacher write? Without the pressure of feeling like I have something to prove, I don't seem to be inclined to engage with the knowledge that I try to convey. I've been thinking about this a lot and, frankly, it has weighed heavily on me. I got some good feedback from my prospectus committee chair a couple of weeks ago, and it has just been sitting on top of my dusty stack of film and religion books since then. I've been thinking about what he wrote - and that's important, don't get me wrong - but I haven't been writing anything.
So a couple of days ago, I assigned my students a reading selection from the new textbook I'm testing out and I read it so I could include material from it on an upcoming quiz. It's called "Ten Tips on Making Writing Work for You" and it's by Michael C. Munger, a former poly sci professor at Duke. His thesis is that even though a lot of academics spend a good portion of their time writing, many aren't any good at it. Their work habits are too poor too really make room for technical improvement or their mental habits are too narrow to allow for new ideas. I read this thing and felt as convicted by it as anything I've ever read. I felt as though it was speaking directly to me and my sorry, tired writing habits (if not doing something can be called a habit.)
So, as a kind of ten step remedy for the problem of writing-teacher-suck-itis, Munger offers the following:
1. Writing is an exercise. Like any skill or ability, writing takes practice. The more you do it, the more you can do it. Just leave that ability in the proverbial drawer and it will eventually leave you like your childhood ability to hula hoop or your teenage grasp of the piano.
2. Set goals based on output, not input. In other words, make goals for what you will accomplish, not how long you will spend doing it. This is a killer for me. So many times I have said, "I'll work on X from 9-12" instead of saying, "I will produce 3 pages today."
3. Find a voice: don't just "get published." Write about what you care about instead of trying to manufacture something you think the market or your audience will like. If you like it and care about it, chances are others will too. If you don't, they surely won't.
4. Give yourself time. Here he calls out the great lie of "I work better under pressure." No one does. Good thinking and good writing, like anything else worthwhile (a great meal, a good relationship), is the result of time and effort, not some half-hearted last minute scramble. If you are writing something worth reading, doesn't it deserve some time to grow, develop, and improve in your head and on the page?
5. Everyone's unwritten work is brilliant. Talk is cheap. Get it on the page and deal with what you really have instead of always talking about that unwritten novel, that dissertation, that project in airy, abstract terms. An idea is worth is weight in gold - but since ideas don't weigh anything, they're worthless. Write it down.
6. Pick a puzzle. The best writing usually comes from trying to figure something out. If you already know all the answers, why are you bothering to write about it?
7. Write, then squeeze other things in. Don't treat writing as an afterthought or something you manage to wedge in here or there. Like anything else that's really important to you, you make time for it. Otherwise, it just becomes a fun little hobby you do when no one's around - like a crossword puzzle or Tetris.
8. Not all of your thoughts are profound. It's okay to start small. It's okay to not have the Next Big Idea. Writing something small is better than writing nothing at all. If you wait until you have a "profound" idea to write about, you may never write at all.
9. Your most profound thoughts are often wrong. In this step, Munger specifically mentions grad students who think they know what they want to write their dissertation about as soon as they enter the program. He's not mean about it but does suggest that this is the wrong way to go about learning anything. Unfortunately, this was me. While I'm not necessarily sorry that I've stuck so devotedly to my initial dissertation idea of so many years ago, I sometimes wonder what intellectual opportunities I passed by because I was already so certain of my destination.
10. Edit your work, over and over. I have learned the hard way, many times, that my ability to detect errors and areas in need of revision in my work is pretty nominal. Getting a second and third wise, informed opinion on every draft is like getting your oil changed in your car - it takes a little time out of your busy day but it definitely helps avoid complete breakdown later.
The thing about feeling convicted is, it's only any good if you are willing to act on it. Conviction must lead to action. So Suzanne and I talked a lot about it and decided that writing something every day has to become a priority. Finishing my PhD isn't just a matter of being rewarded for the time I've already invested or the money that it has cost. It's not even simply a matter of personal pride and accomplishment. In many ways, it is the gate through which we have to step in order for us to move on with the next phase of our lives. We don't want to stay in Tonica or at IVCC forever. The thing that will most likely enable us to find happy, gainful employment elsewhere will be me being Doctor Brown rather than just "Hey Chubby, did you grade those papers yet?"
So thanks to Dr. Munger for not only helping me to see the error of my ways, but for offering some useful, practical suggestions for how I might do better than I've been doing. He's pretty good at this. He should be a teacher.
I also have wondered at how little writing actually gets done by writing teachers. Seriously, I've been a professional, full-time instructor of writing for nearly ten years now and yet, how much writing do I do myself? Every semester, I go on and on about writing as a tool of discovery, about how essays are little attempts at figuring out life's questions, about the necessity of daily writing. And yet...how often do I do anything about these frequently spouted beliefs?
Suzy is teaching her first college-level class this semester and, while she is doing great at it, she regularly says that she feels like a fraud. I laugh and tell her that every teacher feels that way at first. (I sure did. When I taught my first classes at Boise State as a TA, I was positive my students were going to see right through me and just stop coming to class because they wouldn't think they should pay to be in a class taught by a dorky know-nothing.) Over time, new teachers come into their own and feel more confident in their body of knowledge, in their capacity to convey the important material, in their ability to address and resolve student concerns. But, for myself, I wonder sometimes if I have become too comfortable in what and how I teach. I happily rattle off my formulas and strategies for writing. I give tips. I describe simple, easy techniques for creating quality writing. I spell it out.
And yet, how often do I use any of the knowledge I'm spreading around like so much fertilizer? How often do I prove that I know what I'm teaching because I actually do it? How often does this writing teacher write? Without the pressure of feeling like I have something to prove, I don't seem to be inclined to engage with the knowledge that I try to convey. I've been thinking about this a lot and, frankly, it has weighed heavily on me. I got some good feedback from my prospectus committee chair a couple of weeks ago, and it has just been sitting on top of my dusty stack of film and religion books since then. I've been thinking about what he wrote - and that's important, don't get me wrong - but I haven't been writing anything.
So a couple of days ago, I assigned my students a reading selection from the new textbook I'm testing out and I read it so I could include material from it on an upcoming quiz. It's called "Ten Tips on Making Writing Work for You" and it's by Michael C. Munger, a former poly sci professor at Duke. His thesis is that even though a lot of academics spend a good portion of their time writing, many aren't any good at it. Their work habits are too poor too really make room for technical improvement or their mental habits are too narrow to allow for new ideas. I read this thing and felt as convicted by it as anything I've ever read. I felt as though it was speaking directly to me and my sorry, tired writing habits (if not doing something can be called a habit.)
So, as a kind of ten step remedy for the problem of writing-teacher-suck-itis, Munger offers the following:
1. Writing is an exercise. Like any skill or ability, writing takes practice. The more you do it, the more you can do it. Just leave that ability in the proverbial drawer and it will eventually leave you like your childhood ability to hula hoop or your teenage grasp of the piano.
2. Set goals based on output, not input. In other words, make goals for what you will accomplish, not how long you will spend doing it. This is a killer for me. So many times I have said, "I'll work on X from 9-12" instead of saying, "I will produce 3 pages today."
3. Find a voice: don't just "get published." Write about what you care about instead of trying to manufacture something you think the market or your audience will like. If you like it and care about it, chances are others will too. If you don't, they surely won't.
4. Give yourself time. Here he calls out the great lie of "I work better under pressure." No one does. Good thinking and good writing, like anything else worthwhile (a great meal, a good relationship), is the result of time and effort, not some half-hearted last minute scramble. If you are writing something worth reading, doesn't it deserve some time to grow, develop, and improve in your head and on the page?
5. Everyone's unwritten work is brilliant. Talk is cheap. Get it on the page and deal with what you really have instead of always talking about that unwritten novel, that dissertation, that project in airy, abstract terms. An idea is worth is weight in gold - but since ideas don't weigh anything, they're worthless. Write it down.
6. Pick a puzzle. The best writing usually comes from trying to figure something out. If you already know all the answers, why are you bothering to write about it?
7. Write, then squeeze other things in. Don't treat writing as an afterthought or something you manage to wedge in here or there. Like anything else that's really important to you, you make time for it. Otherwise, it just becomes a fun little hobby you do when no one's around - like a crossword puzzle or Tetris.
8. Not all of your thoughts are profound. It's okay to start small. It's okay to not have the Next Big Idea. Writing something small is better than writing nothing at all. If you wait until you have a "profound" idea to write about, you may never write at all.
9. Your most profound thoughts are often wrong. In this step, Munger specifically mentions grad students who think they know what they want to write their dissertation about as soon as they enter the program. He's not mean about it but does suggest that this is the wrong way to go about learning anything. Unfortunately, this was me. While I'm not necessarily sorry that I've stuck so devotedly to my initial dissertation idea of so many years ago, I sometimes wonder what intellectual opportunities I passed by because I was already so certain of my destination.
10. Edit your work, over and over. I have learned the hard way, many times, that my ability to detect errors and areas in need of revision in my work is pretty nominal. Getting a second and third wise, informed opinion on every draft is like getting your oil changed in your car - it takes a little time out of your busy day but it definitely helps avoid complete breakdown later.
The thing about feeling convicted is, it's only any good if you are willing to act on it. Conviction must lead to action. So Suzanne and I talked a lot about it and decided that writing something every day has to become a priority. Finishing my PhD isn't just a matter of being rewarded for the time I've already invested or the money that it has cost. It's not even simply a matter of personal pride and accomplishment. In many ways, it is the gate through which we have to step in order for us to move on with the next phase of our lives. We don't want to stay in Tonica or at IVCC forever. The thing that will most likely enable us to find happy, gainful employment elsewhere will be me being Doctor Brown rather than just "Hey Chubby, did you grade those papers yet?"
So thanks to Dr. Munger for not only helping me to see the error of my ways, but for offering some useful, practical suggestions for how I might do better than I've been doing. He's pretty good at this. He should be a teacher.
Monday, June 18, 2012
How Cool Are My Kids?
Funny you should ask.
Yesterday, when we sat down to eat our lunch during our annual Father's Day hike around Matthiessen State Park, I opened my lunchbox to find a hand-drawn, first issue of The Souper! In this exciting new creation, I star as a mild-mannered guy who feels strongly about two things: loving soup and hating Ben Lyons, the lame movie critic who pretty much put the nail in the coffin of At the Movies, the tv movie review show.
Apparently, Maryn wanted to marry all my loves - superhero comics, soup, hating Ben Lyons, etc. all in one place so she and Avery labored over this comic for a week, entirely in secret. Neither Suzy nor I had any idea they were working on it. Ave snuck it into my lunchbox when she offered to carry stuff out to the van before we headed to the hike.
Behold it in all its glory:
In case it isn't clear, that's me watching TV while eating a bowl of soup and growing irritated by Ben Lyons. Finally, I lose it, throw my bowl of soup at the television, and then, in a moment of inspiration, decide to do something about the problem. I transform into The Souper! I have goggles, an antennae on my helmet, and a bowl of soup around my waist equipped with rocket blasters.
I take off and crash into Ben Lyons' lair. There I trip him (or stomp on his foot, it's not clear) and he falls down on live TV and looks like an idiot. I return home to watch TV with a satisfied look on my face.
Bizarre and awesome, right?
Well, apparently, that was just Part One of my gift because today after church, they awarded me with the follow up gifts - a partial Souper costume. Behold:
Modified thrift store aviator glasses and my own ball cap with an antennae attached to it.
Truly, it was an epic Father's Day.
This is The Souper, signing off.
Yesterday, when we sat down to eat our lunch during our annual Father's Day hike around Matthiessen State Park, I opened my lunchbox to find a hand-drawn, first issue of The Souper! In this exciting new creation, I star as a mild-mannered guy who feels strongly about two things: loving soup and hating Ben Lyons, the lame movie critic who pretty much put the nail in the coffin of At the Movies, the tv movie review show.
Apparently, Maryn wanted to marry all my loves - superhero comics, soup, hating Ben Lyons, etc. all in one place so she and Avery labored over this comic for a week, entirely in secret. Neither Suzy nor I had any idea they were working on it. Ave snuck it into my lunchbox when she offered to carry stuff out to the van before we headed to the hike.
Behold it in all its glory:
In case it isn't clear, that's me watching TV while eating a bowl of soup and growing irritated by Ben Lyons. Finally, I lose it, throw my bowl of soup at the television, and then, in a moment of inspiration, decide to do something about the problem. I transform into The Souper! I have goggles, an antennae on my helmet, and a bowl of soup around my waist equipped with rocket blasters.
I take off and crash into Ben Lyons' lair. There I trip him (or stomp on his foot, it's not clear) and he falls down on live TV and looks like an idiot. I return home to watch TV with a satisfied look on my face.
Bizarre and awesome, right?
Well, apparently, that was just Part One of my gift because today after church, they awarded me with the follow up gifts - a partial Souper costume. Behold:
Modified thrift store aviator glasses and my own ball cap with an antennae attached to it.
Truly, it was an epic Father's Day.
This is The Souper, signing off.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Simple to Stupid in Two Quick Hours
We bought a bike rack. I couldn't get the trailer hitch insert off our car in order to use it. The pin holding the thing in place wouldn't move. I sprayed it with WD40 and PB Blaster every day for a week. I hammered at it. Nothing happened. So I called our local body shop and asked if they could take care of it. The guy said, "Sure. You got a couple minutes? Come on over now and I'll get it done for you." He's a big guy and he used a much heavier hammer than I had. The pin didn't move so they cut it in half and punched out what was left.
Here is our friend the pin after it suffered an ugly death.
Once the pin was out, they hooked the hitch insert up to a winch that applied 3,500 lbs of pressure. Nothing. Not a wiggle. Not a slip.
Next, they tried heating the hitch with an acetylene torch in hopes of loosening the rust and then letting the winch do its work. Nothing. Not a shiver. Not a hint.
I got so hungry during this two hour (!) odyssey, I resorted to eating the movie popcorn Suzy and I had left in the car the night before when we went to see Snow White and the Huntsman. It was neither a nutritious nor a satisfying lunch. Look at my sad face. That's a face of a man who wants his trailer hitch to work and who wants a cheeseburger.
They decided they couldn't properly heat the hitch without melting the bumper cover. So they took the bumper cover off. Nothing. Not a shimmy. Not a quiver.
This is the car with no bumper cover, no bumper proper, the hitch having been heated with a torch, pounded with twenty pound hammers by burly men, and having a winch pull it constantly for over an hour. Nothing.
This is the entire trailer hitch sitting on the floor of the body shop. With no other option available to them and saying to me, "Well, you're in it this far. Do you want it off or not?" they took the whole thing off the car. Each of the guys working on it said they'd never seen anything like it - a hitch insert that utterly refuses to budge.
The thing is still with these guys - they plan to get it red hot and try to punch the insert out from behind. Whatever. If that doesn't work, we'll have to buy an entire new trailer hitch set up to reattach to the car. A couple hundred bucks is what the guy said. It's not like we can't cover that but - I just wanted to be able to strap our kids' bikes to the back of the car for the occasional bike ride here or there. I really didn't want my entire car dismantled or to provide the body shop guys with a story to tell their friends. I certainly didn't want to spend two hours and who knows how many hundred dollars at this place. I did not want to eat movie popcorn for lunch. It was bad times.
The one bit of light in this whole process was this: at one point when burly man #2 was wailing on the hitch with a hammer, this little item dropped off the bottom of the car. It's one of Dad's magnetic spare key cases. He put these on all of his cars just in case. I had no idea this was there so, when it dropped onto the floor, I had to smile. This whole fiasco is exactly the kind of experience that I would have called Dad about - so this thing plopping onto the floor made me think of him and feel like he was nearby.
I will let you know how the world's most expensive trailer hitch removal goes next week.
Ray
Is there a nerdy kid who didn't go through a Ray Bradbury phase at some point? I doubt it.
For me, it began in the hot, stuffy, light-filled library of Madison Junior High in Rexburg, Idaho. It was a tall room and the east-facing wall was almost entirely windows. I'd spend my lunch hours in there, slowly walking along the shelves, scanning book spines, looking for something interesting. One afternoon, I came across this:
It looked interesting and I knew that Bradbury wrote some of the short stories in our literature textbook, so I gave it a whirl.
I loved it. I don't know why a 13 year old would be so interested in a work of nostalgia like this but I was. I loved the lyrical descriptions of Green Town (a fictional stand-in for Waukegan, Illinois, Bradbury's hometown) and loved how Bradbury managed to wring drama, poetry, excitement out of things like buying a new pair of shoes, picking grapes, or walking home after the movies.
From there, I moved on to The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Toynbee Convector, The Halloween Tree, and The Illustrated Man. Some were hits, some were misses, but I always felt connected to the man himself. In the 80s, there was a tv show based on his short stories and some of his original scripts, and the opening sequence, cheesy and very 80s though it was, fascinated me. I loved his office (to which I doubt he actually took an old fashioned elevator). I've always thought of it as the ideal cave for a writer.
In late high school, I read one of his newer novels, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and the romance was kind of over for me. It was a weird, self-indulgent novel that just seemed like the work of someone who was too powerful and influential to get a serious editing job from his publisher. Also, he was the keynote at a conference a friend of mine attended and my buddy said he was the worst speaker he'd ever heard at one of those things - scattered, unprepared, obviously used to people thinking that every thought that came from his mouth was genius. So I left Ray for a few years and moved on to other literary loves.
After my mission, I picked up my cheapo paperback copy of Dandelion Wine, reread it, and found I loved it still. For four or five years, I read it every spring as a way of marking the beginning of the warm weather. Even now, it sits on my shelf not far from where I'm sitting now.
Ray Bradbury created some really wonderful things that made my life more interesting and more beautiful. I'll always be grateful to him for that. At 91, he more than deserved some rest.
Monday, June 4, 2012
To Read
This fall I'll be teaching an Intro to Fiction course - not a creative writing class or a historical survey but a class devoted purely to the appreciation of good fiction. Holy crap, right? It's so broad and open, it's hard to figure where to even start. I have a good textbook with lots of cool short fiction, and I'm sure I'll supplement it with additional stories. (The book doesn't have "The Prophet's Hair" by Salman Rushdie, "Roman Fever" by Edith Wharton, or "Thanksgiving" by Angela Hallstrom. All essential.) But the thing that's on my mind right now is the novel for the class. I'm going to give them a selection to choose from and then each student picks a novel, reads it, and does a big whoop-te-doo presentation at the end of the semester. My colleague who previously taught the class allowed them to write a straightforward literary analysis or to make a diorama of a scene from the book or to write up and explain the dream cast of a movie version or to stage a small stage version of a scene or whatever. It's really up to the preferences and talents of the individual student. That all sounds good to me. I'm all in favor of a good diorama in college. Really, aren't we suffering from a lack of good dioramas in the world?
I digress.
Anyway, the questions are, what novels do I give them to choose from, and how wide of a selection do I offer? The previous teacher said she wished she hadn't allowed the students so many different options because everyone was working on a separate book practically and there was no chance for things to coalesce between students or for her as a teacher. She was just managing twenty different projects without feeling like any of them had anything to do with the others. So that was her one word of advice in passing this on to me - fewer novels.
So if you had to choose four or five novels that represent the best in fiction, that are substantial enough to be worthy of a semester's worth of study, that won't be totally overwhelming in size or scope for community college sophomores, that you don't mind thinking or talking about for sixteen weeks - what would they be?
Right now, my list looks like this:
My Antonia by Willa Cather. (I've taught this perhaps too many times? Switch to something else by Cather? O Pioneers?)
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. (This is a lock. I'm definitely making this one of the choices. It's great - plus they're making a film version right now. Timely, you know?)
Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. (I love Vonnegut but this is more obscure and less of a workhorse than Slaughterhouse Five.)
Straight Man by Richard Russo. (It may be a little too inside-baseball. A creative writing professor goes through a midlife crisis while teaching a small, rural college. Hmmmm. It is, however, the funniest novel I have ever read.)
My Name Is Asher Lev. (This one's a lock too. It's a great novel and having my students read about Jewish characters at all, much less Hasidim, will be like having them read about Martians.)
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. (A longtime favorite but perhaps too sentimental, too episodic, not substantial enough?)
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. (One of the truly great, epic American novels. It devastated me when I finished it. But it's a doorstop of a book and starts off slow. Might not be anyone's choice and might be some poor student's undoing.)
The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall. (Funny, big-hearted, and unexpected - but also huge and perhaps too much to ask of busy college students.)
I'm just not sure what will be best, you know? I want four, maybe five books and I want them all to be just the right thing - which, of course, never really happens. I'll offer them the literary selections of my deepest soul and they'll be like, "Dude, that book sucked canal water. Who would ever like a steaming pile like that?"
So do you have any suggestions? What's the novel from high school or college or whenever that changed your life? What is the book that made the world look different to you for a while? Do tell.
I digress.
Anyway, the questions are, what novels do I give them to choose from, and how wide of a selection do I offer? The previous teacher said she wished she hadn't allowed the students so many different options because everyone was working on a separate book practically and there was no chance for things to coalesce between students or for her as a teacher. She was just managing twenty different projects without feeling like any of them had anything to do with the others. So that was her one word of advice in passing this on to me - fewer novels.
So if you had to choose four or five novels that represent the best in fiction, that are substantial enough to be worthy of a semester's worth of study, that won't be totally overwhelming in size or scope for community college sophomores, that you don't mind thinking or talking about for sixteen weeks - what would they be?
Right now, my list looks like this:
My Antonia by Willa Cather. (I've taught this perhaps too many times? Switch to something else by Cather? O Pioneers?)
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. (This is a lock. I'm definitely making this one of the choices. It's great - plus they're making a film version right now. Timely, you know?)
Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut. (I love Vonnegut but this is more obscure and less of a workhorse than Slaughterhouse Five.)
Straight Man by Richard Russo. (It may be a little too inside-baseball. A creative writing professor goes through a midlife crisis while teaching a small, rural college. Hmmmm. It is, however, the funniest novel I have ever read.)
My Name Is Asher Lev. (This one's a lock too. It's a great novel and having my students read about Jewish characters at all, much less Hasidim, will be like having them read about Martians.)
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. (A longtime favorite but perhaps too sentimental, too episodic, not substantial enough?)
Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. (One of the truly great, epic American novels. It devastated me when I finished it. But it's a doorstop of a book and starts off slow. Might not be anyone's choice and might be some poor student's undoing.)
The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall. (Funny, big-hearted, and unexpected - but also huge and perhaps too much to ask of busy college students.)
I'm just not sure what will be best, you know? I want four, maybe five books and I want them all to be just the right thing - which, of course, never really happens. I'll offer them the literary selections of my deepest soul and they'll be like, "Dude, that book sucked canal water. Who would ever like a steaming pile like that?"
So do you have any suggestions? What's the novel from high school or college or whenever that changed your life? What is the book that made the world look different to you for a while? Do tell.
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