One For The Books: Filling out collegiate summer reading lists

As the weather begrudgingly becomes balmy and the radiators, tired after a long winter, begin to sputter to a halt, even the most term-paper-laden Columbia students know that summer is nigh.

The movies teach us about the onset of this season: the bells ring, the classroom doors swing open as one, and the joyful crowd spills into the streets, usually while performing some sort of ecstatic song accompanied by dance moves. Each student vows to not so much as crack a book open until the following September. Summer will be spent tanning, carousing, and undoubtedly engaging in more choreographed musical numbers.

True to form, Columbia does summer a little differently. It comes in not with a bang but with a whimper. Students gradually trickle out after their last exams, load their belongings into a parental vehicle (or, God forbid, a Collegeboxes receptacle), and examine their post-finals under-eye circles with morbid interest—and if Bacchanal was anything to judge by, Columbians’ dance moves tend to be just as subdued.

More to the point, few Columbians seem to view summer as a time to eschew work entirely. The season of scholarly rest provides the time to complete a challenging internship, earn money that will be of help next semester, engage in research for a future project, and—of course!—enjoy summer reading.

In high school, summer reading was often mandatory, for it often consisted of works that humanities teachers knew were too time-consuming for the school year or felt would provide a good introduction to the class. Columbia College takes a similar tack with first-year students, assigning the opening chapters of the Iliad both as a way to save time in already-hectic Lit Hum seminars and as an introduction to the College’s classical education.

This reading is meant to shape one’s first summer as a Columbia student so that everyone arrives on campus with a common base of knowledge and, hopefully, an enthusiastic attitude toward Greek epics. From then on, though, when it comes to summer reading, one is largely on one’s own.

Of course, this discounts preparation for classes. A number of fall literature classes list recommended introductory materials in their bulletin descriptions, and even professors who don’t post such recommendations are generally more than happy to provide them to students individually.

But such an approach ignores a question that weighs heavily on the minds of students of literature: should summer reading be a carefully planned and academically relevant endeavor, or a joyful one? Should it be planned to edify or entertain?

I got into a mild debate over this with a friend a few weeks ago, as we discussed our plans for summer and the following fall. When he found out I was planning to tackle a jumbo-sized anthology of literary theory, he shuddered. “I can’t do theory in the summer.” When I considered hauling the hefty tome around in the summer humidity, I saw his point. But the notion that summer was not a time for academic study made me curious.

It’s certainly an arguable position: when else can the busy student find time to read the tantalizing new hardcover books that torment him the rest of the year? Contemporary literature is rarely assigned, but invaluable. On the other hand, when has Columbia ever taught us to take a break—even if that break tends more toward Pulitzer Prize winners than cartoons?

The answer on which my friend and I settled was that summer is a time to tackle both the Big Important Works and the newer works that promised a more easygoing form of education. Summer is no longer a purely practical concern, as it was in the days when students were released to help with vital, season-specific agricultural tasks. Now, it’s both a convention and a psychologically necessary respite from the demands of academia.

In short, it’s the time to do what one normally never has the time to do. My friend convinced me to crack some new fiction—I convinced him that my weighty volume would be perfect June reading. We didn’t break into a song and dance routine, but we still felt pleased.

Rebecca Evans is a Columbia College junior majoring in English and creative writing. One for the Books runs alternate Fridays.