Rebecca Evans

Sometimes, being a bookworm, you start to doubt whether what you do has any real impact on the world. Several weeks ago, I was having a drink with a few people who, like me, are English majors trying to break into the world of publishing and reviewing.

There’s nothing better than a meta-book, as every true bookworm knows.

A few months ago, I was comparing current reading material with a friend. He was halfway through Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives and couldn’t stop raving about the book.

“So,” an incredulous professor asks a colleague, “you want students to nail this stuff so they’ll do well at cocktail parties?” The colleague, offended, looks contemptuous. “You make it sound so superficial,” he says.

Who could ever forget Dorothy’s ruby slippers? All Wizard of Oz fans know them. The truly diehard ones—myself included—went so far as to buy the Payless Shoes version. Yet, as any bookworm knows, in the original books by L. Frank Baum, Dorothy wore the witch’s silver slippers.

Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has been compared favorably with Shakespeare, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot, and Auden, but his most recent book of poetry, Gulf Music, defies comparison.

When it comes to books, I’ve only experienced two of Goldilocks’ famous descriptions: I’m used to the length of literature being either too much, or just right.

When J.K. Rowling outed Albus Dumbledore, there was a surge of Potter-mania the likes of which hadn't been seen since July 21, 2007. The response of those fans die-hard enough to respond at all was largely one of pleasant surprise.

Last Monday saw crowds of protesting students, an influx of concerned community members, and an impressive media presence on Columbia’s campus. The chaotic disturbance of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit was remarkable.

Every genre of literature has certain advantages. We read works of history to be informed and to make sense of the past; we read fiction to enter a thematically cohesive world.

In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani presented a controversial view of the situation in Darfur and the international responsibility to intervene. Most discussions of Darfur use stock catchphrases and sweeping generalizations.

"Very conservative." These two words can ruin a Facebook profile. A few weeks ago, one of my friends was idly clicking through Facebook when he came across the profile of a close friend's new girlfriend. "Very conservative?" he said, equally amused and disturbed.

Baby-oiled bodies, pounding techno beats, and $15 lap dances are more commonly associated with bachelor parties than the birthdays of teenage girls. But I consider myself a liberated woman, and when I was invited to a birthday party at a girls-only male strip club, I was thrilled. Almost all of my male friends have had their strip club rite of passage; my turn to experience such debauchery had finally arrived.

The United States has a strange perspective on ideological conflict. Geographically removed from both our allies and our opponents, we have no way of knowing what it's like to live in the midst of constant dogmatic clashes. The closest we've come in recent memory is in the political quarrels between Democrats and Republicans. While these may inspire protests and propaganda, the fact is that this, our most strident conflict, is relatively mild. Polling places, not battlegrounds, are our place of conflict-we deal with ballots, not bullets.

Columbia is green. Its campus is covered with recycling bins, its Web site is supplemented by a large number of Environmental Stewardship pages, and its dining hall boasts impressive vegetarian and vegan options. More to the point, its students are environmentally conscious.

I've never had any particular liking for apocalyptic fiction. After trudging through A Canticle for Leibowitz and shuddering over the inexplicable success of the Left Behind series, I began to avoid post-disaster literature. It's not such a terrible concept, it's just that it's so often misused by sub-par authors struggling to explain the human condition through overextended metaphors and painful philosophical musings.