Word: bookshelf
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...Harvard offers a liberal arts education. This has no practical purpose. I study government. Not political science; government. I learn about tyranny of the majority, not health care. Rather than learning about basic accounting or business management, as my brother at Virginia Tech does, my bookshelf is full of Thoreau and my checkbook is a mess. I am learning how to think, although I have nothing that practical to think about (something you may have noticed from this column). Not that I mind, I may never get rich, but as one government professor noted, I will never be bored...
Once upon a time, I harbored a great deal of guilt over the contents of my bookshelf...
...Perching on a window seat to wait, I looked around the room at Fielding's collected fans. And what I saw changed me - and my bookshelf - forever. There were septuagenarians, teenagers and thirty-somethings. Women who looked like they'd just ducked out of a board meeting for an hour, and sweatshirt-clad women with babies strapped to their chests. There were women who'd brought sheepish-looking boyfriends and women who'd arrived with their mothers. It was, I decided, a pretty impressive display of sisterhood. And everybody there was waiting, unashamed, to meet and applaud Bridget Jones...
...life with humor. And when I took my copy of "BJD" home that afternoon, I didn't tuck it into the depths of my bag. I carried it proudly in my arms, meeting people's eyes and smiling. I let myself into my apartment, marched over to the bookshelf, and plopped my newly signed volume in the middle of the center shelf. Facing the room. Unfettered by guilt...
...book review is really, in the end, about what you do with your money, so I’ll give you my instructions on the matter and then you can go. So, as for Literature and the Gods, smile when you pass it on a bookshelf, but don’t buy it. If it’s awe and wonder you’re looking for, check out The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, where Calasso comes by it honestly. If it’s coherent literary theory you’re looking for, bleached of interest, I hereby...