Reading log, no. 5

I should be writing about the California Bike Trip, but the end of the
month has arrived, and that means it's time for all of you to read or
pretend to read about the books I finished reading this month. My
apologies.

* * *

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale

I first read The Handmaid's Tale during my first semester in college nearly twelve years ago. This is notable for two reasons: the first being that this is the first reread job I've blogged about here on Just Enough Craig. The second reason is that it seems impossible that it's been nearly twelve years since I sat in that First-Year Seminar class. Please forgive me for writing this under an emotional combination of something like reverie and panic.

For those of you who aren't Trinity alumni, First-Year Seminar was a mandatory class for all incoming freshmen that was open-ended but, to whatever degree imposed by the prof, ended up being essentially a book club with the addition of a strong writing requirement. Each class was to have some sort of theme, picked by the prof. My class's theme was law and justice, I believe, but I can't remember for sure; it wasn't a strongly held together theme. Rumors abounded how one FYS class's theme was baseball. I never verified that, but it could easily be true. FYS was a luck-of-the-draw class with a wide range of possibilities -- especially for those of us who took the class during the fall semester and had not a clue for what we were registering. I lucked my way into a really good one.

We read the following: First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., and a short story whose name I can't remember but that involved desperate, live-saving cannibalism and a resulting court case with the possibility of the death penalty. It's difficult to imagine a more Craigarian lineup: classical Rome historical fiction, two science-fiction greats, and a short story about ethics and political theory.

Each week we read at a furious pace -- about 200-300 pages -- with the composition of a short paper to boot. It was like Book Club on steroids. And twice each week the dozen or so of us -- the students, the student aide, and the prof -- would sit around a conference table and spend an hour discussing ... whatever, though both the prof and the aide were poly-sci kinds of guys, and so they largely shepherded our discussions around abstract idealogical topics related to the reading material. How could I not have loved that class?

Handmaid's Tale was the selected reading for March for my current book club. We had a wonderfully open discussion about sexual equality, or the lack thereof, and that night I was pleasantly reminded of that very first college class of mine.

* * *

Again something in the card drew Trude's attention. Many other recipients of Prendergast's cards also took note, despite the crush of mail each received from his true peers, this being a time when everyone who knew how to write did so and at length. In that glacier of words grinding toward the twentieth century, Prendergast's card was a single fragment of mica glinting with lunacy, pleading to be picked up and pocketed.

Erik Larson
The Devil in the White City

World's fairs are something I knew little about before reading Devil in the White City, and I suppose after reading it they continue to be something I know little about. But I now have a taste of the whirlwind of rushed design and frantic construction behind the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and of the life of the intriguing mass murderer, Henry H. Holmes, who lived and killed in Chicago during the time of the Fair.

I enjoyed this book. It wasn't about the things I wished it to be about -- I learned more in thirty minutes reading the Wikipedia article on the Chicago World's Fair than I did reading this book -- but Devil in the White City spun an interesting narrative and was excellently written.