Infinite Monkeys

What Are You Reading?

Actually, that's a bit of a rhetorical question. Or is it? Although I do not fully agree with Mark Oppenheimer's essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, I can sympathize with his lament that too many Americans are too poorly read. But I wholly endorse the following statement, and would enthusiastically extend it beyond graduate students:

I have long believed that admissions committees at graduate schools should work very differently. Instead of asking for letters of recommendation from undergraduate thesis advisers, admissions committees should try to figure out if an applicant is an intellectual. They should ask: "What do you read outside your proposed field of study? What are your favorite books? Where would you most like to travel, and why? What periodicals do you read?" If a student has no aspirations to travel, doesn't seem to read much except within her undergraduate major, and shows no interest in academic debates — well, that's a bad candidate for academe. A bright, kind, loyal person, perhaps, who could be a success in many ways. But a bad candidate for the academy that America needs.

One could, I suppose, quibble with the verbiage. But let's stipulate that it is 98.9 percent correct. A friend of ours recently recounted a series of interviews he'd help conduct with candidates for national and state office. And the theme was a depressing one: earnest people who desire to serve the public but who know nothing or next to nothing. Now, I would like to ask those aspirants to public office: What are you reading? Could be the daily paper (bare minimum) or it could be Boswell's Life of Johnson. But it had better be something.

What am I reading?

Well, I do read The New York Review of Books, although I much prefer the Claremont alternative. And I just renewed my subscription to the New Criterion for two years. Right now, I'm juggling Paul Johnson's "Creators," Jaroslav Pelikan's "Vindication of Tradition", the new edition of "War: Ends and Means," by Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury, and "God's Terrorists," by Charles Allen.