READ - A mini-rant from the Dean
Be a Sauce Bottle Reader
Someone asked me what an educated person should read, I thought about it for a bit then I realized the answer was very thing you can. What you need to become is someone who reads anything they come across newspapers magazines blogs books yes even sauce bottles.
Do not worry about if it is “improving” or “relevant” you never know where interesting ideas will come from. Van Valen (famous biologist) got one of his best ideas while reading “Through the Looking Glass” hence the “Red Queen Hypothesis”. Ideas from sci-fi books have become reality – Waldos are one example of that. Reading makes you use your imagination.
Do not be afraid to read for pleasure I know you are all bogged down with reading for your classes but at the very least set aside 1/2 hour before you go to sleep and read something for fun, a romance, a gothic horror, a mystery, a thriller, a sci-fi novel, anything you will sleep better and eventually become very well read.
So what am I reading now – I am notorious for reading multiple books at once (no attention span) so I have three books “on the go” at the moment:
Tubular Android Superheroes by Mel Gilden – Very silly sci-fi mystery meet Zoot Marlow an alien who thinks he is Sam Spade.
Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages by Richard E. Rubenstein. Well written history of the development of rationalism in the 12 and 13th centuries
Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain Very different take on how we became human, I am re-reading this in preparation for the Honors Book Club.
OK TURN OFF THIS COMPUTER AND GO READ!!!
KG
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I’m sorry, the correct answer was math.
I agree with you in the main, and do note that you mentioned blogs in your list of things to read, but I take issue with your final ‘turn off the computer and go read.’
Today I have read three contracts, a list of bank policies, four short stories, two chapters of serials, The Phaedo by Plato, a section from Graph Theory by Reinhard Diestel, an article about interactive fiction, several dozens of pages of emails on various and sundry topics, and one blog post, exhorting me to read more.
Of all these, only the contracts and the list of bank policies were in hard copy; all the rest were electronic in some form, be it emails or scans of journal articles. I expect to read another two hundred or more pages before I sleep, most or all of them also on a computer. In practice we now all of us have access to more information through computers than we have access to physically; be wary of betraying your assumptions by recommending that we turn off our computers to read.
Personally, I would rather recommend that people turn on the computer before they read; I much more readily look for more detail on a topic I read when I have a computer at hand to help me research things as curiosity strikes me.
That said, I would read the sauce bottle tonight when I eat dinner, except that I have already done so. Perhaps I will read a package of Pop-Tarts instead.
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