Filling a Hole in My Liberal Arts Education

One of the nice things about being on campus for such a long time twice a week is having the opportunity to futz about in the library. University libraries are wonderful things. I have (these 3 semesters I have been at Texas State) usually spent my library time on a combination of homework/textbook-reading/studying for exams for particular classes and independent reading on topics relevant to my grad school research interests. I have read about 15 books on things like consumer psychology, behavioral economics and social psychology, and have dipped generously into about another dozen or so. I feel that I have taken good advantage of my "free" on-campus time getting smarter about things that will matter for me as I continue my specialized education.

But this semester, I finally realized that the library also contains, you know, books a person just might want to read for the sheer fun of it. And when a person takes a special interest in reading the kinds of novels that English professors are likely to assign undergraduates in classes, all the better.

I have not always been a particular fan of Charles Dickens, nor have I read very many of his books; indeed, the only ones I can remember reading are Great Expectations, which I read in junior high, and A Christmas Carol, which I owned, read several times, and like a lot but which, I must admit, has sort of been overshadowed in my mind by the Disney cartoon version (with, for instance, the wonderful floppy duck feet scene that I can watch a dozen times in a row). And of course, I do have a sense of what Oliver Twist is about (due to that unfortunate musical). But having liked so many books written self-consciously in the style of Charles Dickens, it made sense to see how well I liked the real thing, encountering it for the first time as an adult and basically unmediated by exposure to movies based on the novels.

And since somehow, I managed to reach the age of 35 without having read David Copperfield or, more significantly, knowing very much about the story, and since I have enjoyed other coming-of-age stories of that period, I checked it out of the library last week. (Great thing about being technically a graduate student: every book I check out from the library I get to keep for the entire semester.) It's kind of making me crazy wanting to find out what is going to happen; it's useful to recall that before his books were called "classics" and brought out to bore 9th graders, they were stories normal people followed in their serial publication, like the "Lost" of the 19th century. I am reading it with this strangely nuanced perception that I am envious of the future self who will be able to read the book in a more leisurely state of mind because she will already know e.g. exactly what the disturbingly writhing Uriah Heep is up to and that the future self is envious of the fact that the whole story is so new and fresh to me right now.