Do teachers still send home a “reading list” with students over their summer break?

I seem to remember a few lists coming home in the boys’ backpacks over the years, but never one as intimidating as this.

Mom was an incoming freshman at Saint Joseph College the fall of 1948.

As an English major, she was expected to read a lot. She wrote to her future husband (she and Dad had dated since they met at age 14 and were engaged in early 1952) about how relieved she was to have read so many already. Even so, she was jumping on several of the classics each week in order to keep her head above water.

The list I found among Mom’s college archives is pretty chewed up.

Literally.

The rest of her papers, dating back even a decade earlier, are in pretty good shape compared to this yellowing, hole-ridden piece of typing paper.

Reading List

1. Sigrid Undset’s Gunnar’s Daughter
2. Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter
3. Undset’s Images in a Mirror
4. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon
5. Koestler’s Arrival and Departure
6. Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp
7. Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms
8. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
9. Maurice Baring’s Darby and Joan
10. Leo Tolstoi’s The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
11. Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny
12. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night
13. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
14. Gogol’s The Overcoat and Other Stories

At this point we run into a numbering error. We go from 14 back to 13 and then back on track with 15.

This typo may well tell us the list was not handed out as a class assignment.

(Note: We shall continue the reading list now, duplicating the number 14, rather than trying to trick this computer’s number system into skipping a number.)

14. Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed
15. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
16. Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov
17. Eric von Keunelt-Leddihn’s The Gates of Hell
18. Nicholas Sandys’ Sunrise and Starset
19. George Howe’s Call It Treason
20. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country
21. Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe (a novel in 10 volumes)
22. Henry James’ The Golden Bowl
23. James’ The American
24. James’ The Spoils of Poynton
25. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited
26. Waugh’s A Handful of Dust
27. Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
28. Greene’s The Power and the Glory
29. Greene’s Brighton Rock
30. Greene’s The Heart of the Matter
31. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
32. Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina
33. Tolstoi’s War and Peace
34. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome
35. Wharton’s The Age of Innocence
36. Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth
37. Franz Kafka’s Amerika
38. Negley Farson’s Caucasian Journey
39. Whittaker Chambers’ Witness
40. Undset’s Madame Dorthea
41. Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way
42. Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl
43. James Thurber’s Thirteen Clocks
44. James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan
45. Jagendorf’s Tyll Eulenspiegel
46. Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel
47. Prishvin’s The Lake and the Woods
48. Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind
49. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
50. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

Now that I’ve typed out the full reading list of 50 51 novels …

… it’s obvious my earlier hypothesis has as many holes in it as that aging piece of typing paper!

Bottom line, several of the books on the list were not even published until 1951. Plus, where are Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Kipling, Eliot, the Bronte sisters, and all the others?

Perhaps it was a self-assigned summer reading list for Mom to attack post-graduation. Dad would soon be heading to boot camp, and with her job at the New Haven Free Public Library, she would have grand access to books.

I guess we’ll never know.

No matter what this list of 51 was meant to be, it’s another connection her children, grandchildren, and friends can have with Mom. I can’t promise to read more than another five or six on the list (I’ve read 10 so far), but know each book any of us reads comes with her blessing.

Inheritance

Our books revive us
delight inspire make us think and wonder
like turning on a faucet for a dry day
or a light on for a rainy afternoon
before the fire in a hammock on a train
just before bedtime
we read

What horror then to dream we never read
to Billy as a child
so real and thank God wrong
to see his childhood shelves piled high with books
untouched
I woke up cold until I knew it wasn’t true

A father now Bill reads to Lucy
inhabits bookstores
considers boxes high with sidewalk sales
the other night at dinner here
we all remembered THE LONG WALK
that impossible journey
living nightmare some survived

~ joan vayo January 12, 2006

“Inheritance” © 2006 Joan Vayo. All rights reserved.

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