“Read like a curious teenager; read for delight. Read Ready, Player One and everything else.
I mean here the embrace of reading, not because a novel or work of non-fiction is “essential,” but because it on some or all levels brings us joy to be reading it. And by that I don’t mean that it’s necessarily a cheery read (Game of Thrones is not a feel-good series although it feels good to read it). I’m an English PhD (read cultural critic), so I get that discomfort (formal, personal) is valuable, but I’ve come to see that for me the great power of reading is that, once we give ourselves over to it completely, we read and read and read and read and the sum of it all matters, even if a given book is a formulaic best seller (and those often shed light on “now” in unexpected ways). So mix it up: read The Girl on the Train and all of Louise Penny, and the Wayward Pines trilogy, and Wolf Hall, and Ender’s Game, and everything by David Eggers, David Mitchell, Jonathan Franzen, Neal Stephenson, Gaiman, LeGuin, McCaffrey, Murakami and Neil de Grasse Tyson. And everything else.”
-Susanna Cowan, PhD
Director, Summer & Winter Programs
University of Connecticut
