What will be the first title on your bookshelf for 2011?

Of all the contemporary lit I've read this decade, as of today, these two are the ones I find most memorable: Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro --

If you  missed either the Lecture on Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, or The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates, a streaming audio recording will be available by sending a request through a special page & site for Current Students & Alumni. This is a new process, so please be patient while we work out the details. I'm looking forward to offering additional resources and this is an exciting first step.

Here is our list for Spring 2011 with recommended editions (links on the left-hand column of this website):

• Valmiki, The Ramayana, trans. Narayan (Penguin)
• Caesar, The Gallic War, trans. Hammond (Oxford)
• Khayyam, The Rubaiyat, trans. FitzGerald, ed. Decker (U Virginia P)
• Moliere, Tartuffe, trans. Wilbur (Mariner)
• Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. Rose (Pelican)
• Gogol, Dead Souls, trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky (Vintage)
• Soseki, Kokoro, trans. McKinney (Penguin)
• Woolf, Between the Acts, ed. Hussey (Harvest)
• Bowen, Collected Stories (Anchor)

Garrison Keillor on the Twain autobiography in the NY Times:
Mark Twain's Riverboat Ramblings

Selections for our discussion of the poetry of Edna St Vincent Millay:

• "Renascence"
• "If I should learn, in some quite casual way"
• "The Bean-Stalk"
• "Mariposa"
• "Prayer to Persephone"
• "Dirge"
• "We talk of taxes, and I call you friend"
• "Into the golden vessel of great song"
• "Not with libations, but with shouts and laughter"
• "When I too long have looked upon your face"
• "Wild Swans"
• "I know I am but summer to your heart"
• "What my lips have kissed, and where, and why"

I suggest to you that it is enough for a novelist to be a good novelist. It is unnecessary for him to be a prophet, a preacher, a politician or a leader of thought. Fiction is an art and the purpose of art is to please. If in my quarters this is not acknowledged I can only suppose it is because of the unfortunate impression so widely held that there is something shameful in pleasure. But all pleasure is good. Only, some pleasures have mischievous consequences and it is better to eschew them. And of course there are intelligent pleasures and unintelligent pleasures. I venture to put the reading of a good novel amongst the most intelligent pleasures that man can enjoy.