Auden’s syllabus
My Uncle John shared a syllabus for a course that W. H. Auden taught at the University of Michigan in the early 1940s. Auden assigned 6,000 pp. of reading, according to The Paris Review.
(I’m not sure if the estimate is for recommended and required reading, or just for the latter.)
The way to complete so much reading on time is to begin before the term. Like, in grammar school. I imagine Auden telling his students: “I’m sure you’ve already read two-thirds of this material.”
I try to read a lot, and not only fluff. But there are just three items on this syllabus that I’ve read from beginning to end. I’ll let you guess which they are. Two of them, I first read in grammar school.
What on earth have I been doing since then?
The Philadelphian writer Joe Queenan has a nice memoir of his reading life called One for the Books. He gets through plenty of books and speaks candidly of their lousiness. You can get an idea from this passage. (Read to the end for a tidbit about Winston Churchill.)
The font is Caslon no. 540, which I’ve discussed.
Later in the book, Queenan makes a disparaging remark about South Bend.
P.S. It seems that Alan Jacobs was the first person to blog about Auden’s syllabus. Today, Jacobs posted another good entry, about early cinema.
P.P.S. When I took A.P. English in high school, students were expected to read 700 pp. every 2 weeks to earn an “A”: not quite Auden’s pace, but not so, so far off it, either. I wouldn’t have come close if we hadn’t been allowed to accumulate pages during the summer and Christmas holidays. Even so, I resorted to dubious measures like counting blank pages and skipping ahead to pages with three or four lines of text – at the end of a chapter, for instance. (I found dozens of virtually text-free pages in my parents’ edition of Walden. I also used a very generously spaced edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that contained hundreds of pages. That book was a godsend because we were allowed to count each poetry page as three pages.)
(I’m not sure if the estimate is for recommended and required reading, or just for the latter.)
The way to complete so much reading on time is to begin before the term. Like, in grammar school. I imagine Auden telling his students: “I’m sure you’ve already read two-thirds of this material.”
I try to read a lot, and not only fluff. But there are just three items on this syllabus that I’ve read from beginning to end. I’ll let you guess which they are. Two of them, I first read in grammar school.
What on earth have I been doing since then?
The Philadelphian writer Joe Queenan has a nice memoir of his reading life called One for the Books. He gets through plenty of books and speaks candidly of their lousiness. You can get an idea from this passage. (Read to the end for a tidbit about Winston Churchill.)
The font is Caslon no. 540, which I’ve discussed.
Later in the book, Queenan makes a disparaging remark about South Bend.
P.S. It seems that Alan Jacobs was the first person to blog about Auden’s syllabus. Today, Jacobs posted another good entry, about early cinema.
P.P.S. When I took A.P. English in high school, students were expected to read 700 pp. every 2 weeks to earn an “A”: not quite Auden’s pace, but not so, so far off it, either. I wouldn’t have come close if we hadn’t been allowed to accumulate pages during the summer and Christmas holidays. Even so, I resorted to dubious measures like counting blank pages and skipping ahead to pages with three or four lines of text – at the end of a chapter, for instance. (I found dozens of virtually text-free pages in my parents’ edition of Walden. I also used a very generously spaced edition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner that contained hundreds of pages. That book was a godsend because we were allowed to count each poetry page as three pages.)