Book Launch: 150 Highly Recommended Books

This is rather special occasion. Everyone knows this is the culmination

of a five year project sponsored by Dean, Randy Diehl

and other committee consisted of all that thug

Martin EJ and Elizabeth Richmond, Gaza might think may be coming

later. And Steve Weinberg, who represented the science part

of the committee. The purpose was to

try to get books that would really help students in their reading

in college and actually beyond. In other words, this identifies books that the committee

here in liberal arts think to be significant. So

we’re going to let our panel here this afternoon speak in various ways

about the way in which this came about and the part that they play.

This includes Kip Keller, who is the editor of the British Study Series,

Lisa Lacey, who is a recent graduate and a junior fellow in

British studies. Megan Bennett, who was a graduate student at the GOP Jewish

School. And Jane Waggoner, who is an undergraduate in philosophy.

So as you say, we have asked we thought it would be a bore

for the members of the committee. Speak once again to the group. So we’ve tried to make this brother

representative an unusual occasion. We want

to begin with dinking because all of this had its origins

some three decades earlier. And what is called the Texas list

of unrequited. Really? This was 32 years ago. And Bob was the

chairman of the committee when he was Dean. And it has a

status at the beginning of the present project. Bob will begin with you. I will dops stand

up or do you care? I’ll send it. I’ll say

thank you. That’s it. Texas list of required reading. Roger

is always too generous because he did all the work

on putting this one together. And this was what, Roger, 1985,

Yeah, but we were working on it as early as 84. Yadira Well, here’s how

it came about. Now I’ll try to keep his very brief. I’ve always been a great books

enthusiast. You may have heard of the Mortimer Adler great books

curriculum. That was he and Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago

Instituted and St. John’s, which has two locations,

one in New York and one in New Mexico. The whole curriculum is built around the

great books. Now, those are the great books of the Western world. I mean, I think

that’s actually what they call them. The College of Liberal Arts was created

in in 1979, and the president

asked me to become the dean of the college. And I was looking around for ways

to to get her on the map, to get the word out. College

of Liberal Arts, Piaget. And I thought books, books. We’ve got to stand for something.

I suppose today people would talk about a brand or something. Well, I thought

books were a pretty good brand. And so I just. And I talk to Roger

about it. And we decided, well, let’s get started. Got to start somewhere. And the somewhere

we started was I knew a lot of prominent celebrities here in Texas.

And I wrote them you saying, here’s what we’re doing and

just give me the names of five books that I forget. How a

phrase, the first letter. But it was five important books in your life, something like that.

I remember late Lady Bird Johnson, Mrs. Lyndon Johnson. She was got

quite enthusiastic about it and sent me a list. And it was about the kind

of thing you would expect. I think The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Odyssey,

some other books. And I remember several other former governor,

Alan Shivers. He put a lot of thought to it and sent me a nice list. Now, I was really

I was intrigued. I was I was impressed that these people were even. Thinking about books of that quality,

I wrote Steve Weinberg, who’s on this committee or this year’s this

decade’s committee. You might say and he sent me a list of five

books and they were the predictable Aeneid Odyssey. But he said, What I’d really like

to tell you is five books that I read that made a huge impact on my life

and that are fun to read. Right.

Well, that changed my focus on this thing. So then I started soliciting books,

not that are necessarily fun to read, but that are readable readability, readability

writ large. And we always focused on that. We put a committee together. I put

if you ever want to get anything done, you get Roger to take care of it. And

the result was this list there. I noticed

that some of I had very little to I. I think I lobbied for two books,

one of which has made it through to this list. Who was the White Nile by Alan Moorehead,

which is a great tale, not only of exploration, but of contact between West

and East, between West and Africa. I also

lobbied for and they acceded to Whittaker Chambers witness because that

had made a big impact on my life. Alas, that didn’t make it into this

this current list. But that’s the way the thing came about.

And all I want to say in conclusion is that you

can raise objections to every single reading list that has ever been put out there

from somebodies perspective or another. It is inadequate. It doesn’t have enough of.

It’s not well represented enough by this kind of writer or that kind of writer.

I have an objection. I knew I was actually friends with the Nobel Prize winner

for Yiddish literature, for literature or Nobel. The Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer.

And he always told me, he said, I don’t like to talk to literary critics because they

always first thing they do is say, I have an objection. Well, that’s the way I felt

about peddling, so to speak, this reading list. Everybody had an objection,

but they all do. So with that, I’ll just

turn it over to whoever. Roger, you in charge of this thing before Dean Diehl

speaks? The semester is coming to a close. And this is one of the last

occasions in which a deal will be making a public appearance. That’s why I’m going into total

hiding.

That’s actually more a little more definitive than I had in mind. But yeah, I’ll be

stepping down in two and a half month. I was just talking to Bob King about what to do after retirement.

He gave me some actually some very good ideas. What I would say about my role of

virtually echoes word for word, what Bob just said.

Roger is giving me credit. I sponsored this. I hosted it.

In fact, it was, I would say, entirely Roger’s project.

You came. You came to visit me in my office. You brought the required

list of honor required readings, which, by the way, I’ve always kept in my desk. And I I still have three

copies of it in my desk. I loved it. I love reading lists. I’m not

one of those who objects. But Roger laid out

a proposal that we have at it again.

We didn’t talk about duplicating or replacing the list, but kind of coming up with

our own. We hadn’t yet decided on the number of books to include.

I think what happened was in our various discussions,

people would argue strongly for the inclusion of of a book. So what started out as

maybe a list of 100 became a list of 150. But all along my

view was the purpose of any reading list is

to provide stimulus and perhaps controversy

to to get people thinking about what constitutes a great book like

Bob. I’ve always been a lover of

great books and I was influenced by the same people you just mentioned. But

but I see a list that includes this list as that some

UCH does not aspire to be any kind of definitive list. It’s meant

to be a list that will. Emulate other people

perhaps to come up with their own lives or at least take a look at the books on this list.

I remember I see Elizabeth Werthmann, Gaza back here. I remember I

remember Elizabeth saying and I completely agree with this point of view. She said,

you know, I’m not gonna be a party to a list that proposes

to be the canon of world literature. But you

did like the idea and promoted the idea of a list that would stimulate

discussion and controversy. And I like that that view of the matter

a lot. I will say is this working on this list

was an incredibly enjoyable experience because of the people on the committee.

I look, even though we met about once every four months. I always looked forward

to those meetings. And the list as it was unfolding helped guide

my own reading during the years that we were working on this. So thank

you, Roger, first for proposing this in the first place

and for hosting us here at the HRC and for all the work that you

did, you really are responsible for the blurbs that

I wrote, a couple of them. But I think you are the generator of most of the blurbs

in the in this book. Well, I think it was really a collective effort. But

we do have an editor and I think kept color. Tell us about the process.

Yeah. And I’ll get to that in a second. I didn’t want to say as far as the purpose

of the book, this especially for students, that

this book is not meant to be punitive or prescriptive. It’s

not to say if you don’t read these books, you’re not a complete person or you’re not a good person.

You can lead a wonderful, meaningful life and never,

never read a sentence out of any of the books listed here. So that’s not what this is about.

If you do like to read, though, and there are plenty of good reasons to read, you know, we read history

so that we don’t live in the eternal president like invertebrates. You know, we

we read fiction because we can never know enough people or have enough experiences. And so

if you do like to read a book like a list of books like this

is a sort of map. And I think that this is sort

of a city map, a small map of a small area

to lead through the wilderness of books because there are so many out there.

And it’s impossible sometimes to even know where to set off, you know,

on what? On a path, on a trail. And so a book like this is supposed

to help with that. If you wanted a larger map, these sort of world atlas

version of this is Roger’s indispensable reading, which also worked on.

And it’s where there’s 150 books. This is a thousand and one.

There are actually a thousand won titles, main entries. And then if you throw in

all of the extra stuff, it’s about fifteen hundred. And so it’s roughly 10 times

the size of this one. And and so whereas this would this is excellent

for leading you around sort of a large neighborhood of

possible things to read, this would get you through the whole world of reading.

And now as far as the editorial process, Roger and I have a regular

meeting still goes on every Saturday at 11 o’clock at the Starbucks at twenty

seventh in New ISIS. If you ever wanted to find us, that’s where we are on Saturday mornings. And

and we just hashed out the wording of the entries, the illustrations,

the format, everything. You know, repeatedly books would get added. Books would get

deleted. We would keep the same author, but changed the book. It represented an

author and it was theirs. I would I can honestly say

there’s there’s more work that went into this than might be like immediately apparent, just thumb through it.

I feel I have to defend myself. This all of the entries here

are incorporated in the larger book and all that I did was go ahead in

the eight hundred and fifty one further.

Just eight hundred and fifty one. Well I guess

you didn’t ask me a specific question, so I guess I would say my impression is what

a wonderful tool this is for. Well for anyone really. But I was. Thinking

of it from the point of view of an undergraduate, because

I think about what I read as an undergraduate, which was

in the 70s and it was so Western centric. A lot of

this is Western centric, but it’s still broad and and encompasses

a number of titles that were central to my undergraduate education.

But it’s broader. And I, for example, didn’t meet Hannah Arrente

until 20 years after undergraduate school. I went back to graduate school and took a Holocaust

seminar and suddenly met Hannah Arendt and the origins

of totalitarianism. Looking at this, I think back on meeting Aristotle

as a freshman in the 70s and how

Aristotle has figured into my studies of

the Middle East and in particular this semester teaching Islamic Spain and

the fact that much of Aristotle’s work gets translated into Arabic and then eventually into Latin

and becomes known to the Western world. So it just the connections of these books to me

are limitless for students and how lucky students are to

have these books available. And we’re lucky, too. I often think about

I’m just in the mood to read something. What do I want to read? What a nice way to have something to just

go to. Speaking of other

sort of pivotal works in here, Frederick Douglass, I did a

masters on men who worked for woman’s suffrage. And you don’t normally think of Frederick Douglass as

a woman suffragists. You think of him as obviously an abolitionist for good reason.

But it’s just interesting to to look through this and think of every single one of

these people has been of these authors has been pivotal. The only

thing I would have added just in, nobody asked me this. So I hope I don’t get

mauled on the way out of here. But one pivotal book that I read, an

undergraduate school was Custer Died for Your Sins by veined

Gloria Øyvind, or I’m not sure if he pronounced it Vener Ryan. But it was the

first time I learned that the American government had violated

every treaty that it had ever made with the Native Americans. Every single one.

And so and he had, you know, been active, an activist as well

as active politically in, you know, bureaus and

committees and councils and lots of legal positions and so forth.

That would be the only thing is that I found that book as an American. One

of the pivotal books for me as an undergraduate was learning

a little bit more about the settlement of the West or really the whole United States. It wasn’t

just the West, but anyway, that would be my only one that I could think of off

the top of my head. That was like pivotal. It wasn’t in here, but what a fabulous work. Thank

you for for making this list of books.

Absolutely. So I I when I first got the copy of this,

I kind of looked at it from two different perspectives. I’m a dual degrees of graduate student in Middle

Eastern studies and in global policy studies in my undergrad is in international relations.

And so I looked at it from that point of view and I also looked at it from the point of view. I’m a U.S. Army veteran

as well. And so as I was going through this,

I had a few thoughts. One, now I have a roadmap of

interesting books to read and pivotal books that are important. Some of these I have

literally never heard of. But that’s the point of this list, is to broaden

my my own horizons. I participate in a group called the Warrior Chorus,

which is from a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. Actually, Dr. Pillemer,

over in the Classics department is our is our academic leader

for that. And so we look at The Odyssey and the Iliad and

other works of the classics and relate them to our modern views

of war. And then we make art about it. Some of us do stories or songs or whatever

and then try to relate these themes to the public

and have a public veteran kind of debate. I guess

you could say or kind of bring those two parts of society closer together

and. So, of course, I’m very happy to see the odyssey in here

and also the facilities and every single international relations

or international security class I’ve ever had. There has been chapters

and pieces of two cities and I finally got the book this past

couple of months ago actually to read over the summer from a military or

from a Middle Eastern studies perspective. I’m happy to

see Edward Saeed’s orientalism, of course, a somewhat

controversial work depending on where you’re coming from talking about. And I really

like your blurb about that. He held consistently that Western

scholarship on the region remains distorted and that public attitudes about the Arab world continue to be ingrained

with a condescending attitude. And I feel like as we as our broadening

our horizons and Middle Eastern scholarship, it’s really important for us to always remember that about some

of the works that have already been written. And as we are sifting through the more contemporary

works. So I as a student, extremely

excited to dig into some of these works and really get a broader,

broader foundation for being a human, really.

So I should probably begin by saying I’m probably the last person to get involved

in this particularly was last Friday when Dr. Lewis handed me

the announcement and pointed to my name as one of the commentaries. But

I grew up in a lot of classical education, so there is always a big emphasis on the great book. So

it was exciting to get the chance to sort of reflect on this list and just sort of value the contributions

that it makes both for students and grad students and faculty members alike.

One thing that struck me initially was just how so many of the books selected

I’ve encountered them and they’ve popped up in various conversations and relationships that I’ve had throughout

my life. I can remember last semester when I went and I spoke with my uncle

about how we had just finished the Canterbury Tales and Dr. Lewis’s class on the great books.

And all the sudden my uncle, who’s this very reserved, calm person, just slowly starts

murmuring the opening lines. And it was it was surprising to

me because I had never seen him do anything like that before. But it turned out that he had read the book in high school

count the number of people I’ve met who with a book like, you know, I’ll Bear Can Lose the

Stranger, which appears have encountered that in their teens during

angsty periods of their lives and before any teacher had ever signed it or anything

like that. And so I think that I think that

a list like this has a very important role to play, just in the sense of allowing people to engage with values

and ideas that end up being very significant to them throughout the course of their lives. Regarding

regarding the list itself, the philosophy major in me was happy to see that they selected

Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy instead of a history of Western philosophy.

I mean, both are, of course, very important and inspiring works

for a lot of people who have ever gotten interested in philosophy in most of their professors too.

But the latter, some historical inaccuracy is

a little bit of difficulties there and better cast a bit of a shadow on its classic status. So

I was glad to see that they managed to pick the one I like.

At least there were a few. There are a few selections in there that did surprise

me. I was I was surprised to see towards perpetual peace instead of the critique

by. What? John Maynard Keynes. The economic consequences of peace

rather than the general theory. And all of that just got me thinking about the fact

that you guys were able to come to final decisions on these things is a testament to an

absurdly impressive level of diplomacy and compromise.

So this is that that was impressive. I guess

lastly, the thing that struck me just in terms of the value of the list is it’s

not just a list that provides people with a guide to what to read. It’s

it also seems to be a sort of a shining example of of how we should be reading

just in the sense of not simply looking for entertainment or to learn new facts or something like that, but also

with a critical eye towards what’s valuable and what notions and ideas are going to last. And

so I thought I thought this is maybe just an immense contribution to people seeking to read and enrich

their lives more generally. If I could respond to your

comment about perpetual peace, the economic consequences.

We’ve talked a lot about those two issues and it came down to

what Bob referred to earlier as readability was a factor.

Fair enough. I think we ought to call on the other members of the committee,

Elizabeth Riskin nerves. Martin it’s all batsuit.

In no particular order. Well, I’d like to pick up on

that comment upon kingmakers of everybody having a complaint about it.

I am a friend of mine yesterday. Distinguished scholar on campus.

Thanks again to. You said you had The Odyssey.

Really? It doesn’t say that you shouldn’t read.

And then I said, well, what one of the things we hope will happen is that you read some book

and then that leads you on to another book. So if you read The Odyssey, you may want to find out

what happened before or just use took off.

One of the issues we have that remains an interesting one is that

at one point we were trying to figure out when does a book become a classic and

not just one point many. And because so there are

so many books that have been written very recently that are quite compelling that may last or may not

last for centuries. But if you notice

in that list, these are largely books. Oh, 50 years or

before. Right. Yeah. And that’s what we decided on, which

was an interesting question. A lot of arguments because

we all had our favorites of recent vintage. But it was it was

a very long process for all of us. I think was extraordinary

in Colorado. It was extraordinarily

interesting. And I often got us reading books over the summer that we ordinarily

wouldn’t have read. And I’m sure there were great shortcomings that are made

up by a thousand and one books. So that there’s that

book that’s you should see that is the companion volume. But in any case,

I would just say it’s one of those very special experiences working with

colleagues totally from different views are meeting

our common ground on. So I wish I could

weave together everything that’s been said, but I wanted to pull a couple of ideas I particularly that’s to thank

both deans of the colleges a a lot. Have you brought together these reading communities? That’s

about this. Do people read on their own? But they also read together being invited to during

this time it was a divided labor between a friendly deal and between. Roger Lewis was a great pleasure

over the last few years. That sent me back to the 1980s in a positive way about the big shoulder

pads, but about the great things you could go back to today.

I want to make a remark also about the notion of the map. So if I could just pull that idea out,

I think this is a map. There’s a shorter map and there’s a longer map. I love the idea of the neighborhood

map and the global map. But as a series, who I find really helpful in my work talks about

this up. So he says you can map trains and you could tell everybody to walk on the big boulevard

and they can tell them just putting barricades up and having a revolution. That’s the way the city of Paris was designed.

But what a place when it’s been mapped and trains. The distinction he makes requires that it be

using his word, Clarky. It needs to be used. It needs to be practiced. And

so it was lovely about creating this list for the stations to the beginning of it. And I hope it goes forward

a great deal. Already the comments from my three readers, this new community today are beginning. That

is that it will be practiced by people in different ways. But I was one of my professors.

He’s a little of a flash point. Yeah. So different people are going to practice space and super different

ways and services like Shahzad back in the day, 1001 nights,

added to it. So thank you, Joe Runty, everybody, for letting me be part of those initial, very

initial conversations. This project is not done. This project is an invitation to

the next book that will be added to it by hopefully without any meetings or.