{"id":203,"date":"2019-05-28T21:53:57","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T21:53:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=podcast&p=203"},"modified":"2021-01-20T21:37:59","modified_gmt":"2021-01-20T21:37:59","slug":"book-launch-150-highly-recommended-books","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast\/book-launch-150-highly-recommended-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Launch: 150 Highly Recommended Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Speaker – Dean Robert King<\/p>\n

This occasion celebrates the end of the five-year process, sponsored by Randy Diehl and the College of Liberal Arts, that resulted in 150 Highly Recommended Books. The other committee members for the project were Robert Abzug (Rapoport Chair of Jewish Studies), Roger Louis (Kerr Professor of English History and Culture), Al Martinich (Vaughan Centennial Professor in Philosophy), Elizabeth Richmond-Garza (Director of Comparative Literature), and Steven Weinberg (Welch Chair in Physics). The thoroughly illustrated book assesses the authors of the works selected for inclusion as well as the books themselves. Copies will be distributed at the meeting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – Dean Robert King This occasion celebrates the end of the five-year process, sponsored by Randy Diehl and the College of Liberal Arts, that resulted in 150 Highly Recommended Books. The other committee members for the project were Robert Abzug (Rapoport Chair of Jewish Studies), Roger Louis (Kerr Professor of English History and Culture), […]","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/05\/150-Books.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"41.09M","filesize_raw":"43082048","date_recorded":"03-05-2019","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[211,40,216,214,212,217,213,44,215,120],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-203","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-150-highly-recommended-books","6":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","7":"tag-college-of-liberal-arts","8":"tag-elizabeth-richmond-garza","9":"tag-philosophy","10":"tag-randy-diehl","11":"tag-robert-azbug","12":"tag-roger-louis","13":"tag-steven-weinberg","14":"tag-university-of-texas","15":"series-bsls","16":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n

Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":824,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-23 19:43:17","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:43:17","post_content":"\n

Dean Robert King is the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin. His interests are in historical linguistics, DNA and the origins of spoken language, language and politics, and language and people issues. <\/p>\n","post_title":"Robert King","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"robert-king","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 19:43:17","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:43:17","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=824","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":"

This is rather special occasion. Everyone knows this is the culmination<\/p>\n

of a five year project sponsored by Dean, Randy Diehl<\/p>\n

and other committee consisted of all that thug<\/p>\n

Martin EJ and Elizabeth Richmond, Gaza might think may be coming<\/p>\n

later. And Steve Weinberg, who represented the science part<\/p>\n

of the committee. The purpose was to<\/p>\n

try to get books that would really help students in their reading<\/p>\n

in college and actually beyond. In other words, this identifies books that the committee<\/p>\n

here in liberal arts think to be significant. So<\/p>\n

we’re going to let our panel here this afternoon speak in various ways<\/p>\n

about the way in which this came about and the part that they play.<\/p>\n

This includes Kip Keller, who is the editor of the British Study Series,<\/p>\n

Lisa Lacey, who is a recent graduate and a junior fellow in<\/p>\n

British studies. Megan Bennett, who was a graduate student at the GOP Jewish<\/p>\n

School. And Jane Waggoner, who is an undergraduate in philosophy.<\/p>\n

So as you say, we have asked we thought it would be a bore<\/p>\n

for the members of the committee. Speak once again to the group. So we’ve tried to make this brother<\/p>\n

representative an unusual occasion. We want<\/p>\n

to begin with dinking because all of this had its origins<\/p>\n

some three decades earlier. And what is called the Texas list<\/p>\n

of unrequited. Really? This was 32 years ago. And Bob was the<\/p>\n

chairman of the committee when he was Dean. And it has a<\/p>\n

status at the beginning of the present project. Bob will begin with you. I will dops stand<\/p>\n

up or do you care? I’ll send it. I’ll say<\/p>\n

thank you. That’s it. Texas list of required reading. Roger<\/p>\n

is always too generous because he did all the work<\/p>\n

on putting this one together. And this was what, Roger, 1985,<\/p>\n

Yeah, but we were working on it as early as 84. Yadira Well, here’s how<\/p>\n

it came about. Now I’ll try to keep his very brief. I’ve always been a great books<\/p>\n

enthusiast. You may have heard of the Mortimer Adler great books<\/p>\n

curriculum. That was he and Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago<\/p>\n

Instituted and St. John’s, which has two locations,<\/p>\n

one in New York and one in New Mexico. The whole curriculum is built around the<\/p>\n

great books. Now, those are the great books of the Western world. I mean, I think<\/p>\n

that’s actually what they call them. The College of Liberal Arts was created<\/p>\n

in in 1979, and the president<\/p>\n

asked me to become the dean of the college. And I was looking around for ways<\/p>\n

to to get her on the map, to get the word out. College<\/p>\n

of Liberal Arts, Piaget. And I thought books, books. We’ve got to stand for something.<\/p>\n

I suppose today people would talk about a brand or something. Well, I thought<\/p>\n

books were a pretty good brand. And so I just. And I talk to Roger<\/p>\n

about it. And we decided, well, let’s get started. Got to start somewhere. And the somewhere<\/p>\n

we started was I knew a lot of prominent celebrities here in Texas.<\/p>\n

And I wrote them you saying, here’s what we’re doing and<\/p>\n

just give me the names of five books that I forget. How a<\/p>\n

phrase, the first letter. But it was five important books in your life, something like that.<\/p>\n

I remember late Lady Bird Johnson, Mrs. Lyndon Johnson. She was got<\/p>\n

quite enthusiastic about it and sent me a list. And it was about the kind<\/p>\n

of thing you would expect. I think The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Odyssey,<\/p>\n

some other books. And I remember several other former governor,<\/p>\n

Alan Shivers. He put a lot of thought to it and sent me a nice list. Now, I was really<\/p>\n

I was intrigued. I was I was impressed that these people were even. Thinking about books of that quality,<\/p>\n

I wrote Steve Weinberg, who’s on this committee or this year’s this<\/p>\n

decade’s committee. You might say and he sent me a list of five<\/p>\n

books and they were the predictable Aeneid Odyssey. But he said, What I’d really like<\/p>\n

to tell you is five books that I read that made a huge impact on my life<\/p>\n

and that are fun to read. Right.<\/p>\n

Well, that changed my focus on this thing. So then I started soliciting books,<\/p>\n

not that are necessarily fun to read, but that are readable readability, readability<\/p>\n

writ large. And we always focused on that. We put a committee together. I put<\/p>\n

if you ever want to get anything done, you get Roger to take care of it. And<\/p>\n

the result was this list there. I noticed<\/p>\n

that some of I had very little to I. I think I lobbied for two books,<\/p>\n

one of which has made it through to this list. Who was the White Nile by Alan Moorehead,<\/p>\n

which is a great tale, not only of exploration, but of contact between West<\/p>\n

and East, between West and Africa. I also<\/p>\n

lobbied for and they acceded to Whittaker Chambers witness because that<\/p>\n

had made a big impact on my life. Alas, that didn’t make it into this<\/p>\n

this current list. But that’s the way the thing came about.<\/p>\n

And all I want to say in conclusion is that you<\/p>\n

can raise objections to every single reading list that has ever been put out there<\/p>\n

from somebodies perspective or another. It is inadequate. It doesn’t have enough of.<\/p>\n

It’s not well represented enough by this kind of writer or that kind of writer.<\/p>\n

I have an objection. I knew I was actually friends with the Nobel Prize winner<\/p>\n

for Yiddish literature, for literature or Nobel. The Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer.<\/p>\n

And he always told me, he said, I don’t like to talk to literary critics because they<\/p>\n

always first thing they do is say, I have an objection. Well, that’s the way I felt<\/p>\n

about peddling, so to speak, this reading list. Everybody had an objection,<\/p>\n

but they all do. So with that, I’ll just<\/p>\n

turn it over to whoever. Roger, you in charge of this thing before Dean Diehl<\/p>\n

speaks? The semester is coming to a close. And this is one of the last<\/p>\n

occasions in which a deal will be making a public appearance. That’s why I’m going into total<\/p>\n

hiding.<\/p>\n

That’s actually more a little more definitive than I had in mind. But yeah, I’ll be<\/p>\n

stepping down in two and a half month. I was just talking to Bob King about what to do after retirement.<\/p>\n

He gave me some actually some very good ideas. What I would say about my role of<\/p>\n

virtually echoes word for word, what Bob just said.<\/p>\n

Roger is giving me credit. I sponsored this. I hosted it.<\/p>\n

In fact, it was, I would say, entirely Roger’s project.<\/p>\n

You came. You came to visit me in my office. You brought the required<\/p>\n

list of honor required readings, which, by the way, I’ve always kept in my desk. And I I still have three<\/p>\n

copies of it in my desk. I loved it. I love reading lists. I’m not<\/p>\n

one of those who objects. But Roger laid out<\/p>\n

a proposal that we have at it again.<\/p>\n

We didn’t talk about duplicating or replacing the list, but kind of coming up with<\/p>\n

our own. We hadn’t yet decided on the number of books to include.<\/p>\n

I think what happened was in our various discussions,<\/p>\n

people would argue strongly for the inclusion of of a book. So what started out as<\/p>\n

maybe a list of 100 became a list of 150. But all along my<\/p>\n

view was the purpose of any reading list is<\/p>\n

to provide stimulus and perhaps controversy<\/p>\n

to to get people thinking about what constitutes a great book like<\/p>\n

Bob. I’ve always been a lover of<\/p>\n

great books and I was influenced by the same people you just mentioned. But<\/p>\n

but I see a list that includes this list as that some<\/p>\n

UCH does not aspire to be any kind of definitive list. It’s meant<\/p>\n

to be a list that will. Emulate other people<\/p>\n

perhaps to come up with their own lives or at least take a look at the books on this list.<\/p>\n

I remember I see Elizabeth Werthmann, Gaza back here. I remember I<\/p>\n

remember Elizabeth saying and I completely agree with this point of view. She said,<\/p>\n

you know, I’m not gonna be a party to a list that proposes<\/p>\n

to be the canon of world literature. But you<\/p>\n

did like the idea and promoted the idea of a list that would stimulate<\/p>\n

discussion and controversy. And I like that that view of the matter<\/p>\n

a lot. I will say is this working on this list<\/p>\n

was an incredibly enjoyable experience because of the people on the committee.<\/p>\n

I look, even though we met about once every four months. I always looked forward<\/p>\n

to those meetings. And the list as it was unfolding helped guide<\/p>\n

my own reading during the years that we were working on this. So thank<\/p>\n

you, Roger, first for proposing this in the first place<\/p>\n

and for hosting us here at the HRC and for all the work that you<\/p>\n

did, you really are responsible for the blurbs that<\/p>\n

I wrote, a couple of them. But I think you are the generator of most of the blurbs<\/p>\n

in the in this book. Well, I think it was really a collective effort. But<\/p>\n

we do have an editor and I think kept color. Tell us about the process.<\/p>\n

Yeah. And I’ll get to that in a second. I didn’t want to say as far as the purpose<\/p>\n

of the book, this especially for students, that<\/p>\n

this book is not meant to be punitive or prescriptive. It’s<\/p>\n

not to say if you don’t read these books, you’re not a complete person or you’re not a good person.<\/p>\n

You can lead a wonderful, meaningful life and never,<\/p>\n

never read a sentence out of any of the books listed here. So that’s not what this is about.<\/p>\n

If you do like to read, though, and there are plenty of good reasons to read, you know, we read history<\/p>\n

so that we don’t live in the eternal president like invertebrates. You know, we<\/p>\n

we read fiction because we can never know enough people or have enough experiences. And so<\/p>\n

if you do like to read a book like a list of books like this<\/p>\n

is a sort of map. And I think that this is sort<\/p>\n

of a city map, a small map of a small area<\/p>\n

to lead through the wilderness of books because there are so many out there.<\/p>\n

And it’s impossible sometimes to even know where to set off, you know,<\/p>\n

on what? On a path, on a trail. And so a book like this is supposed<\/p>\n

to help with that. If you wanted a larger map, these sort of world atlas<\/p>\n

version of this is Roger’s indispensable reading, which also worked on.<\/p>\n

And it’s where there’s 150 books. This is a thousand and one.<\/p>\n

There are actually a thousand won titles, main entries. And then if you throw in<\/p>\n

all of the extra stuff, it’s about fifteen hundred. And so it’s roughly 10 times<\/p>\n

the size of this one. And and so whereas this would this is excellent<\/p>\n

for leading you around sort of a large neighborhood of<\/p>\n

possible things to read, this would get you through the whole world of reading.<\/p>\n

And now as far as the editorial process, Roger and I have a regular<\/p>\n

meeting still goes on every Saturday at 11 o’clock at the Starbucks at twenty<\/p>\n

seventh in New ISIS. If you ever wanted to find us, that’s where we are on Saturday mornings. And<\/p>\n

and we just hashed out the wording of the entries, the illustrations,<\/p>\n

the format, everything. You know, repeatedly books would get added. Books would get<\/p>\n

deleted. We would keep the same author, but changed the book. It represented an<\/p>\n

author and it was theirs. I would I can honestly say<\/p>\n

there’s there’s more work that went into this than might be like immediately apparent, just thumb through it.<\/p>\n

I feel I have to defend myself. This all of the entries here<\/p>\n

are incorporated in the larger book and all that I did was go ahead in<\/p>\n

the eight hundred and fifty one further.<\/p>\n

Just eight hundred and fifty one. Well I guess<\/p>\n

you didn’t ask me a specific question, so I guess I would say my impression is what<\/p>\n

a wonderful tool this is for. Well for anyone really. But I was. Thinking<\/p>\n

of it from the point of view of an undergraduate, because<\/p>\n

I think about what I read as an undergraduate, which was<\/p>\n

in the 70s and it was so Western centric. A lot of<\/p>\n

this is Western centric, but it’s still broad and and encompasses<\/p>\n

a number of titles that were central to my undergraduate education.<\/p>\n

But it’s broader. And I, for example, didn’t meet Hannah Arrente<\/p>\n

until 20 years after undergraduate school. I went back to graduate school and took a Holocaust<\/p>\n

seminar and suddenly met Hannah Arendt and the origins<\/p>\n

of totalitarianism. Looking at this, I think back on meeting Aristotle<\/p>\n

as a freshman in the 70s and how<\/p>\n

Aristotle has figured into my studies of<\/p>\n

the Middle East and in particular this semester teaching Islamic Spain and<\/p>\n

the fact that much of Aristotle’s work gets translated into Arabic and then eventually into Latin<\/p>\n

and becomes known to the Western world. So it just the connections of these books to me<\/p>\n

are limitless for students and how lucky students are to<\/p>\n

have these books available. And we’re lucky, too. I often think about<\/p>\n

I’m just in the mood to read something. What do I want to read? What a nice way to have something to just<\/p>\n

go to. Speaking of other<\/p>\n

sort of pivotal works in here, Frederick Douglass, I did a<\/p>\n

masters on men who worked for woman’s suffrage. And you don’t normally think of Frederick Douglass as<\/p>\n

a woman suffragists. You think of him as obviously an abolitionist for good reason.<\/p>\n

But it’s just interesting to to look through this and think of every single one of<\/p>\n

these people has been of these authors has been pivotal. The only<\/p>\n

thing I would have added just in, nobody asked me this. So I hope I don’t get<\/p>\n

mauled on the way out of here. But one pivotal book that I read, an<\/p>\n

undergraduate school was Custer Died for Your Sins by veined<\/p>\n

Gloria \u00d8yvind, or I’m not sure if he pronounced it Vener Ryan. But it was the<\/p>\n

first time I learned that the American government had violated<\/p>\n

every treaty that it had ever made with the Native Americans. Every single one.<\/p>\n

And so and he had, you know, been active, an activist as well<\/p>\n

as active politically in, you know, bureaus and<\/p>\n

committees and councils and lots of legal positions and so forth.<\/p>\n

That would be the only thing is that I found that book as an American. One<\/p>\n

of the pivotal books for me as an undergraduate was learning<\/p>\n

a little bit more about the settlement of the West or really the whole United States. It wasn’t<\/p>\n

just the West, but anyway, that would be my only one that I could think of off<\/p>\n

the top of my head. That was like pivotal. It wasn’t in here, but what a fabulous work. Thank<\/p>\n

you for for making this list of books.<\/p>\n

Absolutely. So I I when I first got the copy of this,<\/p>\n

I kind of looked at it from two different perspectives. I’m a dual degrees of graduate student in Middle<\/p>\n

Eastern studies and in global policy studies in my undergrad is in international relations.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

as well. And so as I was going through this,<\/p>\n

I had a few thoughts. One, now I have a roadmap of<\/p>\n

interesting books to read and pivotal books that are important. Some of these I have<\/p>\n

literally never heard of. But that’s the point of this list, is to broaden<\/p>\n

my my own horizons. I participate in a group called the Warrior Chorus,<\/p>\n

which is from a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. Actually, Dr. Pillemer,<\/p>\n

over in the Classics department is our is our academic leader<\/p>\n

for that. And so we look at The Odyssey and the Iliad and<\/p>\n

other works of the classics and relate them to our modern views<\/p>\n

of war. And then we make art about it. Some of us do stories or songs or whatever<\/p>\n

and then try to relate these themes to the public<\/p>\n

and have a public veteran kind of debate. I guess<\/p>\n

you could say or kind of bring those two parts of society closer together<\/p>\n

and. So, of course, I’m very happy to see the odyssey in here<\/p>\n

and also the facilities and every single international relations<\/p>\n

or international security class I’ve ever had. There has been chapters<\/p>\n

and pieces of two cities and I finally got the book this past<\/p>\n

couple of months ago actually to read over the summer from a military or<\/p>\n

from a Middle Eastern studies perspective. I’m happy to<\/p>\n

see Edward Saeed’s orientalism, of course, a somewhat<\/p>\n

controversial work depending on where you’re coming from talking about. And I really<\/p>\n

like your blurb about that. He held consistently that Western<\/p>\n

scholarship on the region remains distorted and that public attitudes about the Arab world continue to be ingrained<\/p>\n

with a condescending attitude. And I feel like as we as our broadening<\/p>\n

our horizons and Middle Eastern scholarship, it’s really important for us to always remember that about some<\/p>\n

of the works that have already been written. And as we are sifting through the more contemporary<\/p>\n

works. So I as a student, extremely<\/p>\n

excited to dig into some of these works and really get a broader,<\/p>\n

broader foundation for being a human, really.<\/p>\n

So I should probably begin by saying I’m probably the last person to get involved<\/p>\n

in this particularly was last Friday when Dr. Lewis handed me<\/p>\n

the announcement and pointed to my name as one of the commentaries. But<\/p>\n

I grew up in a lot of classical education, so there is always a big emphasis on the great book. So<\/p>\n

it was exciting to get the chance to sort of reflect on this list and just sort of value the contributions<\/p>\n

that it makes both for students and grad students and faculty members alike.<\/p>\n

One thing that struck me initially was just how so many of the books selected<\/p>\n

I’ve encountered them and they’ve popped up in various conversations and relationships that I’ve had throughout<\/p>\n

my life. I can remember last semester when I went and I spoke with my uncle<\/p>\n

about how we had just finished the Canterbury Tales and Dr. Lewis’s class on the great books.<\/p>\n

And all the sudden my uncle, who’s this very reserved, calm person, just slowly starts<\/p>\n

murmuring the opening lines. And it was it was surprising to<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

count the number of people I’ve met who with a book like, you know, I’ll Bear Can Lose the<\/p>\n

Stranger, which appears have encountered that in their teens during<\/p>\n

angsty periods of their lives and before any teacher had ever signed it or anything<\/p>\n

like that. And so I think that I think that<\/p>\n

a list like this has a very important role to play, just in the sense of allowing people to engage with values<\/p>\n

and ideas that end up being very significant to them throughout the course of their lives. Regarding<\/p>\n

regarding the list itself, the philosophy major in me was happy to see that they selected<\/p>\n

Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy instead of a history of Western philosophy.<\/p>\n

I mean, both are, of course, very important and inspiring works<\/p>\n

for a lot of people who have ever gotten interested in philosophy in most of their professors too.<\/p>\n

But the latter, some historical inaccuracy is<\/p>\n

a little bit of difficulties there and better cast a bit of a shadow on its classic status. So<\/p>\n

I was glad to see that they managed to pick the one I like.<\/p>\n

At least there were a few. There are a few selections in there that did surprise<\/p>\n

me. I was I was surprised to see towards perpetual peace instead of the critique<\/p>\n

by. What? John Maynard Keynes. The economic consequences of peace<\/p>\n

rather than the general theory. And all of that just got me thinking about the fact<\/p>\n

that you guys were able to come to final decisions on these things is a testament to an<\/p>\n

absurdly impressive level of diplomacy and compromise.<\/p>\n

So this is that that was impressive. I guess<\/p>\n

lastly, the thing that struck me just in terms of the value of the list is it’s<\/p>\n

not just a list that provides people with a guide to what to read. It’s<\/p>\n

it also seems to be a sort of a shining example of of how we should be reading<\/p>\n

just in the sense of not simply looking for entertainment or to learn new facts or something like that, but also<\/p>\n

with a critical eye towards what’s valuable and what notions and ideas are going to last. And<\/p>\n

so I thought I thought this is maybe just an immense contribution to people seeking to read and enrich<\/p>\n

their lives more generally. If I could respond to your<\/p>\n

comment about perpetual peace, the economic consequences.<\/p>\n

We’ve talked a lot about those two issues and it came down to<\/p>\n

what Bob referred to earlier as readability was a factor.<\/p>\n

Fair enough. I think we ought to call on the other members of the committee,<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Riskin nerves. Martin it’s all batsuit.<\/p>\n

In no particular order. Well, I’d like to pick up on<\/p>\n

that comment upon kingmakers of everybody having a complaint about it.<\/p>\n

I am a friend of mine yesterday. Distinguished scholar on campus.<\/p>\n

Thanks again to. You said you had The Odyssey.<\/p>\n

Really? It doesn’t say that you shouldn’t read.<\/p>\n

And then I said, well, what one of the things we hope will happen is that you read some book<\/p>\n

and then that leads you on to another book. So if you read The Odyssey, you may want to find out<\/p>\n

what happened before or just use took off.<\/p>\n

One of the issues we have that remains an interesting one is that<\/p>\n

at one point we were trying to figure out when does a book become a classic and<\/p>\n

not just one point many. And because so there are<\/p>\n

so many books that have been written very recently that are quite compelling that may last or may not<\/p>\n

last for centuries. But if you notice<\/p>\n

in that list, these are largely books. Oh, 50 years or<\/p>\n

before. Right. Yeah. And that’s what we decided on, which<\/p>\n

was an interesting question. A lot of arguments because<\/p>\n

we all had our favorites of recent vintage. But it was it was<\/p>\n

a very long process for all of us. I think was extraordinary<\/p>\n

in Colorado. It was extraordinarily<\/p>\n

interesting. And I often got us reading books over the summer that we ordinarily<\/p>\n

wouldn’t have read. And I’m sure there were great shortcomings that are made<\/p>\n

up by a thousand and one books. So that there’s that<\/p>\n

book that’s you should see that is the companion volume. But in any case,<\/p>\n

I would just say it’s one of those very special experiences working with<\/p>\n

colleagues totally from different views are meeting<\/p>\n

our common ground on. So I wish I could<\/p>\n

weave together everything that’s been said, but I wanted to pull a couple of ideas I particularly that’s to thank<\/p>\n

both deans of the colleges a a lot. Have you brought together these reading communities? That’s<\/p>\n

about this. Do people read on their own? But they also read together being invited to during<\/p>\n

this time it was a divided labor between a friendly deal and between. Roger Lewis was a great pleasure<\/p>\n

over the last few years. That sent me back to the 1980s in a positive way about the big shoulder<\/p>\n

pads, but about the great things you could go back to today.<\/p>\n

I want to make a remark also about the notion of the map. So if I could just pull that idea out,<\/p>\n

I think this is a map. There’s a shorter map and there’s a longer map. I love the idea of the neighborhood<\/p>\n

map and the global map. But as a series, who I find really helpful in my work talks about<\/p>\n

this up. So he says you can map trains and you could tell everybody to walk on the big boulevard<\/p>\n

and they can tell them just putting barricades up and having a revolution. That’s the way the city of Paris was designed.<\/p>\n

But what a place when it’s been mapped and trains. The distinction he makes requires that it be<\/p>\n

using his word, Clarky. It needs to be used. It needs to be practiced. And<\/p>\n

so it was lovely about creating this list for the stations to the beginning of it. And I hope it goes forward<\/p>\n

a great deal. Already the comments from my three readers, this new community today are beginning. That<\/p>\n

is that it will be practiced by people in different ways. But I was one of my professors.<\/p>\n

He’s a little of a flash point. Yeah. So different people are going to practice space and super different<\/p>\n

ways and services like Shahzad back in the day, 1001 nights,<\/p>\n

added to it. So thank you, Joe Runty, everybody, for letting me be part of those initial, very<\/p>\n

initial conversations. This project is not done. This project is an invitation to<\/p>\n

the next book that will be added to it by hopefully without any meetings or.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/203\/book-launch-150-highly-recommended-books.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/203\/book-launch-150-highly-recommended-books.mp3","audio_player":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/203\/book-launch-150-highly-recommended-books.mp3<\/a><\/audio>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/feed\/podcast\/bsls","embedCode":"

Book Launch: 150 Highly Recommended Books<\/a><\/blockquote>