Jeff Rutenbeck's List of Meaningful Books

If you missed Jeff Rutenbeck's Meaningful Books, you really did miss out! Jeff was terrific. And the threads he pulled together during his discussion of these books was interesting, thought provoking, and funny. A great example of why I love this series!

Jeff's books are still on display at the Miller Information Commons. If you can't make it over, here's his list:

The Peleponnesian War by Thucydides
I will Fear No Evil Robert A. Heinlen
The Hypercomplex Society by Lars Qvortrup
Marxism and Literature by Raymond Williams
Communication as culture: essays on media and society by James A. Carey
Dune by Frank Herbert
Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan
Discovering the news : a social history of American newspapers by Michael Schudson.
The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Phillip K. Dick
The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov
The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul
Ender’s Game, Card by Orson Scott Card
Germinal by Emile Zola
Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson

Happy 200th B-day Darwin and Lincoln!!!

The library has both a Lincoln and Darwin book display up in the entrace and at the desk.  Check out these monumentous historical figures.  We have also made a video in celebration of the occasion.

The List of Gary Scudder's Books

By popular demand, here is the list of Gary Scudder's Meaningful Books. All but a few are available at the Library, so if something looks appealling, come check it out!

Zhu Xi, Reflections on Things at Hand

James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

Junichiro Tanizaki, Some Prefer Nettles

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory

Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility cycle
Spring Snow
Runaway Horses
The Temple of Dawn
The Decay of the Angel

Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book

Valmaki, Ramayana

Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That

Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot

Herodotus, Histories

Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer

J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings trilogy

Books for Fun at the MIC

Students, faculty, and staff often wonder if there is anything "fun" to read in the Library's stacks.

To answer that question, the Library has started to highlight our collection of "Popular Reading" in a virtual display. And to start us off, we are highlighting "Great Books into Great Movies". Some of the greatest movies of all time were books first.

More popular reading collections are soon to come so don't forget to Check It Out!

Angela Battista

Our new diversity director has agreed to be a part of our Meaningful Books Series this fall! We can't wait to see what books Angela finds important to her!

to blog or not to blog

Let's try it! For example, we could talk about what we're reading. I just finished my first book by Amos Oz, an Israeli writer, novelist, and journalist. Don't Call It Night was a haunting and poetic story about the relationship between the couple Theo and Noa and their involvement in the establishement of a drug rehab center in the their small desert frontier town. Oz creates an atmosphere that lingers long after the book is finished!
paula