The College magazine asked readers to suggest books they would like to see on the St. John’s reading list. The question drew an interesting variety of responses, with essays, novels, and works of philosophy suggested. Here are some of the offerings:

Notes of a Native Son
The playwright August Strindberg once wrote about his experience of reading the complete works of Balzac, something over 50 volumes. When he had finished he felt, as he tells us, that he had lived an entire life condensed into the space of a couple of seasons. And that his own life now, whatever remained of it, took on the quality of a kind of second life, a strange addition to the life he had lived vicariously through the great author.

There are other kinds of works, however, not oeuvres but single volumes, that leave their readers with a much different impression. They do not make us feel that we have passed through the entirety of a life but rather, and this is their particular strength, convey to us a sense, both tortuous and exhilarating, of the essential incompleteness of life, of time fraught with interruptions, cut into so many fragments of unclear and mutilated histories, and interwoven with a dizzying variety of fictions and lies.

The book I have in mind is James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, a collection of essays first published in 1955. These essays, brilliantly incorporating original insights into the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, Faulkner, Kafka, and so many others, deal primarily with two themes, both literary and philosophical in scope: the encounter between human beings with different cultures, different ways of thinking and different superficial appearances; and the experience, individual as well as collective, of being an exile, geographically as well as psychologically. Notes of a Native Son is, but is also much more than, a book about the experience of black Americans in the 20th century. Speaking of this experience, Baldwin writes that “the depthless alienation from oneself and one’s people is, in sum, the American experience.” But it is also, one comes to realize while reading these essays, an essentially philosophical experience. For there is a certain kind of understanding that arises only from the point of view of an exile. St. John’s students and tutors will immediately call to mind the cases of Socrates, Christ, Dante, Spinoza, and Frederick Douglass, to name a few. It is the moment when all that is familiar becomes violently and threateningly unfamiliar, and one is compelled, if one has a penchant for intellectual honesty, to re-evaluate those most fundamental notions of self and other, truth and lies.

As I believe St. John’s is at bottom an attempt to cultivate these moments of understanding by passionate discussion of ideas, I think Notes of a Native Son would be a happy addition to the senior seminar list, perhaps following close upon the Lincoln and Faulkner readings.

—Kevin Schnadig, SF98

Death in Venice
I first encountered this book during my freshman year at Kenyon College, an experience which instantly changed my life. I have re-read it several times since. . . and after each reading, as in all the works on the reading list, I understand more, both about the book and about the experience of being human, particularly that of falling in love. It would be wonderful if all St. John’s students had the opportunity to read and discuss Death in Venice.

I suggest this book for three reasons. First, the reading list contains very little 20th-century fiction, and Mann’s tale is certainly one of the best examples, written before the First World War and the emergence of Modernism, yet the style and tone appear to signal the approach of the movement. Second, Death in Venice is short enough to be discussed in one seminar class, while containing enough challenging material to provoke a thoughtful, lively conversation.

Third, and most importantly, the subject matter, the elderly von Aschenbach’s erotic longing for the teenaged Tadzio, is guaranteed to spark debate, especially in light of current events. At the same time, however, it will require students to revisit their discussions of ancient Greek notions of eros, especially as expressed in Plato’s Lysis, Symposium, and Phaedrus. Indeed, Death in Venice may be viewed as a 20th-century commentary on the Platonic idea of love, even incorporating sections of the relevant dialogues into the novella. This work serves as a transition of sorts, from the values and beliefs of ancient Greece to those of the modern world, and for all these reasons, it would make an excellent addition to the reading list.

—Charles Green, AGI02

The Decameron
It’s absolutely imperative that we add Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterpiece, The Decameron, to the sophomore curriculum. Boccaccio’s tales of true love and high adventure (and depraved monks, which are what everyone who reads The Decameron seems to remember best) will provide a wonderful relief to sophomores recently completing their study of St. Anselm and Aquinas. Rather than depicting how people ought to behave in an ideal world—a “city of God” so to speak—The Decameron depicts how they behave in the real world, wherein people are more apt to pursue love, and sex, and wealth than divine absolution. As such we shall be reassured that not everyone in the Middle Ages spent all their time woefully recounting their sins and attempting to understand God’s power and majesty. But of course, perhaps the greatest case for adding The Decameron to the curriculum is Brother Robert, who has long feared the deduction of his beloved Rabelais from the Program list. Obviously, as The Decameron is about 10 times dirtier than anything that can be found in Pantagruel and Gargantua it would be wholly illogical to deduct Rabelais from the curriculum and leave Boccacio on. Thus, the fears of one of our oldest and most respected tutors will at long last be assuaged, and sophomores will have gotten a delectable new read which provides a different, lighthearted, and secular perspective on the Middle Ages.

—Jennifer Wright, A08

The Rule of St. Benedict, The Philosophy of Freedom
I have always thought that the jump from Augustine to Aquinas is too large, a thousand years, and that The Rule of Saint Benedict would fit nicely, as it was much read and often observed in between, so preserving literature from one era for the next.