Editor's Note: Following is the speech given by 2007-08 Professor of the Year Anne Weed, professor of English and chair of the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts, at academic convocation Aug. 26.

Thank you, Dr. Coombs, for your generous introduction, and thank you Dr. Burke, faculty, students, and members of the Board of Trustees. 

I am deeply honored to have been chosen as the 2007-2008 Professor of the Year. I am pleased to welcome our returning students and grateful for the opportunity to extend a special welcome to our newest students, this year’s transfer students and the Class of 2012. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts for their wisdom and advice. They and others at Keuka have served as exemplary role models, and I have learned a great deal from them. I would also like to thank my family: my husband Jim; children Kate, Jon, and Tom; my parents; and my in-laws for their unflagging support.

The title of this academic convocation address is “For the Love of Reading,” and I chose reading as my subject for two reasons: one, an essential activity of your college life will be reading, as is already evident from the lists of required books on your course syllabi; and second, reading, particularly the reading of literature, is a subject very dear to my heart. And so, these remarks will be particular with regard to my own reading history and general with regard to your lives as readers. 

I owe an especial debt to my mother who introduced me to reading. It was through her guidance and example that reading came to play such a significant role in my life, forming both habits of mind and habits of the heart. One expects, of course, an English teacher to enjoy reading, but I would like to explain more fully how books have shaped my life. I particularly like the concept of  “our inner library” described by Pierre Bayard in his witty discussion of reading in How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. In this book, he provides the following definition: “we might use the term inner library to characterize that set of books—a subset of the collective library—around which every personality is constructed, and which then shapes each person’s individual relationship to books and to other people.” He goes on to say, “we are the sum of these accumulated books. Little by little, these books have made us who we are.” When I was yet a very little person, books constituted a central feature of my moral education, as is the case for most of us. Reading and loving fables with their virtue-rewarded and evil-punished frameworks and fairy tales with their enchanted castles, fearsome monsters, and beautiful damsels, I learned valuable lessons about perseverance, imagination, humility, and kindness.

In my teen years, however, new interests emerged, leading to a different kind of reading and education. One reading that comes to mind, still clear to me more than 30 years later, was Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, particularly the infamous wedding sex scene that a grammar school classmate read breathlessly to me over the telephone (page 28 by the way), followed by my purchasing the book on the sly so that I could pore over it on my own. I guess it’s accurate to say that the actual scene itself is less vivid to me than my shocked and titillated awareness that such works existed. Having read somewhere that Lady Chatterley’s Lover had been banned in the United States for its lewdness and obscenity, I was quick to pick up that work but found myself disappointed by its tameness and slow pace, in comparison to The Godfather, and I did not bother to finish it. I am ashamed to say that it was years before I returned to D.H. Lawrence to give him another try. And when I did return to Lawrence’s novel as a college student, I found a marvelously compelling story which surpassed Puzo’s steamy crime novel in every possible way. To state the point more baldly—our understanding of what we read changes dramatically as we grow in maturity and accumulate different life experiences. So too do our reading preferences.   Hence, a significant part of your college education will focus on developing your competence as a reader and critical awareness of your own reading—and re-reading practices.

Books also play a significant role in directing our emotional lives. If you seek compatibility in friends or lovers, you may, as Bayard suggests, seek to learn what books they have loved. By bringing together these inner libraries, you can arrive at a sort of melding of these private worlds. And so it was that John Irving’s The World According to Garp introduced me to my husband. This novel, a story about love, sex, writing, anxiety, parenthood, feminism, wrestling, and bears that we happened to be reading at the same time gave us something to talk about at our workplace and grew to be a kind of private shorthand between us. The novel led to other kinds of conversations and became, in time, the beginning of our own love story, a not uncommon plot twist. (I remain very grateful to Mr. Irving.)  I recommend, then, that instead of the usual conversation starters about cafeteria food or the ordinary, lame pick-up lines, you try asking, “Have you read any good books lately?” At the very least, others will be impressed by your obvious intelligence.  

Books have more or less influenced the way I think about everything—from  relationships with friends and family, to the kind of person I think I am or would like to be, to how I respond to life’s uncertainties. At times I have felt, as I am sure you have, a moment of absolute clarity via the mechanism of reading, or a kind of affinity with an author dead now for decades: you come to a stop in your reading and wonder—“How is it that this author knows how I feel? How did I end up on this page?”  As a young mother reading Anne Tyler’s novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, I was one with the character Pearl, who told her husband that she wanted to have more children, what she called “spare children,” because she was so afraid that something would happen to her first child, and she knew she could not bear such a loss. But each additional “spare” child only sharpened her fear; she could never have enough children to put her mind at rest. Pearl’s fears were my own, her anxious love what I felt for my three beloved children. Rather than being put off or disturbed by finding your private thoughts revealed on the page, you may, as I did, find a comfort in knowing you are not alone; across the globe and across time, you share the common dilemmas of being human. Joy, anger, envy, grief, and loss—who among us has not felt or suffered these? We are all at certain points in our lives, like Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, desperately trying to find meaning in our existence, and her anguished words, “To want and want and not to have,” are surely our own.  The good books we have read, our favorite authors, come back to us again and again, touch and nudge us, and share liberally their wisdom.

For it is indeed wisdom we gain from our literary reading.  Psychological acuity, knowledge of people, cultures, and values unlike our own, insight into the human condition—because these claims about the value of literature are so familiar, we tend to be dismissive, but the point bears repeating. Equally worth repeating is the point that from our literary reading we gain not only wisdom but also intellectual vigor and power. The chief intellectual tasks that you will face in your academic work, such as engaging with the ideas of others, testing their insights against your own experiences, and exercising your judgment, call for skills you have already developed and continue to sharpen through your literary reading. This is not to underestimate the difficulty of college-level reading. The intellectual work will be daunting, and indeed, there will be times when you will want to give up, certain you are not smart enough or simply too tired of all its stresses.  But carry on, stick to it—such diligence will build character and yield rich rewards. I particularly like the pertinent saying I stumbled across in my reading: “You put on muscles only when you box with strong sparring partners.” It can be wonderfully exciting when your hard work pays off. I sincerely wish for you the exhilaration and delight that comes with realizing you actually understand a difficult book, whether it is the dense prose and convoluted time sequences of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or the problem of evil as addressed in Voltaire’s Candide. Keep in mind that once upon a time your professors were in your shoes, scratching their heads before a challenging passage, pulling out their hair, and saying “This book makes my brain ache!”  I dare say it was such exhilaration that led many of us deeper into our disciplines and ultimately into the profession of teaching, for having experienced this cataclysm of insight, it became addictive—one simply wanted more and more of this euphoria. It is part of our duty to help make the meaning, or the form, of the work clearer by teaching you the skills and craft of serious reading, but it is our fondest hope that you will partake of its pleasures.

And so we come back to pleasure, to love. I love the summer morning ritual of reading outside on the porch, coffee cup in hand, and lazy dog at my feet. I love stumbling upon a sentence of such pure beauty that it catches one’s breath, and I love putting myself into the heart and mind of a boy trying to determine the right thing to do. Love, pleasure—do today’s young people share this love, this pleasure in reading? If we pop into a Barnes and Noble store, we find a bustling place, with shoppers putting hefty tomes into their bags, and novel readers kicking back with a white chocolate mocha frappuccino. And if we follow the unprecedented success of the Oprah Book Club, which has generated tremendous revenues for publishers, it would appear that big novels, including some of the greatest ever written, are finding places in the hearts and minds of millions. One can only applaud Oprah’s sentiments from an interview with Publishers’ Weekly: “I feel strongly that, no matter who you are, reading opens doors and provides, in your own personal sanctuary, an opportunity to explore and feel things, the way that other forms of media cannot. I want books to become part of my audience’s lifestyle, for reading to become a natural phenomenon with them, so that it is no longer a big deal.” But alarming reports of the decline in literary reading among today’s young people are to be found everywhere, from the National Endowment for the Arts survey titled “Reading at Risk,” to my own classrooms, my own students who too often confess, “I hardly ever read.”  Such disheartening news and student comments are enough to make one despair, but I remain optimistic that the right books will make a difference in your lives, and that in the course of your studies, you will encounter at least one of these life-changing books. I also remain convinced that today’s students—our students—are up to the challenge of reading difficult texts and possess the necessary perseverance and courage.

So if our reading lists for you are long, it is because we see these books as essential, as a means to help you achieve the good and true life, but also as aesthetic entities valuable in their own right, providing, as Cicero avowed, “the food of [our] youth, [and] the delight of old age.” We ask, then, for your indulgence if we sometimes wax a little over-enthusiastic or passionate about these books. And I thank all of you for your indulgence in listening to these comments on the love of reading on this late summer afternoon. A very warm welcome to the Class of 2012! Embrace the reading challenges that lie before you and rest secure in the knowledge that we are here to guide and support you in this great adventure. May we all have a wonderful academic year reading lots and lots of good books, and may those books become treasured friends upon our shelves and in our hearts.

-- Anne Weed