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| Brian Taylor for The Chronicle Review |
By Ivan Kreilkamp October 25, 2015
A recent issue of the
Yale Alumni Magazine offers a
promising feature:
"Guilty (and not-so-guilty) reads of the Yale faculty: What your
professors read when nobody’s watching." It’s a potentially juicy idea
that yielded disappointingly tepid results.
The editors of the magazine admit, "The first thing we learned when
we asked faculty across the campus to share their guilty reads: Not all
Yale professors know how to relax. Their summer reading lists included
the likes of
Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — a
groundbreaking work by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, but not exactly
escapist. Other books sounded suspiciously like fodder for future
papers."
As I leafed through the article, I found myself mentally awarding
points to any prof whose supposed "guilty reads" were in fact even
remotely embarrassing or guilt-inducing.
It’s no surprise that detective fiction — long the acceptable light
reading of the professoriate — often turns up in the responses. Robert
Stern, dean and architecture professor, recommends Georges Simenon’s
Maigret thrillers and Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series,
documenting the Peculiar Crimes detective unit in London; Sidney Altman
(biology and chemistry) likes mysteries by Philip Kerr and Andrea
Camilleri; Diana E.E. Kleiner (art history and classics) suggests Diane
Mott Davidson’s culinary mysteries about "a spunky heroine named Goldy
Bear."
OK, the Goldy Bear whodunit does sound a little silly. But if a taste
for detective fiction was possibly, once upon a time, considered mildly
outré in Ivy League faculty clubs, it’s been more than 70 years since
Edmund Wilson declared (in his 1944 "
Why Do People Read Detective Stories?")
that he was "always being reminded that the most serious public figures
of our time, from Woodrow Wilson to W.B. Yeats, have been addicts of
this form of fiction." Detective fiction has long been a safe harbor for
professors who wish to show they can unwind without risking any true
status demerit.
Read more....http://chronicle.com/article/When-Dickens-Is-a-Distraction/233854?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elq=c37ffb9c7d8c49b7a558f67709142014&elqCampaignId=1690&elqaid=6681&elqat=1&elqTrackId=ed0194c854254d77aa2cef02d2008094
