Supplemental Essay #6 Book List

JHS
Tue, 04 Aug 2015 13:26:58 +0000

I hadn’t seen the revised list when I wrote my post above.

Zinn’s book is very, very popular. I’m sure you can write a good essay about it, but I’m not sure that will make you stand out.

Three things strike me very strongly about your book list: (1) As I said before, you like doing deep dives when an author interests you. You have read a lot of Melville. It looks like you were assigned Bartleby for school, and then you read Moby Dick and a bunch of much less well-known works. Why did you do that? What did you get out of it? (2) You clearly have a thing for big fat Russian novels. Why? What do you get out of it? (3) Same with historical fiction (which could include Larson, who writes history as if it were fiction, and of course Zinn, who many believe is making it up – j/k).

How does what you learn from Zinn affect how you read the very different ideas of history in all of those 19th Century novels? How does reading Zinn affect how you read texts that are both historical artifacts and part of a vibrant canon that teaches people today what to expect from literature?