My First Literary Crush
The books famous people loved in college.
Thoroughly entertaining comments by a variety of writers and journalists and TV writers, some fiction, some non-fiction. My own college literary crush was James Joyce, who was the subject of a survey course I took my freshman year. I ended up working as a teaching assistant for the professor, and read not only all of Joyce that year (except Finnegan’s Wake, of course), but Richard Ellman’s incredible biography and much writing about myth and language by people I found in the library stacks, like James George Frazer, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Ernst Cassirer. Back then I believed Ulysses to be the greater book, but Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to be the more important (because it was, like, readable by everyone). That’s silly, but in hindsight all that reading gave me the confidence that I could tackle any subject if I put my mind to it.