Reading List: On Self-Education
January 11, 2020

     My first career was in teaching, although "career" may be too strong a word.  Let‛s say I had the opportunity to teach for a few years after college, before I decided to go to law school.  It ended up being a six-year stint altogether, which is why it almost veers into "career" territory.  

     It was a good opportunity, indeed, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the education I gave myself during those years.  The reading I was able to do in the years between college and law school was nothing short of magical, building on and rounding out my undergraduate education with a richness I am still spending.

     It was during those formative years that I finally read Jane Eyre and Middlemarch.  Pure bliss, both of them. On the political theory front, I read Allan Bloom‛s The Closing of the American Mind, Michael Sandel‛s Democracy‛s Discontent, Benjamin Barber‛s Consumed, and Francis Fukuyama‛s End of History and the Last Man.  I read Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin and learned why Lincoln was perhaps a once-in-a-millenium leader.  And I traveled out to the west coast and back with Lewis and Clark, in Stephen Ambrose‛s Undaunted Courage.  I read The Handmaid‛s Tale, Crime and Punishment, and a history of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester, entitled The Meaning of Everything.  (Don‛t laugh.  It was awesome – and a satisfying coda to the  time I spent reading the dictionary during bible study as a teenager.  I was a bond fide rebel.)   I read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, followed by his environmental warning, in Collapse.  I read Tim O‛Brien‛s The Things They Carried and Marilyn Robinson‛s Housekeeping.  And the summer before starting law school, I read Barbara Kingsolver‛s  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – which might have planted the seed that has become our small farming life today.

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     So by the time I went to law school, I think I understood that epic line from Good Will Hunting:  ‟You dropped $150 grand on a [***] education you coulda got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library.‟  

     Okay, maybe that goes little too far.  I am absolutely certain that my undergraduate education – an embarassment of riches in an of itself – prepared the fertile intellectual ground in which my post-college reading program blossomed.  In fact, perhaps this reading list (which is not exhaustive, by the way) illustrates what the very best education is supposed to do: set you on a journey that lasts the rest of your life.  I may be a homebody now, but I love this traveling life.