We were honored to be featured in The Huffington Post last week by Kimberly Rae Connor, blogger and Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of San Francisco’s Department of Public and Nonprofit Administrations–and we are more pleased to republish the article here. As Kimberly writes: “While opinion writers across the media have begun supporting and expanding humanities offerings as preparation for work and life, most have neglected to consider those who seldom get past the academic threshold in the first place but whose journeys have taken them to the workplace. Books@Work corrects that oversight. They recognize that 60% of workers in the U.S. do not have access to higher education. Many front line, blue collar and even middle management workers lack structured opportunities to engage in intellectual adventures by way of formal education and to benefit from the kinds of skill, knowledge, confidence, and empathy building experiences that can be elicited from reading and discussing literature.”
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The work of art helps us see the world anew–this is no less true for books than it is for a painting or sculpture. Our Marketing and Communications Director picks 10 books that are rich in detail–books that think about flowers and bees, as well as human relationships. These novels will make you laugh as well as reflect on the harder points of being human. And they will certainly entertain you.
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Robert Frost is undoubtedly a New England poet, a realist poet who portrays the region in minute detail. And he’s given us iconic, seemingly straightforward lines: “The road not taken,” and “Good fences make good neighbors,” are just two. But his poems are all about negotiating language and complexity. How can a poem help us think about perspective and comparison? After all, “all the fun’s in how you say a thing.”
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Books do a lot for us. They entertain us and make us feel less alone. They illuminate larger truths about the human story. They are a connection to and depiction of those combined qualities–magic and messiness–that make humans, well, human (and wonderful). Our Operations Coordinator picks 10 books to befriend, to reread, and to help you appreciate what it is to be a person.
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How can you read a place? What is the value in reading for dystopic places– “communities and territories that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated?” And what does a western American town have in common with a Soviet prison city? Kate Brown bridges the gaps between peoples and cultures by reading for commonality in the unlikeliest places.
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What would you read if you were stuck on the proverbial desert island? What would make you laugh? What would sustain you? What speaks to your experience and reminds you who you are? Program and Curriculum Director Jessica Isaac lists her picks.
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We are all taught the classics in school, so what’s the problem with reading only canonical literature? What is the value in going outside of your comfort zone, literary or otherwise? And why might moving outside that zone be necessary to understanding the world in all its fullness and complexity? On stories and power, and how that power shapes us . . .
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Creativity in general aligns with our sense of why literature is important for readers and writers–it flexes our thinking capabilities and connects us to others. As Polly Car notes, the power of creativity is, in part, “To see yourself small on the stage of another story; to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power to make your life, to make others, or to break them, to tell stories rather than be pulled by them.”
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I found myself becoming resentful of the little house and its unwillingness to adapt to the realities of the city growing up around it. I was frustrated that the house had to have it all quiet and peaceful in the country, like an idyllic pastoral life was the only life worth living.
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