WITH HOST

Gary Scudder

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We read for all sorts of reasons: for amusement, to make it through class, to mend a broken heart, to appreciate beauty - and almost always to improve ourselves in some fashion. Years ago a friend asked me to list the books that had made me a better person. My answer then - the Qur'an, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past - would be my answer today. We'll talk about those books, what they have to tell us, and the odd ways that three books that seemingly have nothing in common actually intersect. None of us are a product of one book or one philosophy or one discipline, and sometimes it's the shared spaces on our intellectual Venn diagram that tells us the most about ourselves. And I'd like to hear about the books that (maybe, potentially, hopefully) made you a better person.