Regents Professor Patricia Hampl last spring received the College of Liberal Arts' Dr. Matthew Stark Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Faculty Award, which recognizes distinguished service, writing, teaching, involvement, and leadership in support of civil liberties, civil rights, public education, and social justice. Hampl is the author of six memoirs, from the classic A Romantic Education (1981) to her latest Minnesota Book Award-winner, The Florist's Daughter (2007). She is currently working on a book project entitled The Art of the Wasted Day: "a riff on the idea of leisure and a homage to the inventor (sort of) of the essay, Michel Montaigne." (More from Professor Hampl here.)What are you reading, Professor Hampl?
Strange that someone like me is called (and call myself) a "writer." A more accurate label might be "reader" considering the time I spend on other people's work. I'm an omnivore reader--poetry, fiction, nonfiction. And I'm a magazine buff--everything from The New York Review of Books (my favorite literary review) and The New Yorker (I usually find a couple things worth finishing) to cooking magazines (I mourned the loss of Gourmet, a wonderful source of personal essays). I confess to the typical "late style" habits of many writers--re-reading books I've long loved. Recently I returned to Anna Karenina, a book I adored as a 19-year-old romantic, detested with fiery feminist outrage at 30, and now found myself putting down and saying, "OK, that's the greatest novel ever written," as if I were giving out an Academy Award.
A more recent novel, The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, is an extraordinary evocation of Central Europe between the two wars, based on a family's relation to a Modernist house modeled on one by Mies van der Rohe in Brno. Perhaps the most striking memoir of the last year is the great post-War historian Tony Judt's book, The Memory Chalet. Judt died of ALS before age 60, and wrote this book in the midst of his many losses, including his ability to write or speak. I return often to William Trevor, Alice Munro, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I'm always reading Montaigne these days--partly for my own project, but really because he's irresistible.What other English professor's recommended reading do you want to know? Place your vote here in the box marked "Your News"--and include what's new with you!
