What was Your Literary Crush? Slate has an article where Names write about the books that influenced them most in college. It got me to thinking about mine. (It is all about me, of course.) Its been so long ago, give me a minute to remember just which college that was.

OK.

Magazines that were memorable were not included, which is just as well.

For me, they were

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Weiner.

Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament. (I was so pleased at the time that I could read a "modernist" text with great pleasure and interest and still retain an orthodox view of scripture.)

Then Winthrop Hudson's Religion in America, the umpteenth edition of which text was being taught at Davidson when my kids were there.

War and Peace I read a second time and sort of "got it". The first time I read it I was in high school and really didn't get it.

Don Quixote. I read this in English.

Dante's Divine Comedy.

Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men.

Casona's La Barca sin Pescador. This is a short novel that I read in Spanish.

I look back at that time with amazement. "Your assignment, whether you like it or not, is to read really good books." Wow. What a privilege.