The return to school is a steep climb, but thankfully is one that I have learned to traverse with more surety through the years. Still, the ascent is formative. The piles of novels an English teacher needs to have at her disposal is a big one, and in most cases, there are often several piles due to teaching several courses. Most are, of course, old favorites by this point in my career, but I read them again. Rereading, I love how lines hit me anew. How different images stand for something I just lived through. How the makeup of the class veers into a whole new vein of thought than previously.

Books were very important to my father, and I was reminded of that this week when my brother sent me a list of titles my father recommended to him. I recalled most of the list he handed me. Anything by Jane Austen, he wrote. Both Emily and Charlotte Bronte he insisted. Everything Dickens. He adored George Eliot and reminded me that was a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans. You must read the Russians, start with Tolstoy. And yes, of course Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. He included Sigrid Undset’s epic work Kristin Lavransdatter. I read everything while pregnant and nursing, which lasted seemingly for a decade. These days I nudge my students up the same laborious hill of classics, offering historic context with all the excitement I can muster. Making readers these days is more formidable than summiting Everest but perhaps equally rewarding to those who make it there.

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