What does it mean that so many faculty members at the United States Naval Academy have recommended Ayn Rand’s work on the “Reading List For Life?”
The Naval Academy’s Reading List for Life
Blue Nights
An “extended short film excerpt” of Joan Didion reading from her memoir Blue Nights, which our own Michael Bourne reviewed yesterday.
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Inside Coetzee’s Head
J. M. Coetzee has published The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy with psychologist Arabella Kurtz, which details the five-year correspondence between the two. The letters offer “a rare opportunity to understand the mind of a writer who almost never speaks at length in his own voice.” For more of the Nobel laureate, read our review of The Childhood of Jesus.
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Do I Dare to Eat a Banana?
“She didn’t even want to be anything. She just wanted to be able to sit in a room and not feel tortured by it, which is sort of the human condition in general. Eileen isn’t dreaming of leaving home and making it in the big city on Broadway. She just wants to go and eat a banana, you know?” Ottessa Moshfegh on her new novel, Eileen, for The Rumpus.
Community of Conlangers
David J. Peterson is the man responsible for creating the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for the television adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. Peterson, who took Martin’s 55 Dothraki names and created a 4,000 word vocabulary, is interviewed over at Flavorwire. If the Dothraki don’t have a word for it, the Germans probably do. Here’s an essay from The Millions on just that.
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Is it just a Russian thing?
Jennie Erdal asks, “What is the modern equivalent of the philosophical novel?”
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I only counted three I think. I actually found the lists to be surprisingly ecumenical. There were only a handful that were packed with military histories.
I count five professors total, the majority of whom are in mathematics or engineering. I think the list overall is pretty interesting, though.
I’m not surprised by the Randian representation within math/engineering. As an engineer myself, I tend to observe more Randians within my profession than in the general population. A desire for seeing the world in black and white and for logical actors, I guess.
I’m amazed that someone could go through that whole page and decide to fixate on the Ayn Rand entries.