Did you know that if you read a handful of newspaper articles a day, do your studying like a good student, skim the occasional magazine, read a book or two from time to time and surf the net every day, you could potentially be reading a million words a week?
That, my friends, means you could be reading 34 million words every school year.
How much of that sticks?
That is why, on this literature page each week, we try to tell our readers which books they might actually enjoy, as well which they might not want to waste their time on. It is hard, of course, because everyone has different tastes, and while many of us like to relax with a funny novel, some people eschew the mainstream and prefer to read textbooks on advanced quantum physics to relax.
Because of the diversity of tastes on this campus, it is rare to find a book that will appeal to a wide variety of people, and it is even harder to convince all those people reading the book is worth accelerating the ruin of their eyeballs.
But I found one. And with perfect timing. As we all know, Earth Day is Thursday. (And if you live on Langdon and drive an SUV, you may want to hide it that night, as people learned last year.) A book is going to be released that day that every student at this university should read.
The book is called \Naked-Writers Uncover the Way We Live on Earth."" This is a collection of short stories written by some of the best authors on the planet, and each story offers a unique viewpoint on some major issue affecting the overall well-being of the planet.
Two of my favorite authors, Carl Hiaasen and T.C. Boyle, have written stories for this book, and that alone makes this worth the purchase price.
Admittedly, Hiaasen's story is a little raunchy, if true, accounting of a PR company's worst nightmare at a Disney-owned theme park.
An endangered rhinoceros is brought to live at the park, and is found dead one day. With a stick in its body. And while rhinoceroses eat sticks, this particular stick was found in the wrong end of the rhinoceros.
Boyle's story, ""Dogology,"" is a wonderfully humorous story about a woman who chooses to live like a dog, running with the local pack and sniffing at the ground-which mildly disturbs her Californian, upper middle class neighbors. Boyle's writing, as always, is sharp, lightly infused with humor, and guaranteed to make people think deeply.
This anthology is an important read because each and every story discusses serious, if painful abuses that take place on our planet every day, and are certain to make people think more seriously about what they can do to both celebrate and protect the planet.
Most impressively, and the reason I like it best, is that this book is not a political one. In almost all cases, the author does not tell a person how to think, they just show them things to think about.
Taniquelle Thurner is a senior majoring in journalism and Scandinavian Studies.
