“You just dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you could have gotten for a dollar fifty in late fines at the public library.”

Let’s not fool ourselves – higher education in Modern America is fucking expensive. I know very few people my age who aren’t deeply in debt to their friendly collegiate lender. We sign up for a class, are told which books to read, and vaguely tested on our comprehension of those books. We have time to read but no money in college, and then have money but no time to read until we are out of debt (if that ever happens). So, in this delightful overlap in which I’ve been granted a bit of both, I’ve been doing my best to catch up on my reading.

Like I hope most college kids did, I considered a large swath of possibilities (art! film! english! music! philosophy!) when trying to pick a major. Ultimately, the unfortunate “what are you going to do with that” logic won out; however, my interests still heavily lie pretty much everywhere else. Obviously, personal readings won’t result in any accreditation or increased employability, but I feel the clarity of mind reached after six months of active reading on topics of your interest should make it a standard aspect of any formal education. Or just something more people should do.

For some dumb reason, I feel like listing the books I’ve been moving through here. Maybe you’ve read some of them and want to talk about them. Maybe you have suggestions on other books I might like. Maybe a better use of the public eye inherent in playing music in front of people is to remind them how cool reading is. Maybe I just keep forgetting which books I’ve recently read and want to write it down.

In any case, I present the real-time syllabus for my post-graduate education (roughly chronologically):

-Walden, Henry David Thoreau
-The Yage Letters, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg
-Planet of the Apes, Pierre Boulle
-Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken
-Love is a Mix Tape, Rob Sheffield
-Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
-Atop an Underwood, Jack Kerouac
-Massive Change, Bruce Mau
-Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
-Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
-A Lovely Love Story, Edward Monkton
-Gig, ed. John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, and Sabin Streeter
-Wordpress for Dummies, Lisa Sabin-Wilson
-Disposable People, Kevin Bales
-Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
-The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
-Bound for Glory, Woody Guthrie
-Chronicles, Vol. 1, Bob Dylan
-Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
-Down and Out In Paris and London, George Orwell
-The Human Comedy, William Saroyan
-What Is The What, Dave Eggers
-The Unabomber’s Manifesto, Theodore Kaczynski
-Ralph the Duck, Frederick Busch
-A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
-The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer
-The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
-The Road, Cormac Macarthy
-The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
-The Essential Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi
-Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu
-The Political Mind, George Lakoff

Books in a state of perpetual half-finished (bathroom reading, filler between larger texts, etc):

-Hard Times, Studs Terkel
-Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1, Hunter S. Thompson