Course Packed: Keith Maillard, Gloria (Junior Year)

Part of a brief series on the non-required reading that I liked best in college.

I had never heard of this novel or its author when I discovered it in a New Jersey secondhand bookstore, nor would I have guessed that it would end up being the best book I read in 2004. What attracted me about it was its length -- I'm always looking for a substantive read -- and its cover photograph of what looks like a debutante's neck with a 1950s evening gown and strand of pearls.The heroine of Maillard's novel has the trappings and the suits of debutantery -- sorority letters, an honors degree from a respectable school (class of '57) and an upstanding, desirable boyfriend. But as she returns to her West Virginia hometown and the country-club set in which she grew up, Gloria keenly feels that all of her roles in life, from privileged teen to campus May Queen, have been a put-on.

She gamely attempts to rejoin this privileged world, but lost in her thoughts, Gloria drifts through her past while she puts off thinking about her uncertain future. The conventions of her old life, distant father and fashionably alcoholic mother, suddenly make her feel like she's living in a foreign country. So too the voice of her college boyfriend, pleading with her to marry him and make their relationship up to this point "official" or "worth it," seems like a dispatch from a different era.

Maillard offers no easy answers or, really, precedent to the way Gloria falls apart in this book. The way she travels back into memory for guidance, for explanation of the self-consciousness with which she has suddenly been burdened -- what she calls the "secret watcher" -- makes the novel so rich and dense I was shocked when I finished the book. Three or four times a year I find myself picking it up and reading hundreds of pages in one sitting, particularly at night, letting the dark circles under my eyes deepen while I wander back into this world. In fact -- heck, I'm going back to read it right now.

Much, much earlier: Max Frankel, THE TIMES OF MY LIFE AND MY LIFE WITH THE TIMES (Freshman Year)
Ingrid Bengis, METRO STOP DOSTOEVSKY (Sophomore Year)

Course Packed: Ingrid Bengis, Metro Stop Dostoevsky (Sophomore Year)

Part of a short series on the books I loved in college.

The summer after my senior year in high school I was lucky enough to go to Russia on a student exchange where I lived with a host family, studied the language and visited probably every historical site in St. Petersburg and many in Moscow. I entered Russia with no expectation of what I might find, and was often conflicted about what I saw -- a place that by all accounts had come so far in terms of its development but was completely alien to any place I'd lived or visited before.

As I continued to study Russian in school I found that the book METRO STOP DOSTOEVSKY best represented the divide I felt between Russians and visitors, particularly Western visitors. Author Ingrid Bengis is Russian but was born in America and writes about her visits there (mostly to St. Petersburg) in the '90s, including the staggering changes she saw around her. But most of those are "read" through her Russian friend "B," who is experiencing the changes in Russian society at the time firsthand. But "B" and Ingrid have their differences too, and the way their relationship goes sour mirrors, I think, where dialogue between Americans and Russians can kind of break down over very simple discussions.

Bengis found that in a country she was expecting to find very home-like, every little thing, from getting a job to finding an apartment, became a huge struggle despite her fluency in Russian and comfort with the culture. I don't want to draw the parallel too closely but I think that heading off to college can be sometimes like living in a foreign country, where you have to re-learn (or, let's face it, learn) everything you need in order to succeed. By sophomore year I was feeling a little better about those basic life processes but sometimes I still feel like I'm playing at an adult, as Bengis in a sense played at being Russian. (I even have that feeling now sometimes, even at 24!) It's that disconnect between where you are at the moment and where you would like to be that can drive you forward or drive you crazy.

Read a short excerpt from METRO STOP DOSTOEVSKY here.

Earlier: Max Frankel, THE TIMES OF MY LIFE AND MY LIFE WITH THE TIMES (Freshman Year)

Course Packed: Max Frankel, The Times Of My Life And My Life With The Times (Freshman Year)

Course Packed is a brief series of autobiographical comments on books that were important to me when I was in college -- named, of course, for those giant stacks of paper many of my classes would insist I purchase. Funny, I kind of miss course packs here in the real world -- and the regular use of highlighters, notebooks and campus meal points.

More than any of my classes, my first year in college was marked by my involvement in the campus newspaper. I got involved in a lot of things, as freshmen do, but writing for the paper became my most common to-do, and it shaped my days in a way I hadn't expected. My 19th birthday found me going over edits to a feature story before cake and presents, and when a week later the War in Iraq started, I remember sitting on my roommate's radiator frantically calling students with family in the Middle East for comment -- as if anyone knew what to say at the time.

Max Frankel's memoir was the kind of book I reserved for after finals, when I needed to be distracted from impending grades and plotting next year's course load. Frankel rose at the New York Times in what used to be the usual way, by starting as a stringer and becoming an integral part of the newsroom, pushing for reforms in the way the Paper of Record covered women and minorities. Along the way he reported from Russia, Cuba and Washington D.C., and won a Pulitzer covering Nixon's visit to China.

Frankel's book is a brick, but it has stayed with me not only because of the obstacles Frankel overcame to get to the Times but the ones he set for himself once he got there. After all, a Jewish kid born in Nazi Germany who was eventually admitted to Columbia and went on to the Times had to be pretty pleased with himself for getting there. It's that quest for excellence -- if stressed over other things, as memoirs tend to do -- that I admire in Frankel and other great editors.

I don't work for the Times, sadly, but I still enjoy journalists' memoirs. The summer after sophomore year I grabbed Arthur Gelb's CITY ROOM off a one-week-only shelf and dutifully read it in the week provided, it was that good. And I'm gearing up to tackle the grande dame of newspaper memoirs, Katherine Graham's PERSONAL HISTORY.