When she was alive, Joyce Columbia Berner loved books so much that she married them. No, really, she pretty much did–Berner had such an affinity for written stories that she eventually changed her last name to “Book.” She died with the name of Joyce Columbia Book last year, and that was that. Berkeley lost one of its many eccentric souls.
Today, however, the name Joyce Columbia Book resurfaces after a recent revelation. When Book died, she left a great amount of money to the Berkeley Public Library–$77,000, to be exact.
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If you compare a 2007 survey on Cal reading tastes to similar surveys administered in 1997 and 1987, what can you infer about Berkeley students? Perhaps we should be afraid–very afraid. In the past 20 years, student preferences strayed away from poignant classics like “The Fountainhead” and “The Color Purple,” to lucrative bestsellers like “Harry Potter” and the “Da Vinci Code.” Alright, we admit it–we read and loved both bestsellers–but what does it mean that the most elite public education institution in the world prefers contemporary fluff over literary heavyweights? Could it be a sign of the apocalypse?
Perhaps, but it could also be that “(t)he 1987 survey, like the ‘97 version, was conducted simply by distributing sheets of paper to freshman English classes,” while the most recent one was a “web-based summer/fall 2007 Survey of New Students (SoNS)” from 2,875 freshmen in every major.
Obviously, that explanation isn’t as fun.
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Newsweek’s ongoing book-recommendation list features the selections of Journalism Dean Orville Schell. It’s really a spot where writers can plug their own book, so just know that Schell has a book out. But what does he recommend?
1. “The Best and the Brightest” by David Halberstam
2. “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
3. “The Trial” by Franz Kafka
4. “The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides
5. “The Selected Stories of Li Xun”
And the kicker,
An Important Book you haven’t gotten around to reading: Any excellent new book that helps assess the challenges of global climate change … even if it’s by Al Gore.
A Life In Books [Newsweek]
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