Katherine Churchill ’16 recently surveyed students in Smith Union around lunchtime about the books they were carrying around in their bags for class or for personal reading. Students pulled out books by Geoffrey Chaucer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Dickens, Amiri Baraka and more. (To not exclude scientists, one student shared the biology paper he was reading.)

Below is a list of the students who displayed the bookish contents of their bags, in order of appearance:

Christina Sours ’16. Dream Visions and Other Poems, Geoffrey Chaucer

Hailey Beaman ’18. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Nicole Tan ’16. Women and the Economy: Family, Work, and Pay, Saul Hoffman and Susan Averett

Nicholas Benson ’17. Tales of the Out and the Gone, Amiri Baraka, and Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy, Stacy Palen and Ana Larson

Wilson MacMillan ’18. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society, A translation of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo edition

Julianna Lewis ’18. Apology by Plato, The Aeneid by Virgil, and When you Gift a Duke a Diamond by Shana Galen. (Books that Julianna also pulled out of her bag but which didn’t make it into the final cut included Ken Ludwig’s Leading Ladies and Elizabeth Peters’ Lion in the Valley)

Jack Lucy ’17. A bunch of books on the European Union, including A Stranger in Europe, by Stephen Wall; European Integration and its Limits: Intergovernmental Conflicts and their Domestic Origins, by Daniel Finke; The European Union: Readings on the theory and practice of European Integration, edited by Brent F. Nelsen and Alexander Stubb; Ever Closer Union: An Introduction to European Intergration, by Desmond Dinan; The EU as a Global Security Actor: A Comprehensive Analysis Beyond CFSP and JHA, by C. Kaunert and K. Zwolski.

Riley Bubb ’18. La Sagouine, Antonine Maillet

Maggie Seymour ’16. Dombey and Son, Charles Dickens

Blake Gordon ’18. Method and Meaning in Polls and Surveys, Howard Schuman

Ben Torda ’18. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke and Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (Torda also had The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown, in his bag as he was reading this book for pleasure)

Spencer Wuest ’18. The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti: A Mahayana Scripture, by Vimalakirti and translated by Robert Thurman, and Untimely Meditations by Friedrich Nietzsche

Katherine Churchill ’16. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , Unknown author