Reclaiming Our Brains Without Losing Our Minds

Inga Wiehlholds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington.

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION Part I: Reclaiming Our Brains 1 We Become a Reading Group: How and Why 2 The Kind of Books We Read and the Way We ChooseThem3 From Lunch to Lecture: Why Do We Keep ComingBack?Part II: Responses to Books We Have Read 4 Mutations of the Novel Over Time: From Boccaccio’sDecameron to Lessing’s The Golden Notebook5 From Poem to Novel: Dante Then and Now—TheInferno and The Dante Conspiracy6 Verisimilitude in the Historical Novel: AlessandroManzoni’s The Betrothed7 Every Novel Has a Clock: Reeds in the Wind, The Houseby the Medlar Tree, and The Leopard8 Looking at the Invisible with Italo Calvino 9 Life is Short but Long on Zest in Stendhal’sCharterhouse of Parma10 Buddenbrooks: The Ordinary Novel 11 No Rest Cure for Readers on the Magic Mountain 12 On Holiday with Felix Krull vi Reclaiming Our Brains Without Losing Our Minds13 Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and the Horsemen of theApocalypse14 Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don: A Novel of War andPeace15 Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:Learning to Want the Inexhaustible16 A Doris Lessing Debut: The Grass Is Singing, and WeSing With It17 Getting What We Want or Wanting What We Get: DoesJ.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace Have a Happy Ending?18 Unlived Lives and Our Roles in Perpetrating Them 19 “I can’t see where I am going. My life finished. It spoil.It spoil”: V. S. Naipaul’s Vision of survivors in Post-Colonial Worlds20 Well Lived Lives and the Costs They Exact: Guy DeMaupassant and Isak Dinesen21 Emigrants in “The Golden Land” 22 Emigrant or Immigrant: A Challenge for Giants 23 The Costs of Building the Soria Moria Castle 24 The [Tainted] Vision of Emma Blau 25 From Jyoti to Jasmine, Jase, Jane, and Jase Again: A Journey of Transformations26 Self-Help and Other-Help: A Means to an End 27 More Responses to Our Study of Immigrant Novels 28 Migrants in Search of Kinder Suns 29 Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Novel of Homecoming Appendix 1: Thursday Readers by Correspondence Appendix 2: The Books We Have Read Bibliography