Student 1.3

What I Am Reading Now 3 David Santin Kilday DSK Copyright 2026 Edgar Allan Poe Complete Tales & Poems. Vintage. Twain, Mark. Five Novels. Barnes & Noble. Gray”s Anatomy. Running Press. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Belknap. Harvard University Press. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. Vintage Classics. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. A Doubleday Anchor Book. It is important for students to read books through to the end. Take notes on your reading in a top-spiral, journalist/detective notebook (which you can purchase in bulk online at WalMart). You might enjoy experimenting with a fountain pen. Disposable Pilot Varsity fountain pens are a good place to start for this inexpensive hobby. I like Diplomat pens which have decent nibs for the price. Students, be sure to complete all your homework and leave plenty of time to read freely according to your own personal interests. The goal is to increase your reading attention span, so read for longer and longer stretches. Consider purchasing a timer for this purpose. We work with what we can but every student needs a desk and stenographer chair (in my experience, the best value for the money in deskchair, ergonomic comfort), and a comfortable ergonomic reading chair like the recliner in which I write now). A desk lamp and floor standing reading lamp will be required by the desk and reading chair respectively. Sartre–the French academic, philosopher, existentialist, and Resistance fighter–wrote that we read until we have completely read enough books to have the context and competency to write. Students, read your 500 books; write your 1,000,000 words. This American way is something many serious adults share even in our hardscrabble America. Enjoy our shared culture and don't neglect our great authors, artists, and architects. Knowledge of these subjects will forever amplify your appreciation of life. Music is something all students should learn to appreciate. A knowledge of the periods of Classical Music is a good place to start. Learning American Folk Music– particularly American Blues and American Jazz–is an exciting part of every citizen's education. I am a man on a modest budget. I invested a little and got maximum, high fidelity sound for my dollar. If you can stand a system that powers only one set of headphones, you can have high-fidelity sound for the isolation and solitude that inspires good scholarship. Instrumental music, particularly Classical and Jazz, will not interfere with your studies but will further stretch and soothe your mind while you read. I source my system from Tidal, a smartphone app. Tidal is known for its high fidelity among the other music streaming subscription apps. A Tidal subscription provides you with a wide selection of music through history and from around the world. My headphones are an American build from HiFiMan. These headphones are planar magnetic so they require some power. I power my headphones with a Chinese S.M.S.L. DAC/Amp. A DAC/Amp is a power amplifier to power the Tidal source combined with a digital audio converter to transmit the source music with high fidelity. It is not analog, but combined with the proper audio cables, the fidelity really is excellent. You hear every breath and intonation of voice, every nuance of the musical instruments, and unlike vinyl, there is zero hiss from the contact of the record player’s stylus with the vinyl long playing record. The above list is the focus of my reading but I have also been researching Timothy Corrigan & Patricia White’s The Film Experience, An Introduction, William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Raymond William’s Keywords, M.H. Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms, Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin’s Critical Terms for Literary Study, Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Cornel West’s Democracy Matters, Eric Holder’s Our Unfinished March, Noam Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy, Cornel West’s Race Matters, James G. Basker ed.’s Black Writers of the Founding Era, Homer’s The Iliad, Homer's The Odyssey, Kurt Vonnegut’s Novels and Stories (1963-1973), Goddard’s A Buddhist Bible, Wei Jingsheng’s The Courage to Stand Alone, Turco’s The Book of Forms, Kurt Vonnegut's Novels and Stories (1950-1962), Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, William Gibson‘s Agency, Jonathan Arac’s Critical Genealogies, Bruce Sterling’s The Artificial Kid, A.C. Grayling’s The History of Philosophy, Frank Lentricchia’s Ariel and the Police. This reading list reflects my personal interests. I am an adult of 58 years old. I hold a B.A. from Duke's English Department and a M.A. from Pitt’s English Department where I taught Composition for 6 years. Students, if you excel in school, you can earn scholarships for further study. Do your homework first. All other extracurricular activities should be second to your schoolwork. Students, doctors and psychiatrists say that you should limit your screen time to no more than 2 hours per day and, for some younger students, less. Read more and become an active reader. Respond to what you read on a notepad while you read. Enjoy a fountain pen. Read aloud sections from your reading that you like. If you don't understand, go back and reread the section you don't understand until you understand the author’s train of thought. Collecting books is one of my passions. When we moved into our home here, my father employed a woodworker to install a two wall shelving unit. In addition, I have 5 freestanding bookcases in my comfortable, basement quarters. I own about 650 books. I purchase books to this day. The last book I purchased was a hardback copy of Lao Tze’s Tao te Ching. I purchased most of these books in used bookstores in Pittsburgh when I taught there as a Teaching Fellow (a graduate school scholarship position). These books are my research library. I am aware of how they relate to each other in terms of intellectual history. I refer to them often when I read and write. Recall, all work and no play is no way. Even students need rest and relaxation. I was born in the 1980s. I played the new Atari system’s Space Invaders, Adventure, and Missile Command as a kid during summer break between swim team practice, and the Price is Right before I started working when I learned to drive. After I completed my classwork at Duke early, I bought a 16-bit Sega Genesis to play. When I went to graduate school to focus, I left television and videogame play behind. If you like videogames–I still do–Evercade Games are a good option. They have modest price points for their hardware and cartridges and feature retro classic video games from the old Atari systems up to 32-bit videogames like Tomb Raider and Duke Nukem'. Evercade frequently releases new cartridges of curated videogames and videogame collections. For a collector like me, it is a chance to own and play parts of videogame history from when the game play was more important than processing speed and cinematic graphics. Today's premium systems cost the moon. Humble retro Evercade features a cartridge based system that requires a direct physical connection between the console and the videogames cartridge and no internet Wi-Fi connection. It is a difficult system to bug. Evercade offers several handheld videogame console options and two console options that connect to your TV or monitor via a HDMI port. The handheld options are for solo play while the HDMI options support 1 to 4 players (according to the video game). The Evercade video game cartridges can be used in both the handheld units and the tv/monitor consoles so you can use your cartridges in both. Students, don't overdo it, but there's nothing wrong with a little good clean fun. We need both rest and relaxation: sleep and play. Videogames in moderation are okay. So, happy reading. Reading the written word in books should be your primary occupation when a student. Reading is one of my favorite activities. It was the favorite activity of my youth. Students, let reading be your refuge, your time alone, your time to learn. There should be nothing purer than an author’s written word. Without the integrity of authorship, we live in a totally corrupt world. Private property is the fundament of our law. Without intellectual property law, we would live in a world of total fraud and complete piracy.