I’m reading this novel that’s killing me right now: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. It makes me want to teach a course, a course with an enrollment of half twenty year olds and half forty year old parents. I’d like to read a series of novels on parenting, on what it means to grow up, what it means to love your children more than anything you can describe. And I’d want to know how the twenty year olds would respond — whether they’d get it or not.

I can only manage forty or fifty pages of Gilead without being too moved to stop. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road destroyed me in the same way. Would they have done so twenty years ago? Without having spent nearly every day of the past four years with my son, would these books still resonate?

Of course, the flipside would be to read Siddartha, The Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, to see if the forty year olds can still feel the power of the dream in these books, or whether they’d want Holden to chill out.