Arcadia University

Welcome back students! It’s a new year with new challenges. The staff at Landman Library is available to assist you with your research needs.

This section of the Library website – The Reader’s Drawbridge -is devoted to leisure reading. Landman Library has a great collection of fiction available, including classics and recent bestsellers. Many of the books, called the McNaughton Collection, are located just inside the entrance of the Library.

You’re probably thinking “When do I have time to read??!!?” You’d be surprised.

I was surprised to see that one of my favorite books, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, has been made into a movie. The book deals with, among many other subjects, friendship, Catholicism and love. The story is told from the point of view of Charles Ryder, who meets the aristocratic Marchmain family while studying at Oxford. Charles quickly becomes fascinated with the family, partly because of their wealth, but also because of their foreignness (The family is an aristocratic Catholic family, a minority in England).

Summer is the time for leisure reading . Well, anytime is the time for leisure reading. But something about summer, either it’s because everyone’s on vacation or that the heat makes it to difficult to exert yourself, that encourages the fluffy read.

I’ve heard people say that they don’t like poetry because it’s difficult to understand. I, too, have avoided poetry thinking that it was too vague to comprehend (or it took too much work to understand). But even as an amateur poetry reader, I know that good poetry can transcend the physical page and provide visceral experiences.

A clear example of such a poet is Pablo Neruda. I was introduced to his work when I received the book 100 Love Sonnets as a gift. No, it wasn’t Valentines Day but it was from a love interest. Yes, librarians have love interests.