With the start of the new semester, we asked seven students:
What book that you'd been longing to read did you indulge in over winter break?

Brian Eichner, a senior, found a poetry collection by Pablo Neruda both enlightening and humbling. He liked Captain's Verses "because he puts so much emotion and detail into what he writes, making me realize how inferior my own efforts at poetry are, while being in awe of his ability." Elizabeth Ralston, a junior, made an artful choice, Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring, which recreates the world of Vermeer. "I enjoyed the insight into the lifestyle of different social classes during the 1660s."

Just weeks before the celebration of the civil-rights leader's birthday, sophomore Dave Allen was drawn to a collection of the sermons of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., A Knock at Midnight. "I was particularly interested in learning more about how King connected his Christianity with promoting justice in the world," Allen says, "because I wonder how I might incorporate this model into my own life." Sophomore Adam Bloomfield read about another cultural icon, Albert Einstein, in Driving Mr. Albert. He calls the book "a truly grotesque gem"; it charts the travels of author Michael Paterniti and Thomas Harvey, a pathologist who had kept Einstein's brain in his basement for forty years.

Sona Chikarmane, a junior, found The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadman, "an amazing account of a Hmong child and how culture differences and language barriers inhibit access" to health care. "My interests in culture and medicine combined with the fact that I was on my way to India to study Ayurvedic medicine made the book a great example of how modern medicine doesn't always have the right answers." Also finding a focus on India, Abigail Langston, a sophomore, turned to The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. "Although this was my fifth or sixth reading, I was once again bowled over by Roy's storytelling. Rhythmic and lyrical, it reads like Rushdie telling a Faulkner tale."

For another sophomore, Jessica Fuller, winter break provided a plunge into Uncle John's Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader, edited by--of course--the Bathroom Readers Institute. "This has so many random facts and stories that I've actually wanted to reference it in some of my papers. Unfortunately, its title doesn't lend itself to academic credibility."

Between them, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Lord of the Rings have brought in more than $500 million in box-office receipts, and counting. What explains the appeal of these fantasy tales?

Harry Potter has the structure of a classic fairy tale, and this always involved a hero or heroine catapulted into an extraordinary situation to face and overcome evil. Almost everyone can identify with Harry: He's special in some mysterious way, misunderstood and mistreated by his family, but he is learning to overcome those handicaps in life to enter into an extraordinary destiny.

The magical dimension is particularly effective in the film and story because author J.K. Rowling uses it to create a parallel world, one that exists right under our everyday noses. All you have to do is drop your normal perspective, and suddenly this other dimension comes into focus. A good story, laced with magic like this one, can reach deeply into the unconscious or barely conscious desires many people have to understand their own lives as somehow special, charged with meaning and adventure. Which everyday life really is, when we drop our habits of mind and identify with the characters.

The Lord of the Rings works on another scale altogether. Harry Potter is a domestic tale: We know there are larger stakes than Harry's life and well-being, but mostly the story centers on those smaller consequences. J.R.R. Tolkien takes us into an epic story where one unassuming and young person--naïve in so many ways--is thrust into a drama of epic proportions. Not only his own life is at stake, but the fates of his and other peoples. Does he have the courage to assume his destiny?

This tale was written against the backdrop of the massive political and ideological conflicts of the first half of the twentieth century. It doesn't take much to understand that the Shire and the Hobbits are the English, and they stand pretty much alone against the terrible combined forces of Fascism and Communism. This is also a tale about power--and what power does to people, how it corrupts them, and the terrible temptation of making the wrong use of it.

Many people want to believe that their own lives really count for something, that they have meaning in a much larger context, and that they can measure up to the tasks placed before them. So however much these tales appear to be about the fantastic, they really are about the drama of the everyday life. Everyday life really is a drama. It is a fantastic adventure with unknown challenges, setbacks, and enemies. It can even be epic. When you finish such a tale, you are meant to feel encouraged, heartened, even if, as in Lord of the Rings, it becomes clear that the price for living out one's destiny is high. But we all know that, don't we?

----Thomas Robisheaux, professor of history, whose courses include "Medieval Worlds" and "Magic, Religion, and Science since the Renaissance"