I went away on sabbatical in 2021-22, feeling burned out on teaching. A sabbatical is supposed to be an intensive time of research immersion but also a time of academic renewal. (“On the seventh day God rested,” Genesis reads, thus inventing the sabbath and, by extension, the once-every-seven-years sabbatical.) Residencies at universities in Canada and Britain kept me busy with my scholarly writing. But last fall, when I resumed teaching, I didn’t feel rejuvenated.
And it wasn’t just me. I came back to my leafy Southern campus at the very height of a post-Dobbs, “Don’t Say Gay” moment, and America’s political divisiveness never felt more real, more painful, more demoralizing. Emerging from their online lockdowns, students seemed burdened by the trials of pandemic life — mounting rates of depression and anxiety, on top of traumas endured — and less equipped to engage deeply with their education. Worries over tuition debt and the earning power of their degrees meant that when they did engage, it was often in pursuit of an “employable” major approved by their parents. The critical-thinking and social-justice courses that I taught in the humanities seemed, at best, an add-on to their education. A love of learning for its own sake felt like a luxury, an old-fashioned pursuit, like needlepoint or membership in a bowling league.
Surprisingly, what cured my pessimism about the possibilities of the classroom was not the sabbatical at all. It was the students themselves who gave me hope again. Bless their hearts (as we say down here in Alabama), they helped me to reforge a connection where I least expected to find it: through a mutual love of books.
I had brought back new books from the sabbatical. As I tried to unpack, I realized that my campus office had run out of room. Books were already everywhere, a 25-year accumulation overflowing on my shelves and piling up in stacks on the floor — old books from research projects long completed, texts from courses I no longer teach, volumes of journals from before online access made print copies obsolete.
To clean house, I started a giveaway in the hallway outside my office. I made a giant sign out of bright yellow poster paper and taped it onto the wall over a line of books. In the center, I wrote in marker: “FREE BOOKS! Help yourself! Leave a comment about the joys (or crappiness) of reading.” I put up another hand-drawn poster in our building’s central stairwell: “FREE BOOKS TO A GOOD HOME! New ones every day!” — with a big arrow pointing toward my office door.
I had no idea what to expect. After all, the book is dead, right? Young people don’t read print anymore. I’ve had undergrads tell me to my face they don’t like to read. I would never have dared say such a thing to my professors. (“Maybe car magazines,” one guy told me, shrugging, as his lone acceptable reading material.) Surely no one would take the dusty volumes I needed to clear out of my office.
To my shock, the giveaway proved a huge hit with students. Books got scooped up so rapidly I had to restock several times a day. I developed a plan — what I called to myself a “curatorial practice.” I would line up 10 books on the floor, leaning their backs on the hallway wall between my office door and my neighbor’s: two copies of a journal, two romance novels, four academic books, and two issues of National Geographic.
The students (and the occasional colleague) took everything. Canadian religious-studies journals from the 1990s (bilingual!). Old-school Harlequin romances (one of my colleagues snaps up The Sophisticated Urchin). Environmental-studies textbooks. Paperbacks of English classics. Half a bookshelf of Hasidic literature. Ecofeminism. Linguistic philosophy.
No matter what I put out, nothing lasted more than two days before disappearing.
The yellow poster started to fill up with the students’ comments. Some basics quickly emerged: “Reading helps you relax!” Someone assured me (or themselves) that reading “makes you smarter.” It “opens your mind to new ways of seeing the world” and “lets me explore interests that help me understand what I want to do with my life.”
No one wrote about crappiness, although some comments did compare assigned versus pleasure reading: “Why is it that the books you are forced to read always aren’t as good as the ones you choose to read?” And there was a gentle reminder to all of us wordy academics: “Sometimes books don’t need to be so long.”
The students drew little smiley faces and hearts. Some left favorite author quotes: “It was books that made me feel perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them.” (I look up the reference: Cassandra Clare, from Clockwork Prince.)
The giveaway began to feel like a game, an interactive art installation. One of my colleagues would routinely check out what he called “the catch of the day.” I sat at my desk, prepping class or answering emails, and overheard groups of students come to a standstill outside my door: “Whoa, look at this — who doesn’t love free books?!” And there were regulars, with a Monday-afternoon seminar around the corner from my office; one student told me it was the highlight of her week to stop and see what was on offer. It became exhilarating.
Book chatter from students would pull me from my desk. I often explained my philosophy to them: Books are meant to be read. They don’t want to sit unloved and ignored on a shelf. They want to be in the hands of people who appreciate and enjoy them.
“Sick project,” a young woman said, smiling and nodding. “Sick,” she repeated several times, as she and her friend picked out a giggle-inducing Fabio-cover pirate romance and a 1980s history of the Middle Ages that I’ve been holding onto since my undergrad days.
A poignant through-line in the comments connected to the mental health that has become so precarious in the age of Covid. Students told me that reading “relieves stress and makes me feel better about myself” and “helps me forget about life for a while.” Reading, as another described it, “allows me to be someone else. To worry about their issues and know the outcome is not permanent.” Some comments made me catch my breath: “My escape from reality and the chaos of the world when things get rough — don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have it.”
Sometimes, the theme of escapism was more playful: “All the adventures I get to go on!” One student noted, “You can be anyone when you read.” A certain spirituality appeared: “Reading is good for the soul” and “I’ve never felt a deeper comfort than reading words and feeling them in my soul.”
As the students and I stood talking in the hall — about the feminist potential of the romance genre, the value of children’s literature, what’s in their TBR pile — we geeked-out over our mutual love of books. How did I ever doubt them? One guy — another regular — thanked me for a history of philosophy and a how-to-have-a-successful-marriage guide. I tried to sell him on a lesbian shapeshifter erotica for his next pick, but he demurred, laughing, and chose another nonfiction title.
What emerged most clearly on my sunny yellow poster was the sheer joy of reading. As one student wrote: “I have found the largest impact on my happiness is the amount I read.” Every time I looked at that comment, my shrunken Grinch-heart seemed to grow three sizes. I even pointed out the remark to my colleagues who came by the giveaway to pick out books or donate their own: “Look!” I would say, tapping hard on the words. “They do read!”
The teacher-student relationship is a special one. Over the course of a career, we launch thousands of young people into adulthood. Most of us can think of a teacher who impacted us in a positive way, and I want to be that for students who need a learning space to explore and grow. (#Adulting is hard.)
Yes, like so many faculty members these days, I had gotten burned out. I’d grown disillusioned about the impact of my teaching. And Covid only exacerbated the stresses in American education — inequality, underfunding, culture wars. In the face of all that, moments of disillusionment in the college classroom were inevitable.
Yet it was students who rekindled my love of teaching. Witnessing their love of reading reminded me of a simple yet intoxicating truth: Books are fun. I had first learned that lesson as a nerdy girl, and their joy reaffirmed my sagging faith. “Reading is glorious,” one comment proclaimed. And, most simply: “I love reading.” Through their embrace of the book giveaway, I found my way back.
Now my office looks great. I’ve got plenty of room on my shelves for a fresh set of books. And my old ones are out in the world, just where they should be.
