This course will explore the value we place upon reading and the role reading—especially reading literary fiction—should have in our lives.  In particular, I want you all to be thinking about the role reading will have in your lives when you become engineers and mathematicians and business people.  Will you continue to read literary texts?  And if so, why?

We will focus on literary fiction that explores books, reading, and censorship.  Each book we will read examines societies in which reading has been eliminated or severely curtailed, though for different reasons and through different means.  I will ask you to consider if you see some of the forces in these books as being operative today in our world.  (No surprise, but I think they are).