Vassar Today

What's on Your Nightstand

By Compiled by Veronika Ruff '01

In case Oprah’s recommendations are not the law of the land for your nightstand, the VQ asked some Vassar professors what they were reading in their spare time. You may no longer attend their lectures, but they can still pass on some words of wisdom.

James Steerman

Professor of Drama and Film

Steerman
Steerman
"At the moment, I’m reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I read it, or was supposed to read it, as a freshman in college; but, for a variety of reasons, I think I mainly skimmed it. I started to read it again after noting in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, that he had found Tolstoy’s book very powerful and meaningful when he read it while in prison in South Africa. I’m now about 700 pages into War and Peace at present and [agree with Mandela]."

Molly Nesbit ’74

Associate Professor of Art

Nesbit
Nesbit
"Upon the recommendation of Rachel Whiteread, the British sculptor, I have been reading Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal. It is easy, once opening it, to see why a sculptor would like this book written by a paint chemist. It collects the elements of the periodic table, many of them sculptors’ materials, into stories: stories taken from nature, about nature, for nature. They are also the stories that tell something of Primo Levi’s life.

"The book, however, should be read along with his first book, Survival in Auschwitz, translated by Stuart Woolf. [The latter], first published in 1947, was written immediately upon Levi's return from Auschwitz, where he had been a prisoner. In writing this book, Levi learned to write a story, to see what a story was, and to see how close to truth a story could [come]. Together these are books that recount a horror and, in full knowledge of it, see a way out of it, a way of life. They are very great books."

Rachel Kitzinger

Professor of Classics

Kitzinger
Kitzinger
"I am on the last pages of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. I love it because it’s beautifully written and the best contemporary ‘version’ of the Odyssey I know. I’m about to read The Right Hand of Sleep by John Wray, about a man returning to his Austrian village from Russia in 1936."

Seungsook Moon

Assistant Professor of Sociology

Moon
Moon
"I am reading Anchee Min’s Becoming Madame Mao. It is a novel based on the life story of Jiang Ching, the wife of Mao Tse-tung. It’s a wonderful read, and I certainly recommend it."

Randy Cornelius

Professor of Psychology

Cornelius
Cornelius
"For pleasure, I’m currently reading Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, which I’ve had on my nightstand for a couple of years and am just now getting around to reading. It’s a coming-of-age novel of sorts and explores some of the darker aspects of familial and romantic relationships in Moore’s characteristic penetrating, no-nonsense prose. The second book I'm reading is Philip Steadman's Vermeer's Camera, in which he makes the case, using a very cleverly assembled body of evidence, that Vermeer used a camera obscura (and the same room) as an aid in painting a great many of his works."

John McCleary

Professor of Mathematics

McCleary
McCleary
"I keep a few books going — choice depends on mood: Much Depends on Dinner, by Margaret Visser, is a discussion of a simple meal and all the history, science, and social impact of its ingredients. An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears, is a historical novel about Newton’s Oxford. One of the chapters is written from the point of view of the famous mathematician John Wallis, and so the book caught the attention of the history-of-math crowd. [And then there’s] Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse. I have to work a bit to read a novel in German, but it is fun. This novel was a favorite from my college days."

Photos by Scott Murray '01