TTC Audio - A Day’s Read

But there's another strategy for reading the "great books" that is truly manageable; one that allows you to get all the power of brilliant authors in a single day. By engaging with literary works that can be savored in less than a day, you can discover—or rediscover—just how transformative an act of reading can be. These short works possess an economy of form that you rarely find in the larger tomes we associate with great literature. Reading these shorter works allows you to

- see the play of ideas, metaphors, and logic that often seems blurred in more expansive books;
- distill and focus your attention on a story's intricate details and characterization; and
- instill in you the critical thinking skills and confidence to tackle larger works by similar or different authors.

Join three literary scholars and award-winning professors as they introduce you to dozens of short masterpieces that you can finish—and engage with—in a day or less with A Day's Read. Professor Arnold Weinstein of Brown University and Professor Grant L. Voth of Monterey Peninsula College—two of our most popular literature professors—are joined by award-winning Professor Emily Allen of Purdue University. Together, all three offer you their unique scholarly perspectives on short books from across time and around the world.

Get Three Great Professors in One Single Package

Stunning, shocking, surprising, pleasurable, inspiring—the works covered in these lectures range from short stories of fewer than 10 pages to novellas and novels of around 200 pages. They are works you can read in a morning, an afternoon, an evening, or throughout the day; and they constitute a dynamic literary adventure.

But despite their short length, the books in A Day's Read are powerful examinations of the same subjects and themes that longer "great books" discuss. And with three great professors coming together to offer their own looks at literature, you'll get a multitude of ways to approach and think about grand human themes, including

- the nature of love and the mysteries of fate;
- the riddle of identity and the trials of growing up;the complex ties between individuals and their societies; and
- the ways we make sense of personal and public history.

In the company of these three professors, you'll also approach the evolution of the modern novel, the development of literary genres such as graphic novels and creative nonfiction, the role of politics and culture in inspiring authors, and much more. What's more, by exploring literature through three perspectives instead of one, you'll get an opportunity to see how literature professors—just like everyone else—approach and read books in their own unique way. It's like getting three distinct learning experiences—all in one single, affordable package.

Engage with Fascinating Characters and Literary Styles

A Day's Read is organized into three 12-lecture sections led by each of the course's three professors. Each lecture is a stand-alone piece that can be enjoyed before you read the work under discussion, or as soon as you finish.

Professor Weinstein's selections offer you engrossing emotional and intellectual journeys into the recesses of the human heart. He takes you from Norway and Italy to the American South and the French countryside, introducing you to a cast of fascinating characters, a range of existential dilemmas, and captivating literary styles. His selections include

- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway's most distilled novel and a jarring read that captures the drama of aging;
- Invisible Cities, an experimental novel by Italo Calvino that will have you rethinking the role of cities in everyday life; and
- "Judgment Day", a short story by Flannery O'Connor that uses grotesquerie and gothic undercurrents to get to the heart of enduring spiritual truths.

Embark on Literary Day Trips

Professor Allen frames her selections against the backdrop of the novel's historical development in the British and French literary traditions. Working your way from the late 1700s up through today, you'll savor what she calls "literary day trips" that illustrate just how intense, encompassing, and reorienting a single day's read is.

Her section of A Day's Read covers works including

- Lady Susan, an early Jane Austen novella whose provocative subject matter and wicked central character will shock fans of the author's more "polite" social novels;
- The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel filled with decadent prose that is flawlessly beautiful and undeniably rewarding to read; and
- Wide Sargasso Sea, the 1966 novel by Jean Rhys that uses the perspective of a minor character from Jane Eyre to offer a raw commentary on English colonialism.

Read between the Lines of Powerful Literature

Professor Voth's unique selections are brief but lasting adventures in which you'll confront more ideas about love, identity, history, and even the pleasures of reading itself. His lectures help you make sense of each work under discussion, reveal new ways of thinking about and interpreting their events and characters, and sometimes even provide you with lasting life lessons to take away from a first (or even second) reading.

In his 12 lectures, you'll read between the lines of day-long reads such as

- Billy Budd, Herman Melville's classic short story that combines high-seas adventure with a richly detailed character study;
- Hiroshima, in which author John Hersey combines journalism and storytelling to report on life in Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945; and
- Persepolis, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi that depicts, with brutal honesty, one young woman's coming of age during the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The Perfect Place to Start Reading

College students and lifelong learners alike have praised Professors Weinstein, Allen, and Voth for the ways they transform literary works into portals into other cultures, psyches, and eras. Their combined decades of teaching thousands of students, along with their numerous teaching awards and scholarly books dissecting literary works and themes, make them the consummate team to introduce (or reintroduce) you to these day-long reads.

And the short length of these works makes this course great for book clubs (whether you're already in one or looking to start one). You and your book club members can read one of these short books, watch or listen to the course together, and then follow up with a deeper, livelier discussion using some of the professors' intriguing questions found in the course guidebook.

Reading a great work of literature in a single day can seem like a luxury these days. But A Day's Read proves that this experience can be a lot less rare than you'd think. There are a host of books out there that offer the same emotional and intellectual rewards as "great books" that can take months to finally get through. The 36 works in these lectures make, in the opinion of these three experts, the perfect place to start.

01. Kafka, “A Country Doctor”
02. Prévost, Manon Lescaut
03. Flaubert, “A Simple Heart”
04. Faulkner, “Pantaloon in Black”
05. Borges, Short Story Selections
06. Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
07. O’Connor, Short Story Selections
08. Lagerkvist, The Sybil
09. Vesaas, The Ice Palace
10. Calvino, Invisible Cities
11. Duras, The Lover
12. Coetzee, Disgrace
13. Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
14. Austen, Lady Susan
15. Balzac, The Girl with the Golden Eyes
16. Meredith, Modern Love
17. Huysmans, Against the Grain
18. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
19. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
20. James, The Beast in the Jungle
21. Joyce, “The Dead”
22. Proust, The Lemoine Affair
23. Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street”
24. McEwan, On Chesil Beach
25. Cather, Alexander’s Bridge
26. Lu Xun, Short Story Selections
27. Chopin, The Awakening
28. Melville, Billy Budd
29. McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Café
30. Chekhov, Short Story Selections
31. Hersey, Hiroshima
32. Satrapi, Persepolis
33. Jataka Story Selections
34. Munro, Short Story Selections
35. Basho, The Narrow Road of the Interior
36. Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress