Marathon Readings

Today’s Inside Higher Education reports on a growing trend on college campuses:  marathon book readings.

At Hamilton College, students spend an entire day reading aloud John Milton’s Paradise Lost.  In November, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro held a 24 hour-long reading of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  A few weeks ago Rutgers University students read Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as part of a campus celebration.  At the University of Arizona, a classics professor set up a tent in a heavily traversed area of campus and had students and actors read the text of Homer’s Iliad.  The reading lasted 21 hours and it included belly-dancers, torches, and a lyre player.

If this is a way of getting more people interested in literature, then I am all for it.

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