caitri | A Book a Day: The Campus Trilogy

Every day I'm posting a picture of a book I like. Today I'm cheating and posting an omnibus of three: Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work. These are campus comedies originally written in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and reading them today is a bit like reading science fiction from the period--it's such a very different world (and boy are the gender issues/treatments a headache), but the fairy tale of plentiful money for conferences! and academic jobs! is bittersweet. But there's a lot that's familiar too, especially in Small World, from the "I have a question, a comment really..." guy at the conference, to grad students trying to explain their dissertations to publishers who actually are only half-interested and just want to churn out more content for their crummy presses, to the numerous and ridiculously petty feuds between rival academics. The third book, Nice Work, is very different, and is a sort of take-off/transformative retelling on Gaskell's North and South that actually highlights all the problems in that story that get glossed over by the love story in the original.

I hesitate to say this series prepared me for life in academia, but it didn't hurt, either...