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We asked the staff to confess their most questionable literary habits — no names attached, no reputations harmed. From unread masterpieces to opinions that could cause minor academic riots, they did not hold back. We’ll keep their identities safe… unless, of course, you’re good at guessing.
Anonymous 1 :🌪️
Anonymous 2: 🛡️
Anonymous 3: 🦊
Anonymous 4: 🧨
Anonymous 5: 🧳
One book I pretended to read (but didn’t): Be honest… we’ve all been there.
🌪️ Proust’s Recherche from beginning to end
🛡️The Book of Mormon
🦊 Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A first year student came up to me after an ILA class, trembling with enthusiasm over Gibbon and I didn’t have the heart to admit I hadn’t read Decline and Fall. I think I just said, ‘wow, that’s impressive.’
🧨 I plead the fifth
🧳 Joyce’s Ulysses
The hill I’ll die on (literary edition): What’s that one opinion you’ll defend to your last breath?
🌪️ You must not discriminate on the ground of sex and sexuality, race, class, origin or physical difference.
🛡️Samwise Gamgee is the true hero of Middle-earth.
🦊 Reading Tolkien is not stupid (I have quite a few more if you want).
🧨 Audiobooks aren’t books.
🧳 We need a different approach to our bodies: “My body, my choice” has terrible blind spots.
A literary opinion that might get me fired: Time to spill the hot takes.
🌪️ Run mad as often as you choose but do not faint.
🛡️ Out of all the stories about Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles is the worst one.
🦊 The fox in Ted Hughes’s dream who told him that studying literature was killing him.
🧨 Bad literature might have more cultural impact than good literature
🧳 Gosh, I can’t think of one … does this institution care so much about literary opinions?
Where would you absolutely perish — Regency England? Pick your doom.
🌪️The nineteenth century with its scientific definition of race and gender.
🛡️The Middle Ages
🦊 The future in which everybody hands in AI-generated essays, and people only talk on ZOOM, but mostly they exchange photos on TikTok (hopefully, there are other futures possible).
🧨 The trenches of modernism wouldn’t have been kind to me. Or anything before penicillin.
🧳 Definitely not Regency England… Modernism in South Africa?