For the first time in six years, I won’t be a student this semester. Surprisingly, I haven’t felt the difference as much as I expected, perhaps because I hope to be a student next year, perhaps because my job keeps me involved in academia.

At the library, I am preparing a series of guides to a wide variety of topics. In a few days, I will have a dozen or so student workers to supervise. The number of reference questions should pick up once classes start, and some teachers may ask me to instruct their classes on how to use the reference resources.

I will be taking one class for credit, a German reading comprehension course. The class is intended to teach PhD students to read German well enough to pass their language exams, which is exactly the type of language study that I need.

In a way, I’ll be starting a new semester at church too. My Sunday school class has asked me to teach church history, beginning with the English Reformation. While I would prefer an earlier starting point, the topic is at least somewhat limited in time, topic, and geography, so it should be manageable. I have only a few weeks before the class will begin, so I have much work to do to prepare.

For a couple weeks I’ve been reading Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. It’s a lengthy book, and I’ve been fairly busy these past few weeks, but I have no excuse: the book is taking me longer to finish than I had hoped.

I sometimes have the book with me at church. This morning one of my junior church students saw it and said, “You’re still reading that book?”

Point taken.

Fortified by Anna Beth’s monkey bread, Kellen, Anna Beth, Abby, and I attended the Really Big, Really Good, Really Cheap book sale. We went to the sale together last year, so we had a plan. First, we got there when the sale opened, rather than at ten o’clock. Second, Kellen insisted that, unlike last year, he would by no means drop us off while he found a parking space. Third, we assigned ourselves to different parts of the sale: me to history, Kellen to philosophy, Anna Beth to literature and cookbooks, and Abby to children’s books and cookbooks. I had made my interests known to the rest of the part in advance, though they refused to memorize the list of Bancroft Prize winners as I’d asked.

I found some pretty good deals. Among the more notable were these:

• Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence
• Page Smith’s two-volume biography of John Adams (I gave my other copy to my dad.)
• Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower (a good narrative history, though the title is misleading since the Mayflower is dispensed with in the first fifty pages)
• Winston Churchill’s four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples (to complete Abby’s collection)
• Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Age of Jackson and The Crisis of the Old Order
• John Steinbeck’s A Russian Journal, Once There Was a War, Travels with Charley in Search of America, The Winter of Our Discontent, and The Moon is Down (thanks to Abby and Anna Beth)
• Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (so that I can find out what all the commotion is about)
• Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People
• David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas
• William James’s The Principles of Psychology

I also got two books to give as gifts, and Abby got a children’s book, some literature, a biography of Churchill, and at least one squishy book.

There were some heartbreakers, however. I own McCullogh’s Truman in hardback, and Kellen and I gave a paperback copy to a fellow history student, but it was only with great that I left behind another copy. I also had to pass over a good paperback of The Grapes of Wrath, because I have a copy in Massachusetts (though technically it belongs to my dad). Other books abandoned for the sake of the budget were Eric Foner’s Short History of Reconstruction, Samuel Eliot Morison’s The Oxford History of the American People, and Lawrence Friedman’s A History of American Law (the last two of which I already own). I could have bought those books to give to others, but at least I can still lend them.