Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin is a classic.

It is a splendid retelling of the “Tam Lin” ballad (you may know Fairport Convention’s version of the song).  It is also an argument for a liberal arts education. This brilliant novel is set at Blackstock College (based on Carleton College) in Minnesota in the 1970s, and chronicles the four years of the heroine Janet Carter’s education.  She is an English major, though her classics professor advisor,  a “demon recruiter,” tries to lure her into classics.  (She does take Greek.)  The classics majors are rumored to be crazy, and indeed, are very strange, especially a group of actors who speak Shakespearean English: “Cry me mercy, lady!”

Why is she an English major?  She explains to one of her roommates:

Look,” said Janet, irritated, “if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay your room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn’t you do it?”

On the internet many lists have been posted of books read by characters in such TV shows as “Mad Men” and  “The Gilmore Girls.” Well, the curriculum at Blackstock College in Dean’s novel is far more interesting.  And so I have compiled a partial list of poems, plays, and novels read by Janet, discussed with her brilliant friends, quoted, and sometimes staged or set to music.

A great liberal arts education!

THE LIST

Herodotus’s The Histories

T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral

T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”

Homer’s The Iliad

Homer’s The Odyssey

Raymond Chandler’s mysteries

E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros

“The Romance of the Rose”

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”

Samuel Delany’s Babel-17

Shakespeare (Janet takes two or three Shakespeare classes)

 Hamlet (Janet and three friends attend a production, critique it, and frequently refer to it)

The Liddell and Scott Greek Lexicon  (all Greek students have this)

Matthew Arnold’s On Translating Homer

Aristotle

Keats (Janet’s favorite poet)

Milton’s Paradise Lost (read as science fiction by Janet)

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Thomas Middleton/Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy

Arthur Koestler’s The Watershed

Cyrano de Bergerac (Janet’s boyfriend Nick is writing an opera of it)

John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi

Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet (Janet hates it; her roommate loves it)

Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows

Oxford English Dictionary

John Donne

Thomas Campion

Thomas Wyatt

Wallace Stevens’s “The Emperor of Ice Cream” (Janet’s boyfriend Nick has set it to music)

Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings

Addison

Euripides

Chase and Phillips (possibly the most horrible Greek I textbook ever)

All of Balzac

Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning

Dumas’s D’Artagnan romances

Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night

Nancy Drew

Pope’s Dunciad

Dickens

Southey

Wordsworth

Byron

Shelley

Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Spenser

Aristophanes

Jane Austen’s Emma

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

Jane Eyre

Samuel Johnson

James Boswell

Richard Brautigan

Lewis Carroll

Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time

A complete set of E. Nesbit

Hermann Hesse

C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces

Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time