TCNJ

9 FALL 2018 READING LIST: Walk with the First-Years A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson Open City by Teju Cole How to Walk by Thich Nhat Hanh Exit West by Mohsin Hamid Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit longer simply a practical mode of transportation. They are necessar- ily shorter the further he gets from his early days too. When he started at TCNJ, he walked from Princeton, New Jersey, to campus on a snowy day. Today? "Yeah, not that same person," he says. And he comes across the same disruptions some of his reading list protagonists do. "There's more land that is impacted by humans — crisscrossed with highways — than even since I was walking and hitchhiking in the '70s. It's just a different landscape." All this is compounded by his own injury — a recent diagnosis of plantar fasciitis. It came just as he began designing the course. Perhaps, Bennett muses, he started thinking about his love affair with walking because he saw it slipping away from him. ■ —Dan Morrell Dan Morrell is the senior associate director of Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin. Bennett, who has taught at TCNJ for 21 years, often told his friends that he couldn't read all he wanted to because he had to stay up-to-date in his field. But FSPs give faculty the opportunity to teach outside of their expertise and focus on a special interest. What would he read if he were reading for himself ? He'd probably take a break from novels. He'd read science, he'd read spirituality, and he'd read about nature. But what would connect those ideas? What's the spine? "Well, I have this long history of walking a lot," he thought. "I don't think there's anybody who's walked as much as I have." I ntent on building a class and readying a syllabus, he started reading about Buddhism and walking. He read famed naturalist John Muir and Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. Then Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail — a popular work he had long eschewed but now included in his syllabus in an effort to get students excited. "I thought students would really like it, and I would get them hooked on the whole idea of walking," he says. As he expanded his reading list, he found his protagonists were increasingly facing man-made challenges in their journeys. "I got to a point where I was reading, and people were no longer walking into the woods and just looking at the beauty of nature," he says. "Instead, they would be on these walking ventures, and they would say, 'That mountain no longer exists because of mountaintop coal mining.'" It turned Bennett to realism, reading about humanity's impact. Then, there was a deeper dive into cli-fi, a kind of science fiction dedicated to apocalyptic depictions of environmental disasters. Then, the two roads merged under the course title to focus on the Anthropocene — what some call the current geologic age, defined by drastic, man-made changes to the environment. "I wanted to find the right books that would provide just enough of the grounding spiritual journey of walking as a meditative, exploring process — and just enough text that pushed my students to ask, 'Yeah, but what is happening to this world we're walking through?'" He sees this awakening in the course's texts (see reading list), which feature writers who merely set out to write about hiking the Appalachian Trail or the immigrant experience in New York City, and find themselves instead ruminating on what humans are doing to the planet. Some of Bennett's goals for the students are humble and tradi- tional: Become critical readers. Improve your composition. Learn how to edit yourself. "Then I'm hoping that the books will send them on their own journeys," says Bennett. W alking can be a metaphor for a journey through life, a walk further into knowledge. But Bennett's not sure there will be any actual walking in the course. As he often tells his students, he is sort of a 1960s guy — freewheeling, laid back. "But I was born in the '50s, so I still have that sort of rigid way of thinking about things," he says. Seminars are taught in a classroom. "It's one of the big ironies of me teaching this course." His own walks are different now. They're usually for leisure or because the dog requires it — no

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