When you have as much reading to do as the average Washington University student, it’s easy to completely let pleasure reading fall by the wayside. But part of college is expanding your mind and exposing yourself to a wide variety of classics.

What does September 11, 2001, mean for our generation—for those of us currently around college age? How did we experience those events that in the minds of many mark a paradigmatic shift in national and world history? When we were 13 or 12 or 11 or 10 years of age, what did the most massive terrorist attack we have seen, upon the nation in which we lived, mean to us?

Chief among the joys of literature is a savory, self-aggrandizing contempt for the thumb-sucking twits with whom you are unfairly forced to share the planet.