When I was younger and stronger, I taught night classes. These classes would meet, sometimes, four hours at a stretch. Twenty-nine years ago, I would teach Intro to Lit until ten-thirty at night. The first class session, of course, was the hardest since students had not yet read any assigned works. I couldn’t stand before them and lecture for four hours. That would kill them, and murder is illegal. Nor could I just send them home, cutting valuable hours from the class curriculum. Instead, I would try to break that first night up into four or five bite-sized chunks. One of these involved responding orally to a series of getting-to-know-you questions. Among these was this item: “Not counting the reading assigned in classes, what’s the name of the last book you read?” Back then in the big cit
