24 things Ruth Bellamy from Cambridge, MA actually loves
- The first sentence of Middlemarch
- A well-argued essay by a first-year student
- The Widener Library reading room at dusk
- Tea, always Assam, always with milk, never with sugar
- Seamus Heaney reading his own poems aloud
- My red pen collection, which my students find terrifying
- The semicolon, correctly deployed
- Walking along the Charles in November
- The Brattle Theatre
- Joan Didion's sentences, the way they turn
- A student who comes to office hours not for the grade but for the conversation
- My colleague Margaret, who disagrees with me about everything and is usually right
- Used bookstores that smell like they should
- The way a great paragraph builds and then lands
- Marilynne Robinson's Gilead
- Portuguese egg tarts from that place on Cambridge Street
- The first day of the semester, all that possibility
- Virginia Woolf
- A library card, the physical object
- The radical act of reading slowly
- Scrabble, played seriously
- The conviction that the humanities matter
- An em dash used instead of a comma, when the sentence needs air
- The moment a student's writing voice emerges, usually around week seven