H
ello, my name is Joshua Riley. I am an Assistant Professor of General Studies here at Olivet Nazarene University. This is the Olivet Reads project. Every image in the collage has been selected by faculty, staff, and students to be a visual representation for each of the books contained in the Olivet Reads Special Collection which is on the first floor of Benner Library. The collage on the home page is an interactive exhibit that can show you more information about each image. Simply click one of the images in the Interactive Collage and the tile will reveal which book the image represents, the author, when it was published, some brief information about the image, why it was chosen and the book as well. In addition to information about the book, you will be able to see who else has read this book on campus and how to get in contact with them so that you can read it together. The hope of this project is that Olivet Reads becomes an organic reading community across campus connecting faculty, staff and students around the shared interest in books that is informal and not directly connected to course work.
If you would like a formal introduction to the project, the front door to get involved is to take GNST 136 Reading Strategies. Taking that course will require you to select one of these books and read it with me or any other faculty member or student who has read that book over the course of a semester. You will check in 4 times during the class to make sure you are keeping on track with your reading and at the end of the semester, you will choose an image that represents that book and explain why you chose that image. That image will be placed on this website, and on the collage in Benner. After that semester, should you complete it successfully, you can be a Reading Mentor for that book for anyone else who takes the class and chooses that book as well. After completing the course, you are able to read any other book in the collection and petition for an image to be changed and updated to your selection. Eventually, every image on this wall will have been selected by students in conversation with one another.
The images are chosen as a response to the work as a whole. I chose the initial round of images as place holders and guides for students to engage with. The ring around the outside of the collage are the Pulitzers in order from Ernest Poole’s 1918 winner His Family to 2026’s winner Angel Below by Daniel Kraus. I chose to keep those images as book covers because the majority of them I read before I began this project. I read them so long ago that I do not think I could come up with an image now in response to them. I hope students choose those ones first to respond to in order to fill in these holes in the collage.
The images that I chose to start with come from my own visual sense and taste in art. This is simply a suggestion or guide for a student response but it is the furthest thing from a requirement. I chose images that are also in conversation with the works and the readers who have responded to these works in the history of human culture. For instance, I chose the first image of the monster every portrayed visually of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. This image was the first depiction of the monster in the 1831 revision to the original text. This is the image that Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte would have seen if they were to have read this book. This seems important to me, but it doesn’t have to be the student who replaces this image.
I prefer not to choose book cover images, or illustrations that accompanied the works in real time if I can because often times these were not beautiful works, cheap prints in metal etchings or wood carvings that were done quickly that could be cheaply reproduced. I would choose a famous, important artist who may have done an illustration or homage to a work like Picasso or Dali’s response to Don Quixote, or Edvard Munch’s Night Wanderer as an homage to fellow Norwegian Nobel Winner Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. If such an image is not readily available, then I would like for it to be something that may have influenced the writer’s visual sense so art that was popular when the author wrote the book like Hunt’s Lilith which was chosen for Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. This image was chosen by Alyson Chandler in the Fall of 2025.
Another, and perhaps more common avenue of approach is that the reader would choose their favorite or most impactful moment from the novel and see if such a moment has been represented visually in the history of art. Chilon the Spartan painting by Luca Giordano (1660), Chilo is a famous story recorded in Gellius’ Attic Nights. It is unclear why Giordano chose this subject of this painting but Gellius is one of the classic renderings of this story and so I would infer that this was Giordano’s response to Gellius. If any thought can be given to the artists, movements and eras of art, and the medium of art as well. You will see art from high to folk art responses. You will see a diversity of artists from all over the world. You will see art that is a variety of mediums like drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, photography, film, and music represented visually.
What will your response be? I hope each work that is represented here will be beautiful on its own whether it is visually eye catching or whether the story associated with it, your connection to it, your love of the image or whether students will choose to create their own image, will beautiful as well. Then, it is the hope of this project that the accumulation of all of the images will beautiful in and of itself as each image set side by side with another image will show the shared response of the individual and the community to the reading life, to human connection, to community and collaboration, to shared inquiry.
I wish there was a simpler answer, but bear with me. I started this project several years ago before I taught here at Olivet. I was asked to teach a course at another university on Early American Literature. I asked the department chair at the time which books would be included in this type of course, and they responded with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. At that time, I had not read either of those books. I thought this was an oversight in my own reading and so I sought to fix that. I wasn’t sure onto what end starting this type of reading would amount to or how to keep track of what I had read in case I should be tasked with teaching other literature courses. In response to this need, I developed the first list, the Big Book List which is something like the 1000 books you should read before you die sort of a list.
I consulted lists all over the internet. Apparently, there is not just one such list. I folded into this list all the works that have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I had compiled and read those books previously to this reading project. That is a much longer story. Then I folded in all the Nobel Prize winners. These individuals do not win for a single work, so I had to choose a work at random for many of them. Then I put in Time’s 100 Best books and many other such lists. In order to get to the 1000, I added Penguin Classics and other fancy collections to the list. It is a work in progress, and there is no static finalized form yet. That will emerge over time.
By my rough math, if I read 25 books a year over the next 35 years, I should be able to complete the project. I started this project when I was 35 and thought a charitable end point as at 70 years old, that I could read these 1000 books. That number gives you 875 so some years I will have to add more, and I brought into the collection 100 already completed by the Pulitzers being on the list. Not all the Pulitzers will make it to the end, some are not very good.
After compiling the Big Book List, I realized that if I only read from this list works like Moby Dick or Bleak House, I will never read poetry again and so I developed the Small Works List. I scoured every Norton Anthology I could get ahold of, British, American, World, Women, Black literature, and instead of going through the Table of Contents, I went through the Index and added every name mentioned in the anthologies. I put these into 17 different categorized lists of domain and timeframe, like British Literature 1650 to 1800, or World Lit1900 to Present. These are full of hundreds of names that do not have a work associated to them.
Which leads me to my last point, at any time I have at least two books that I am reading. I have one from the Big Book List, and one from the Small Works List. When I finish each work, I record a short video which I formally posted to YouTube which is simply a reaction video to the book, how I arrived at this work, what I thought of it, and how it fits into the project, then I pull another book randomly from the list of the book I just finished. I started to make these videos as a sort of digital book club for my daughter who was 3 at the time. I thought that if she were to read Huck Finn or Frankenstein and want to know what her dad thought of these books, she could go back in time to see what I thought right as I finished that work. The Lord is good, and I did not know how useful these videos would be to me as I have students reading any one of these random books that I have read over the last number of years. I can go back to myself and what I thought about these books.
This is where you come in, you read these books and you tell me what you think of them. That is the nature of this project, and that is what I would like to invite you into. If we all read these books and we all talk about each of them with each other, we may be able to produce something beautiful in response to these works. It will be the labor of my life, and I would like to collaborate with you in this work.
