David Yaffe’s career path has shifted more times than fickle Syracuse weather forecasts in autumn.

At 10 — the age at which Yaffe first read J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” — he planned to collaborate with a friend on penning both the ultimate Beatles book, using the color photocopier at his dad’s office (a big deal for pre-teen Yaffe), and a soap opera. During high school, it was journalism or psychology, at least before he ran screaming from his first college psych class, he joked.

The one facet of Yaffe’s long and winding road toward English professor-dom that didn’t change was an all-consuming appetite for anything literary. Yaffe, now an associate professor of English at Syracuse University, confessed that his 12-year-old self would read everything that wasn’t assigned by teachers. In bookish acts of truancy, he would skip class and read the day away.

“It wouldn’t be the only reason I would skip,” Yaffe said. “But it was a big one.”

A son of a philosophy professor, Yaffe said he found himself interested by books about high stakes and life-or-death contemplations. He lists “The Invisible Man,” — Ralph Ellison’s version is Yaffe’s most-taught novel, not H.G. Wells’ — James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and pretty much anything Franz Kafka as life-changers.

Yaffe’s literature leanings also found a soft spot in poetry since the time he had to memorize a Robert Frost poem in school, despite knowing nothing about snow in the sweltering Texas climate.

His wife is a John Keats scholar, he is particular to teaching Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” for classes and he remembers when he first heard the news of Allen Ginsberg’s death in 1997.

“I was 24 at the time,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘There goes the last of the rock star poets.’ I was exposed to him pretty early on.”

A book Yaffe first read at the age of 20, Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady,” remains in his rotation of class material after eight years of teaching it. Yaffe numbers the novel’s themes of potentiality, youth and self-built barriers against freedom as still having legs more than 130 years since James wrote the book.

“It’s like George Bernard Shaw said, that youth is wasted on the young,” Yaffe said. “And ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ is a reminder of that.”

**

When Sarah Harwell was in third grade, she dated a boy — her next-door neighbor, no less — not for his looks, charm or wit, but because he owned the entire collection of “The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz” books.

“I liked him alright,” said Harwell, the associate director of creative writing in SU’s English department. “But he asked me to go out with him and I said yes because he had the whole series.”

It wasn’t just L. Frank Baum classics that Harwell voraciously devoured. Growing up, she read everything from the backs of cereal boxes to her mom’s copies of The New Yorker, which she admits mostly went over her head.

But unlike Yaffe’s literary odyssey, Harwell read to escape the self, not to discover it. She didn’t find herself in “Anna Karenina,” but what she did find was lessons about 19^th-century Russia and the pangs of love.

“I always felt like I read to learn about other people,” Harwell said. “So that each book I read shows me kind of another thing about another group of people.”

Harwell said she finds poems to be more like portals into self-revealing truths, since poetry is more internal and driven by universal emotions. However, reading one of her favorite poets, Elizabeth Bishop, is still more of a conduit to empathy instead of self-awareness: Harwell said she feels the poet’s sadness instead of her own.

“I don’t know if I understand more about myself than about what the world is like,” she said. “It seems like I was born into a state of ignorance and my whole life is trying to figure it out.”

Harwell said it’s tough to pinpoint one novel that might shake a reader to the core of self-discovery, but added that reading any kind of literary fiction — dismissing “Twilight” as reductive since she couldn’t get through it — allows students to understand their world in a more complicated way.

“I’ll teach Kafka, and some people will hate him with a passion,” Harwell said. “And some people think he’s amazing, and he opens up something in their brain. It’s hard to find one book for everyone.”

Favorite books change throughout time, and that’s a truth Harwell reconciled with. Sometimes you read something you loved at 22 when you’re 40 and just flat out hate it, she said. With a deeply saturated book market, Harwell said it’s tricky to find a good book to latch on to, but said the joy of discovery is a big part of the process.

Published on October 20, 2013 at 11:37 pm

Contact Erik: ervanrhe@syr.edu | @therealvandyman