As an 11-year-old boards the ocean liner that is to be “the first and only ship of his life,” the prospect of a three-week voyage between Colombo and London strikes him as less extraordinary than the idea that his mother will manage to find him on the London pier when he arrives. A note slipped under his cabin door indicates that he will take his meals at Table 76. Arriving in the dining room, he quickly discovers he has been assigned to the Cat’s Table along with other passengers insignificant enough to sit at the table farthest from the captain.

With fall semester well under way, it seems prudent to recall a line of Emily Dickinson’s: “There is no frigate like a book/ To take us lands away.” Perhaps you’ve blithely sailed into the semester only to wake up stunned, lying on a narrow papery deck and not at all liking the place your first sociology text is taking you. Never fear! Like the friendliest of shipmates, we have laid out a veritable armada of choice books and book-related events for a pirate adventure or pleasure cruise. You will find no tortured metaphors like this one. We promise.

If the pea-green cover of David George Gordon’s The Secret World of Slugs and Snails appeals to you, with its alliterative title and its mottled banana slug rearing up in a sunburst above the subtitle “Life in the Very Slow Lane”, you’ve probably found the right book.

Should students entering into what is often described as the finest higher education system in the world expect to learn anything at all? The answer, according to sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa ’00, is distressingly unclear. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, released in January, details the results of their research on undergraduate learning in American institutions.

Have you reveled in ‘Romeo and Juliet’? Swooned through ‘Sense and Sensibility’? Test your recall with our Valentine’s Day Quiz!

If David Levithan is to be believed, love has evolved a great deal since Ambrose Bierce defined it as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder…It is sometimes fatal, but more frequently to the physician than to the patient.”

Over the past 50 years, researchers have steadily unraveled the pathology and chemical imbalances behind the gravest mental illnesses, producing drugs to combat them as effectively as insulin combats diabetes. Thus runs the conventional wisdom surrounding America’s $40 billion mental health pharmaceutical industry.

By all accounts, Nina, Victor, Gersh and Vera ought to have lived charmed lives. Nina and Vera were childhood friends, reunited as beautiful ballerinas in one of the best companies in the world. The effortlessly charming Gersh composed virtuosic music. Nina and Victor, an esteemed poet, fell in love at a party and married shortly after.

One of the sad ironies of graduate school application season is applicants probably do not have time to read The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. In this excellent memoir of sorts, Elif Batuman chronicles her traverse through studies in Russian literature and life after an undergraduate degree.

Henry Broad’s latest dealings with prima donna Aiden Massey, recently voted England’ s sexiest academic, have pushed him dangerously close to walking away from his beloved documentary on the Puritan Iconoclasts.