As the person who prompted the discussion about plot summaries, I have to apologize for the brevity of my original remark. I knew it would not really explain my position, but I didn't have time to do more than fire off a quick reply to the colleague who was concerned about which editions to have his students buy. He was concerned about exceeding the maximum he was allowed to have his students spend per course, and I felt that, in that context, he ought to reserve the student money for editions rather than references, and leave the reference books for the library. I also suggested that Kent Rasmussen's synopses could get in the way of pedagogy. I was concerned about writing that, knowing my remarks might suggest some condescension toward my students or a sanctimonious concern that they would be cheating to pass classes. That is not what I meant to imply at all. I'm really much more concerned about the conditions of learning and what we implicitly, as well as explicitly teach. Students today are grossly over-extended. Between classes--each of which is put together by a professor who thinks his or her course is the center of the university if not the universe (I plead guilty as charged!)--and a multitude of extracurricular functions, including part-time (or even full-time) work to help pay for college, students are stretched thin. Such circumstances do teach them what to expect from the work world, perhaps, but they are not conducive to loving learning for learning's sake and do demand that students take short-cuts. I simply wanted to suggest that it may not be in a teacher's best interest to make such short-cuts readily available under his or her SANCTION, because it might suggest that such short-cuts ARE a viable alternative to reading literature word by word. After all, students are taught early to read quickly and efficiently--that is to read for the central ideas, not for the whole picture. They are taught to see reading as a means to finding information. They are taught to summarize. I think that in teaching literature, we need to teach another way of reading, a way suitable to the material at hand, a way unlike the way they are taught to read newspapers and textbooks, etc. I don't think it's a question of students not being readers--they're bombarded with text even through the visual media that often get the blame for "decreasing literacy" (which may be a canard, but that's another topic). What's different is how they're taught to read. (I suppose I should say "we"--I'm plenty young enough to remember. In eighth grade, I was "rewarded" for my good work in my English class by being taken out of the regular group, which was studying literature, and put in a pilot speed-reading class. We were deliberately discouraged from reading word by word in favor of gleaning the "facts" from articles. To encourage a disregard for the rhythms and textures of language, we were assigned dull articles written by someone with a tin ear.) I spend some time each class reading literature aloud--slowly, with feeling. I also spend some time each class having my students read their own short essays on the literature they have read. In so doing, I ask them to HEAR their own language and register its impact on a living audience, something they don't do in the papers they efficiently write and never re-read after they hand them in to be graded. As for the utility of Kent Rasmussen's summaries, I confess that, as much as I use _MTAZ_ almost every day, I never look at the summaries. Yes, I would, I suppose, work more efficiently and make fewer mistakes if I were to use those summaries as an index, but I find that the less efficient use of my own memory is pleasurable. It gives me a chance to caress each work in my own mind and to reorder my mental index cards, which tend to get jumbled when I don't use them often. And I also find lots of other useful things by serendipity. Efficiency is a wonderful American virtue, but it isn't everything. Gregg