 textbooks and college have a really difficult relationship. Buying textbooks for the under division physics and math classes can cost hundreds of dollars every quarter and honestly they're not very good references so I kept most of my textbooks through college but I got rid of a bunch of those intro ones. Some of them like in calculus I had to buy multiple versions of the same book and none of them were useful down the road. I have a couple textbooks that are particularly memorable though. This is the textbook for my very first class in college. It was an 8 a.m. elective class. Bioscientific etymology, the meaning of words. I knew I wanted to be some kind of engineer or science major so I thought being able to learn more Latin and Greek roots of science words would be a useful skill. It turns out that is actually a really cool thing and I wish I knew more of this book but it was a bit dry for 8 a.m. for an 18 year old. Of course I've got a lot of astronomy textbooks. I've shown some of them on this channel. The best textbook for a basic understanding of astronomy is called Bob. It is big, orange, and a book. Bob. This is Carol and Osley's modern astrophysics. I find Bob to be a critical reference even in my day to day work. With a PhD in astrophysics I have never once found a need to open up Griffith's quantum mechanics. Except to prove to people that the last word in the book is actually gullible. It's true. My favorite textbook and actually my favorite class in all of college was Shakespeare. It's like a piece of lumber. There's nothing particularly special about this copy of Shakespeare other than it's got a whole bunch of it in there. That was absolutely my favorite class in college. I needed to take an English or a literature class for general education credits. All the creative writing ones that maybe I wanted to take I couldn't get into were full. I think the class course number was English 235. Introduction to Shakespeare. Over the 10 week quarter we read 8 or 10 plays but what made it and what makes almost every class is the instructor was phenomenal. I think he was like a postdoc, probably a little younger than I am now. I took the class in spring quarter and the instructor had just landed a tenure track faculty job. It was the perfect combination. The instructor was young enough to be energetic and relevant. He didn't just have us reading and discussing the plays. He brought in movies and film clips and it was before YouTube so there weren't YouTube clips yet. There was like words on the internet you could read that were interesting and I have to believe that it was probably the most relaxed an instructor ever could possibly be knowing that their job is secure and all they have to do is teach this class and they're out. So we kind of throughout the syllabus they normally taught out of and just seem to have a lot more fun doing it. I think the combination of energy and relaxed joy really made the class. I got like a B plus or an A minus but it was by far the most impactful and fun class that I took. That class was almost 15 years ago and even though I'm not a great thespan I don't get to the theater that often it honestly made me some kind of a lifelong fan of Shakespeare. To me that seems to capture the point of general education. I learned about how to digest and analyze literature. I walked away with an appreciation for an art form that I knew very little about and here 15 years later I'm still thinking about it.