I'm currently enjoying Carolyn Weber's Surprised by Oxford. I love this passage in which she describes her life as an undergraduate student:

Totally idealistic, I was the quintessential student. One of those inspiring or irritating students--depending on how you look at it--who reads everything assigned and then the footnotes too. And the prefaces, and the references, and the epigraphs, and the marginalia. And the wacky, unrelated stuff on the next anthology page. I devoured everything I came across. I loved it all. Even the annoying parts I enjoyed, precisely because they annoyed me and so, often, made me stop and really think. With college, my life opened up more than I could have ever imagined: into art, and history, and philosophy, and argumentation, and statistics, and postcolonial theory. I began to understand my own spot of existence in relation to the history of ideas. I began to see, both scarily and comfortingly, that all I thought had been thought before. I began to see how studying the humanities illuminates humanitas or "what it means to be human." What it means to become human. The decisions and the responsibilities of becoming truly humane.