A course's reading list is the skeleton of a semester's body of thought, the inventory that a professor writes up for the departmental Web site and the schedule of courses that lists the goods. Despite the obvious utility of fixed reading lists, one should jettison them when possible. The author has been conducting an informal experiment using a flexible, investigatory reading list. The results have been salutary at the least and liberating at best. The author thinks of classes without fixed reading lists as relaxed laboratories for the generation of ideas. The flexible professor can shape the environment to produce new thoughts and ideas, while the nervous professor must lock down that process so that outcomes are fixed and expected. With a flexible reading list, the class is free to follow whatever byways come up in classroom conversations. The author argues that the problem with a fixed reading list is that it does not allow for adjustments. In other words, reading lists disregard what is going on in the students' minds and ensure that everyone marches lock step through the syllabus. He suggests flexible reading lists as a temporary, tactical measure to see if courses can run smoothly and deeply if they are not linear.