Some (not all) of the Books We Love and Hope You Will Enjoy

Long lists of must-read books were once standard fare in English Departments.  At the request of students last year, the English Department gathered a list of faculty’s favorite books—not the same thing as must reads, perhaps, but an excellent collection to draw on if you are looking for a good book.

Favorites of Mike Opitz

A. Manette Ansay.  River Angel.
Mikhail Buklgakov.  The Master and Margarita.
John Irving.  A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Haruki Murakami.  The Wind-up Bird Chronicles.

Arundati Roy.  The God of Small Things.
Anne Sexton.  Transformations.
Gary Snyder.  Turtle Island.
Yuko Taniguchi.  Foreign Wife Elegy.

Roland Barthes.  Mythologies.
Gregory Bateson.  Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
Walter Benjamin.  Illuminations.  Reflections.
Edward Said.  Covering Islam.

Favorites of Nancy Hynes, OSB

Margaret Atwood.  Alias Grace.
Billy Collins.  Sailing Alone Around the Room.
Khaled Hosseini.  The Kite Runner.
Toni Morrison.  Beloved.

David McCullogh.  Truman.  John Adams.
Gloria Naylor.  Mama Day.
Alice Walker.  Possessing the Secret of Joy.

Favorites of Cindy Malone

Marilynne Robinson.  Gilead.
Don DeLillo.  White Noise.
Ian McEwan.  Atonement.
Salman Rushdie.  Midnight’s Children.

Charles Dickens.  Our Mutual Friend.  Great Expectations.
George Eliot.  Mill on the Floss.  Middlemarch.
Jane Austen.  Emma.  Pride and Prejudice.

Favorites of Ozzie Mayers

Emily Bronte.  Wuthering Heights.
D. H. Lawrence.  Sons and Lovers.
Willa Cather.  My Antonia.
Nikos Kazantzakis.  Zorba the Greek.

Virginia Woolf.  To the Lighthouse.
Eugene O’Neill.  A Long Day’s Journey into Night.
William Faulkner.  Absalom! Absalom!  The Sound and the Fury.
Thomas Hardy.  The Return of the Native.

Edith Wharton.  The House of Mirth.  The Age of Innocence.
Emily Dickinson.  Poems.
Walt Whitman.  Leaves of Grass.
Mary Oliver.  New and Selected Poems.

W. B. Yeats.  Complete Poems.

Favorites of Hilary Thimmesh, OSB

Colm Toibin.  The Master.
Ian McEwan.  Atonement.
W. B. Yeats.  Collected Works: The Poems.
Julian of Norwich.  Showings.

Jane Austen.  Emma.
Mark Twain.  Huckleberry Finn.
Charles Dickens.  Tale of Two Cities.
Sigrid Undset.  Kristin Lavransdatter.

Leon Tolstoy.  War and Peace.
Jean Edward Smith.  Grant.
Diarmaid MacCulloch.  The Reformation.

Favorites of Matt Callahan
Jose Saramago.  Blindness.
Dave Eggers.  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
Annie Proulx.  Close Range.  Bad Dirt.
George Saunders.  Pastoralia.

Stuart Dybek.  The Coast of Chicago.
Margaret Murek.  Two in the Far North.
Jhumpa Lahiri.  The Namesake.  Interpreter of Maladies.
Jon Krakauer.  Into the Wild.

ZZ Packer.  Drinking Coffee Elsewhere.
Terry Tempest Williams.  Refuge.
Rick Bass.  In the Loyal Mountains.  The Hermit’s Story.
Jonathan Safran Foer.  Everything Is Illuminated.

Favorites of Eva Hooker, CSC

Lucie Brock-Broido.  The Master Letters.  Trouble in Mind.
Frank Bidart.  Music Like Dirt.
Emily Dickinson.  The Poems, ed. Franklin.  The Letters, ed. Johnson.
Cormac McCarthy.  The Crossing.

Henry James.  Portrait of a Lady.
Marilynne Robinson.  Gilead.
Mary Gordan.  The Pearl.
Orhan Pamuk.  Snow.

Ian McEwan.  Saturday.  Atonement.
Andrea Levy.  Small Island.
Nicole Krauss.  The History of Love.
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.  The Particulars of Rapture.

Mark Doty.  Still Life with Oyster.
Carl Phillips.  The Rest of Love.
Jack Gilbert.  Refusing Heaven.
Susan Stewart.  Columbarium.

Mary Kinze.  Drift.
William Shakespeare.  Hamlet.  King Lear.
William Shakespeare.  Sonnets.
Stephen Greenblatt.  Will in the World.

Marjorie Garber.  Shakespeare after All.
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.  de Kooning: An American Master.
Shirley Hazzard.  The Great Fire.
Michael Ondaatje.  Anil’s Ghost.

Charles Wright.  Appalachia.
James Wright.  Above the River.
Mary Oliver.  American Primitive.  West Wind.
Anne Carson.  Men in the Off Hours.

Jorie Graham.  The Errancy.
Irina Ratushinskaya.  Grey Is the Color of Hope.
Leon Wieseltier.  Kaddish.
Pablo Naruda.  Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon. Selected Poems, trans. Stephen Mitchell.

Rainer Rilke.  The Book of Images.
Jonathan Safran Foer.  Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Favorites of J. P. Earls, OSB

Herman Melville.  Moby-Dick.
Henry David Thoreau.  Walden.
John Bunyan.  Pilgrim’s Progress.
Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Collected Short Stories.

Ernest Hemingway.  Collected Short Stories.
Charles Dickens.  Bleak House.  Hard Times.
Emily Dickinson.  Complete Poems.
Robert Frost.  Complete Poems.
George Eliot.  Middlemarch.

Favorites of Chris Freeman

Dorothy Allison.  Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.
Paul Monette.  Becoming A Man.
Jim Grimsley.  My Drowning.  Dream Boy.
Marilynne Robinson.  Gilead.

Mary Oliver.  New and Selected Poems. 
Christopher Isherwood.  A Single Man.
Alice Walker.  The Color Purple.
Kate Daniels.  The Niobe Poems.
Stephen King.  On Writing.

Favorites of Mara Faulkner, OSB

Marilynn Robinson.  Gilead.
Ralph Ellison.  Invisible Man.
Eavan Boland.  The Lost Land.  In a Time of Violence.
Seamus Heaney.  Complete Poems.

Mary Oliver.  New and Selected Poems.
Billy Collins.  Nine Horses.
Adrienne Rich.  An Atlas of the Difficult World.
Mary Pipher.  In the Middle of Everywhere.

Tillie Olsen.  Tell Me A Riddle.  Silences.
Toni Morrison.  Song of Solomon.  Beloved.
Frank Delaney.  Ireland.
Audre Lorde.  The Uses of the Erotic.

Anne LaMott.  Bird by Bird.
Michael Ondaatje.  Anil’s Ghost.
Charles Dickens.  Everything, but especially David Copperfield.
 

Favorites of Christina Tourino

Vladimir Nabakov.  Lolita.
William Faulkner.  Absalom, Absalom!
E. L. Doctorow.  The Book of Daniel.
Theodore Dreiser.  An American Tragedy.  Sister Carrie.
Thomas Hardy.  Jude the Obscure.
Clarice Lispector.  Hour of the Star.
 

Favorites of Madhu Mitra

Salman Rushdie.  Midnight’s Children.  Shame.
    Haroun & the Sea of Stories.
Gabriel Marquez.  One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Laurence Sterne.  Life and Times of Tristram
    Shandy.
Mary Shelley.  Frankenstein.

Frantz Fanon.  Black Skin, White Masks.
Zadie Smith.  White Teeth.
Arundhati Roy.  The God of Small Things.
The Mahabharata (Indian epic -- the longest poem in the world)
 

Favorites of Charles Thornbury:
Ralph Ellison.  Invisible Man.
James Joyce.  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Ulysses.
E. M. Forster.  Passage to India.
Virginia Woolf.  Mrs. Dalloway.  To the Lighthouse.

William Faulkner.  Light in August.  Absalom, Absalom!
M. Scott Momaday.  The Way to Rainy Mountain.
Tim O’Brien.  The Things They Carried.
Louise Erdrich.  Love Medicine.

F. Scott Fitzgerald.  The Great Gatsby.
Saul Bellow.  Humboldt’s Gift.
John Okada.  No-No Boy.
Flannery O’Connor.  Collected Short Stories.

Eudora Welty.  Collected Short Stories.
Seamus Heaney.  New and Selected Poems, 1966-87.  Seeing Things.
William Stafford.  The Way It Is.
Robert Frost.  Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Lathem.

T. S. Eliot.  Complete Poems and Plays.
W. B. Yeats.  The Collected Works, Vol. I, ed. Finneran.
Elizabeth Bishop.  The Complete Poems.
Mary Oliver.  New and Selected Poems.

Isaac Rosenberg.  The Collected Works: Poetry, Prose, Letters, Painting and Drawing.
Wallace Stevens.  Complete Poems.
Emily Dickinson.  The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin.
C. K. Williams.  The Singing.  Repair.  Flesh and Blood.

Billy Collins.  Sailing Alone Around the Room.
E. B. White.  Essays of E. B. White.
George Orwell.  A Collection of Essays.
James Baldwin.  Collected Essays.

Annie Dillard.  An Annie Dillard Reader.
Barry Lopez.  About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.
Terry Tempest Williams.  The Open Space of Democracy.  Refuge.
Scott Russell Sanders.  Writing from the Center.  The Force of Spirit.

Samuel Beckett.  Waiting for Godot.
August Wilson.  Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
Arthur Miller.  Death of a Salesman.
Tennessee Williams.  Glass Menagerie.
Eugene O’Neill.  Long Day’s Journey into Night.  Iceman Cometh.