July 01, 2004

Reading List

One of my favorite profs at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology was Dr. Julia Williams. See her website for information on her classes and a very nice picture of a southern Indiana flower. Oh and check out the page for her Utopian Thought and Literature class, of which I was a founding student.

Ok, but apart from the fact that I earned a 'Dr. Williams minor' with the number of electives I took, this post is about a reading list that she gave me. Before I graduated, I asked her if she could list a handful of books that every person should read. She responded with a two page list...I thought that appropriate for a professor of English and literature!

Here are the first 10 on the list (in no significant order). Apologies for any mis-spellings and mis-interpretations of her handwriting.

  • Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
  • George Eliot - Adam Bede
  • James Joyce - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  • Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
  • Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks
  • Charles Dickens - David Copperfield
  • Emily Bronte - Wuthering Heights
  • Charlotte Bronte - Villete
  • Samuel Beckett - Murphy
  • James Agee - Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Posted by Jeremy Showalter at July 1, 2004 11:58 AM
Comments

So the question is, how far are you along in the list?!? Now that I see it again, I want to add and add more and more books . . .

Posted by: Julia Williams at July 2, 2004 11:59 AM

Have you ever thought of making a class on distopian literature? Brave New World, 1984, anything by Philip K. Dick, etc.? That could be enormously interesting as well.

Posted by: todd at July 11, 2004 11:17 PM
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