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Steven Fink

Posted on | March 19, 2009 | 2,178 views |

Steven Fink is an associate professor of English and the author of Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer.

What are your five favorite books and why?
Books are great for very different reasons, so at some point it’s like comparing apples and oranges, and they can’t be ranked. But here are five, among my many favorites, that I consider challenging and innovative and that I have particularly enjoyed both reading and teaching:

Walden, Henry Thoreau. I have spent a good part of my career studying and writing about Thoreau, so I had to include Walden. As closely and as frequently as I have read it, I still discover fresh insights, skillful writing and moral and intellectual challenges. I think it is an especially important and provocative book for college students to read as they are trying to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville. This is another book that just gets richer and more interesting with every re-reading. It’s an ambitious, daring and exciting novel, less about adventure on the high seas, ultimately, than about intellectual adventuring. It is both meditative and melodramatic; deeply serious (even intellectually tormented), yet also very funny and witty.

The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner. Faulkner’s experiments with narrative make this an almost perversely challenging book. It is full of extravagant, outrageous gestures, but beyond the pyrotechnics, it is profound, wickedly funny, sad, moving and somehow both deeply despairing and uplifting at the same time.

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie. This is magical realism at its best, I think. It is a deeply moving and thoughtful meditation on post-colonial and post-partition India, and at the same time a wildly imaginative and entertaining fantasy/allegory.

A Blessing on the Moon, Joseph Skibell. This is a surreal, semi-allegorical fantasy Holocaust novel. The main character is shot and killed, along with all the Jews of his Polish village, on the first page of the novel. The moon disappears from the sky. We then follow these dead, disfigured Jews as they wander across Poland for the next 50 years, trying to reach the World to Come and to restore the moon to its proper place in the heavens. It is both grotesque and darkly funny, angry and sad, intelligent and compassionate. It’s a fascinating novel to unpack with students in class.

Who is your favorite character in literature?
My answer of the moment would be Melville’s Ishmael, the narrator of Moby-Dick. He has an insatiable intellectual curiosity and a wry sense of humor. He’s the perfect narrator — engaging, open-minded, curious, observant, adventurous and a great story-teller. He takes the world — but not himself — very seriously. He’s a literary geek who wants to know what everything means and who is enthusiastic about sharing everything he’s learned - the model reader and teacher, the guy I want to be.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you?
A few come to mind, actually: George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (it was just boring — though I love Middlemarch); D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (or any other Lawrence novel, for that matter. I never understood why he was so highly regarded when I was in graduate school. I thought he was a sloppy writer whose hang-ups annoyed me); and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet (maybe not a classic, in any case, but I found it an unpleasant, disappointing novel).

If you were to ban one book, what would it be and why?
It would be tempting, I suppose, to say something like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that long-discredited anti-Semitic hoax that nevertheless still seems to flourish in different parts of the world at different times — currently in the Middle East rather than in Europe; but I would never ban any book, and my convictions about this are pretty unshakeable. We’re simply better off, in the long run, allowing all ideas, however evil and insidious, to see the light of day, where we can either engage or ignore them, rather than suppressing them.

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