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Molly Farrell, English Department

Posted on | October 20, 2010 | 4,813 views | 1 Comment

Molly Farrell is an assistant professor of English specializing in early American literature. Her current work focuses on colonial writing, the history of demography and the intersection of gender and empire.

What are your five favorite books and why?

This is such a hard question for an English professor to answer! I love books. I love learning. I love them so much I wouldn’t want to do anything else for a living than what I’m doing right now.

There are so many ways books have affected my life that it makes it hard to pick “favorites”— there are books that forever changed the way I think and see the world (like Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality or Decolonising the Mind by Ngugi wa Thiong’o); there are novels whose characters I loved so much that I cried when I reached the last page with them (like Levin in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina or Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch); there are books whose every word I’ve memorized (like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Sylvia Plath’s poems in Ariel); and then there are books I have to credit with getting me through adolescence and showing me who I wanted to be (like J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States).

Did I just cheat on the answer to this question? And I even left out of consideration books from the period I research and write about!

What is the last book you’ve bought?

Last week I bought Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed while strolling through the Book Loft in German Village with my husband Jesse. I’ve been so busy lately that I wanted a swift and engaging read, and journalistic non-fiction like this is perfect for that. I couldn’t put it down, and it really helped me see the way corporations do everything they can to get every last nickel and dime out of the working poor they employ.

What’s your “guilty pleasure” — a book you love but don’t often talk about because it’s not “serious” literature?

I get asked this a lot by friends who worry that my job makes my tastes too academic. It’s true that I don’t read a lot of genre fiction like romance or fantasy or detective novels, but I read more blogs than I would like to admit. And not political blogs either or even style blogs —“mommy” blogs. I have no idea why. They’re addictive. It may be tied into my utter fascination with reality TV.

What book would you most want your kids to read? What would you want them NOT to read?

I don’t have kids, but if I did I would most want them to read and love picture books. My husband’s mother, Roni Schotter, is a children’s book writer, and I’ve met many writers of picture books through her. I’ve been so sad that sales have dropped off in favor of chapter books that are being pushed on younger and younger readers. How could you build a lifelong love of reading without having pored over the illustrations and text in Ezra Jack Keats’ The Snowy Day a thousand times? Or William Steig’s Amos and Boris? Or to pick more recent ones, Mark Reibstein’s gorgeous Wabi Sabi, James Howe’s Brontorina or Roni Schotter’s Dreamland?

I would NOT want any kids of mine to spend time reading books they felt they should read, instead of those they can discover and enjoy in that spectacular way you can rarely get back once you’re older — the kind of playful reading that turns the children’s section of a library into a candy store. Speaking of which, be sure to vote yes on Issue 4!

BookTalk highlights the literary opinions of faculty and staff at Ohio State. To nominate a colleague for a future BookTalk, e-mail Julia Harris at harris.587@osu.edu

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