Vol. 38, No. 18

1-21-2009
By:

Booktalk, 1/22/09

Amy Shuman is a professor in the Department of Englsh and the Department of Anthropology. She is author of many articles and recipient of a Guggehneim Fellowship.

What are your five favorite books and why?
Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson
The first “chapter book” that I re-read. I read it three times as a child and only figured out that it was a love story the third time, when I was 10.

Columbarium by Susan Stewart
These poems are new to me each time I read them.

100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I took turns reading and hearing the whole book aloud.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson
It totally changed my thinking about so many things.

Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit
She writes with so much passion and clarity.

Who is your favorite character in literature?
Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was one of the first characters I kept with me long after reading the book, maybe because I could imagine knowing her in my real life. I grew up in Boston, rather than Brooklyn, and she was Irish, rather than Jewish, so I knew her from a distance, but an imaginable distance.

What’s your “guilty pleasure” — a book you love but don’t often talk about because it’s not “serious” literature?
I don’t use the category “serious” literature because I read fairytales, children’s books, fiction and ethnographies with equal seriousness.
Probably the category regarded as least serious would be “self-help” books, and one pleasure was Rachel Naomi Remen’s Kitchen Table Wisdom.

What book would you most want your kids to read? What would you want them NOT to read?
I most want them to read any fairytales; I feel very cautious about children reading Huckleberry Finn without a lot of framing about racism. Also, I don’t understand why Lord of the Flies is on so many school reading lists.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you?
I was disappointed when I re-read The Secret Garden because I hadn’t noticed the racism, sexism and able-ism when I read it as a child. I thought I was returning to a childhood treasure; it was more than a disappointment.

What magazines do you subscribe to and why?
I subscribe to The Nation, The New Yorker and The Women’s Review of Books, and our family subscribes to Stone Soup. Each is for different reasons from wanting to know what’s going on to wanting to read about things entirely apart from what’s going on.

To nominate an Ohio State faculty or staff person for a future Booktalk column, e-mail Julia Harris at harris.587@osu.edu.

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