The Ohio State University

onCampus

• Help
• Buckeye Link
• Map
• Find People
• Webmail
• Search

  Search Ohio State Go

Sarah-Grace Heller, Department of French and Italian

February 1, 2012

Sarah-Grace Heller is a professor in the Department of French and Italian and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

What are your five favorite books and why?

In chronological order:

The Sign on Rosie’s Door by Maurice Sendak. This was the first book I remember loving, checking out of the library over and over when I was about 3-4 years old. I loved the illustrations of the children putting on a play by a cellar door. I rediscovered it recently and checked it out for my own daughters, 2 and 5. It has no plot, and evidently the cellar door is not an entry into some magical world for them as it was for me.

A Room with a View by E. M. Foster. This was my favorite book in high school. I loved the tension in it between cynicism at normative romantic relationships and a lushly understated depiction of the transformation that can occur when one finds the people with whom one truly belongs — those occasional fiery declarations of belief in the importance of living authentically professed by Mr. Emerson. I memorized great sections of it, such as Lucy Honeychurch’s great question in Italy, “Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time — beautiful?”  Oh, to find beauty in the world and choose it.

In college my favorite novels were the philosophical musings of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. They pondered many ways in which people from different cultures apprehend the same things in different ways and so misunderstand one another entirely (for instance a cemetery — a morbid place of decay or a respite from communist loudspeakers). This resonated as I worked to process my years as an exchange student in France. Another revelation was Kundera’s proposition that misogynists were the only ones who could truly love an individual woman — men who worshipped womankind could only delight in feminine traits (and tended to be philanderers), not love the unique qualities that set a particular person apart.

Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) by Guillaume de Lorris c. 1225 and continued by Jean de Meun c. 1260-70. My work has centered on this encyclopedic medieval allegory of love. It is one of those inexhaustible works that contain everything — courtly artifice (the hero falls in love with a rose and wants to sniff her), scholastic disputes, treatises on fashion and meterology, the God of Love engaged in feudal politics and even raunchy allegorized sex scenes. Definitely a work that rewards multiple readings.

Flamenca. Medieval romances are fantastic and nearly always subversive. The best of the best is the parodic Flamenca, a 13^th-century text in Occitan, the language of the south of France. The sole manuscript copy is missing the beginning, the end and a few pages in the middle (not to mention being charred in a library fire). Hero Guilhem de Nevers manages to woo the jealously guarded heroine Flamenca by posing as a cleric and exchanging two syllables over the psalter every time she goes to mass. Ah, the strategy and wit required!

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

I love the novels of Jennifer Crusie. She started out doing a PhD at OSU examining women’s romances and ended up writing them, realizing that the genre was not as irrelevant as it might seem. Her characters’ verisimilitude lies in their very quirkiness. Her novels are hilarious, poking fun at the genre’s clichés while celebrating them. My favorite is Welcome to Temptation, set in a small town in Ohio whose water tower gets painted an unfortunate pink.

Who is your favorite character (villain or hero) in literature?

Severus Snape in the Harry Potter books, by J. K. Rowling. So oily, so bitter. So much the best and worst of what one wants in a teacher — an expert in his field, setting the highest expectations in the school, but scornful, condescending and prejudiced, increasing exponentially the effect of the revelation of his expertly hidden experiences and feelings. And Alan Rickman’s performances are one of those rare instances where a cinematic portrayal of a book character was not disappointing.

What is the last book you’ve bought?

Family Values by Wendy Cope. She mixes virtuosity of form with dry wit and self-deprecating reflection. Her latest collection of poems contains several pieces treating the ambivalent feelings so many people experience at the holidays, when according to the songs and cards everything is supposed to be perfect but so often instead resuscitates old family dramas and loneliness. Beautifully crafted, funny; also made me cry.

What book would you most want your kids to read?

I so look forward to sharing my favorites with them — Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, the Chronicles of Narnia, Where the Wild Things Are, From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler… it is a joy to rediscover children’s literature with them.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you?

La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland).  A chanson de geste (epic) more than a novel, it is a long-form fictional narrative. It has long been hyped as the great medieval French epic. However, it is far from typical, notably for its almost total lack of female characters. In medieval French texts the women are generally smarter than the men.

Chandran Kalyanam, Clinical Psychiatry

January 18, 2012

Chandran Kalyanam is an assistant professor of Clinical Psychiatry and the medical director, Electroconvulsive Therapy.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Among many favorites, these come to mind now:

My Antonia by Willa Cather. I enjoyed the story itself, the writing style and learning about the Plains states in yesteryear. If I knew that my then-girlfriend did not share my view of this fine book, she might not have become my wife.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. The power of his magnum opus and the metaphor of “invisibility” still amaze me. Attesting to his skill as a writer, Ellison accomplished a significant feat in keeping the narrator anonymous throughout this substantial book.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. I love Hardy’s ability to develop characters and immerse the reader into the setting. When Somerset Maugham read Tess, he concluded that he must marry a milkmaid.

Swami and Friends by R.K. Narayan. No one has portrayed traditional South Indian life in such a gentle, witty and engaging manner. Thank God that Graham Greene saw Narayan’s promise and advocated a wider publication.

Burmese Days by George Orwell. Although Animal Farm and 1984 are more popular, this book deserves attention. Orwell was unique in championing the individual facing larger oppressive systems, including imperialism and Big Brother.

What is the last book you’ve bought?

A Billion Wicked Thoughts by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. A fascinating book about desire and sexuality, based on actual data from the Internet. An excellent companion to Christopher Ryan’s Sex at Dawn, also an academically informed book about the history of sex.

What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?

From the 20th century, I would love to take on the triumvirate thick books of Joyce’s Ulysses, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. I lack that leisure of mind and time right now.

What classic novel disappointed you?

I am highly indebted to Pierre Ryckmans (pen name, Simon Leys) who observed rightly that reading for pleasure should be for pleasure and not all books are for all people. That gave me permission to abandon books that just don’t work for me now, contrasting mandated reading for class. I loved many books that I read in class, but not all.

Pablo Tanguay, Department of English

January 4, 2012

Pablo Tanguay is an academic advisor in the English department and unofficial Poet Laureate of the Diversity Services Office in the College of Arts and Sciences.

What are your five favorite books and why?

The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll; Without Feathers, Woody Allen; One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie; and Ecclesiastes, possibly King Solomon.

Diaries was a revelation: You could be an athlete, druggie, hipster and poet, all before turning 16. Published in 1978 and recounting Carroll’s life from ages 12-16 in early 1960s NYC, The Basketball Diaries tore this San Francisco boy up. I must have been 15 when my mother (my mother!) passed a copy across the kitchen table. In the end, that thin volume cost me a decade of good citizenship, which doesn’t sound, I know, like much of an endorsement, but I still thank my lucky stars it wasn’t Atlas Shrugged that Mom passed along.

I discovered Woody Allen near the same time — also a gift from my mother. This one struck me as insanely different and far funnier than anything else I had read. In retrospect, I can’t possibly have understood Allen’s more sophisticated existential jokes, but what I remember most is jarring juxtapositions. “The Whore of Mensa,” for example, is the title of one of the collection’s more famous pieces.

One Hundred Years of Solitude. An almost miraculous thing happens as you read this book: Despite the dominant themes of loss and solitude, despite the depravity, duplicity and sinful lust, you are, because Garcia Marquez intertwines so naturally the real and the fantastical, transported to a kind of literary cloud, if such a thing is possible. Trust me, it’s as if Kafka had set The Trial in midair, spun it around and had included seven generations of incest and infighting — and made it all stunningly beautiful and also uproariously funny.

Midnight’s Children: see One Hundred Years of Solitude, 10 years later. Um…OMG.

Ecclesiastes may explain the other favorites, or maybe it’s the other way around: Maybe my exposure to Woody Allen led to my love of Ecclesiastes; certainly a title like One Hundred Years of Solitude had an effect. This relatively short Old Testament text not only explains us better than anything else, but the King James version also is, as importantly, the most perfectly-toned piece of writing under the sun.

Leslie Lockett, Department of English

November 16, 2011

Leslie Lockett is an associate professor in the Department of English. She specializes in Old English literature and teaches Medieval Latin and Manuscript Studies for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent. I read a lot of baseball books in grade school and high school, but this one taught me the most, both about the intricacies of baseball and about the psychology of baseball players.Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and The Secret History by Donna Tartt. I love these two books for many of the same reasons. Each novel plays out in a richly, intimately detailed setting populated with characters who are both alluring and repellent at the same time, which makes for a very engaging experience of reading. These books are so absorbing that their images, their turns of phrase and their tensions stay present in my mind for weeks after I read them.

Goat Song by Brad Kessler. My most passionate hobby for the past few years has been cheese; Kessler provides a poetic and vivid account of the work and the pleasures he experienced while starting up a goat farm and cheesemaking operation in a picturesque Vermont setting in the shadow of a Cistercian monastery.

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. When I was a 7-year-old aspiring ballet dancer, I envied the three sisters’ thrilling lives on the London stage; every detail of their meals, their clothes and their lessons was exotic and mesmerizing. I still read this beloved book once every year or two.

Who is your favorite character (villain or hero) in literature?

The unnamed Whiskey Priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. He’s hero, villain and victim all at once.

What is the last book you’ve bought?

Artisan Cheese Making At Home by Mary Karlin.

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

Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons. I always have a good cry when I read the scene in which the heroine opens an amazing present sent by her sweetheart.

What books have helped you most in your career?

For research: Michael Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library. A magisterial study of the Latin literature known and taught in England during the early Middle Ages. For teaching: Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. A biography of four American Catholic authors: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy.

Kristin Stanford, OSU’s Stone Lab

November 2, 2011

Kristin Stanford is the outreach and education coordinator for OSU’s Stone Laboratory.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. One of the most important books in the past decade. Every parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle or person who cares about our next generation needs to read this book.

Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches by Marvin Harris. I’ve read a few books by Harris, but I love how this one points out all of our societal hypocrisies. If you’re interested in human societal behaviors, you should know this author!

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. Unbelievably ridiculous, funny and smart! I love everything by Tom Robbins, but this one is probably my favorite.

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. I read this at a time when I was contemplating my career goals as an undergraduate and it really solidified my desire to do something that allowed me to enjoy the outdoors. It’s poetry in story form.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Best dark love story ever. Also, it was one of the first “classic” novels I read in high school. I remember being somewhat pessimistic about books that were dubbed “classics.” But after finishing this I remember thinking, “Wow, that really was a great story!”

What is the last book you’ve bought?

Incognito by David Eagleman. I’m about half through this book, and it may be bursting into my top five! Super interesting!

What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?

I haven’t read the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. It’s a book that I have had on my shelf for more than a decade but just have never really been able to get into it.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you?

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. Sorry to all James Joyce fans, but this was horrible. I’ve never had to struggle so much to get through a novel. Yuck!

What genre of literature do you prefer to read and why?

I mix it up a lot depending on my mood at the time and the parts of my brain I’ve had to exercise recently. If I’m feeling too mentally taxed, witty fiction novels appeal to me. If I’m feeling inquisitive, non-fiction books strike a chord.

What books have helped you most in your career?

Definitely the snake ecology series, edited by Richard Seigel, Joseph Collins and Susan Novak.

For my specific research focus, there also are a few demographic modeling books that have been a necessity: Model Selection and Multimodel Inference by Ken Burnham and David Anderson, Model Based Inference in the Life Sciences by David Anderson, Population Viability Analysis by eds. Steven Bessinger and Dale McCullough and Analysis of Vertebrate Populations by Graeme Caughley.

Brent Davis, WOSU Public Media

October 19, 2011

Brent Davis is senior content director for WOSU Public Media and has published two novels, The Spelling Bee and Raising Kane.

What are your five favorite books and why?

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. Okies. Route 66. The Dustbowl. Both a novel and a documentary about an amazing time in America.

One Man’s Meat, by E.B. White. My introduction to the essays of E.B. White.

Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain. Hilarious and informative. And about five steamboat explosions per chapter.

The Shipping News, by
E. Annie Proulx. This book has it all: Style, humor, tragedy and useful information about knots.

Ahab’s Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund. A gripping and gruesome account of the woman who waited for the return of The Pequod.

Who is your favorite character (villain or hero) in literature?

Bartleby the Scrivener from the short story by Herman Melville. His “I would prefer not to” is an entirely appropriate response for many situations we find ourselves in.

What is the last book you’ve bought?

The Haygoods of Columbus, which is Wil Haygood’s terriffic account of growing up here.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you?

It’s not in the classic novel category, but I’ve not worked up much interest in the Stieg Larsson books. Give me a police procedural by Richard Price, Lush Life, for instance, any day.

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

Richard Russo says it’s harder to write humor than nearly anything else, and that it’s not taken seriously. My favorite of his comic novels is Mohawk. I laughed out loud a lot when I recently read Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis. I love anything by Peter DeVries and Calvin Trillin. I pick up James Thurber quite a bit, especially My World And Welcome To It.

What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?

Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust. One-and-a-half-million words? Reminds me too much of a committee meeting.

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

My son is a fan of Stephen King, which is great. I’d be alarmed if my son came home with The Accordion For Dummies.

What genre of literature do you prefer to read (history, fiction, biography, etc.) and why?

History, fiction and biography are my favorite genres. I just finished reading a graphic biography, I guess it would be called, of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. I picked it up because of the quote on the cover: “If that’s the world’s smartest man, God help us.”

What magazines do you subscribe to and why?

I subscribe to The New Yorker and The Banjo Newsletter. I like one for the cartoons and the other for the articles.

Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, Department of English at OSU Mansfield

August 10, 2011

Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich is an assistant professor in the Department of English at OSU Mansfield. Her current book project analyzes entertainments performed at aristocratic estates during Elizabeth I’s royal progresses.

What are your five favorite books and why?

My list could be much longer, but here are five of my favorites:

Emma by Jane Austen.

Austen is one of my favorite writers of all time, and I especially enjoy watching Emma realize how blind she has been. Some of us simply aren’t very observant.

Plainsong by Kent Haruf.

I grew up in a small town, and this underrated book really captures life in small-town America.

Atonement by Ian McEwan.

I love the way McEwan writes, and I find his style in Atonement every bit as pleasurable as the plot.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

This funny, poignant novel is the best one I’ve read in the last few years.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

I’m a sucker for satire and dystopia. This was my favorite book in high school, and I still think it’s one of the best.

Who is your favorite character (villain or hero) in literature?

I love a lot of Shakespeare’s characters, both heroes and villains. My favorite might be Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. She is outspoken and witty, but also kind and sympathetic.

What is the last book you’ve bought?

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. The first half was fantastic; the last half was a little disappointing.

What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?

Moby Dick — I started it twice, but never got past the first chapter.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you?

The Great Gatsby. It was fine, but I thought such an important novel would be better than “fine.”

Derek Alwes, English Department/OSU Newark

June 15, 2011

Derek Alwes is an associate professor of English at OSU Newark who teaches a wide range of courses but specializes in literature of the English Renaissance.

What are your five favorite books and why?

The Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare

This may be cheating, since it includes a number of “books,” but it is certainly my favorite. I have been teaching Shakespeare’s plays regularly for about 30 years, and I have never gotten tired of reading them.

Paradise Lost by John Milton

I could have chosen his complete works, I suppose, but his powerful epic poem is, for me, the greatest single work of literature in any language. Milton’s dramatic flair and his insights into the human condition rival Shakespeare’s.

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Faulkner’s “stream of consciousness” style makes me feel like I am really inhabiting another person’s mind. Faulkner probably derived his experimental literary style from James Joyce, but, as a true artist, he made it very much his own.

Jazz by Toni Morrison

Morrison works very powerfully with very powerful ideas and historical situations, and I think Jazz is her finest work. It is quite magical.

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

Few literary works so successfully combine wit and wisdom as Stoppard’s plays do, and Arcadia is simultaneously funny and moving.

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

Honestly, I don’t have any “guilty pleasure,” in part because I almost never read anything that is not connected to my professional work. Perhaps I should feel guilty about that. I am lucky that I really enjoy reading and rereading the texts I teach (and the voluminous scholarship on them).

Who is your favorite character (villain or hero) in literature?

Maybe this is my “guilty pleasure.” My favorite literary hero is the Count of Monte Cristo. I am a big fan of the James Bond movies, and the Count is the original Bond — cultured, omnicompetent and utterly committed to his mission.

What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?

I keep intending to read Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the 1567 Arthur Golding translation (the one Shakespeare read and loved). It sits near my desk (as it probably did for Shakespeare), but I have only read in it very selectively. It’s a long book.

What are some of your favorite websites?

I am a regular reader of a few political blogs, all with a liberal or progressive perspective — Daily Kos, Washington Monthly, Talking Points Memo. It is a continual source of mystery and frustration to me that a few politically informed writers can be so smart and sensible and our elected officials can be so dense and unreasonable.

To recommend a colleague or submit your own BookTalk discussion, send an email to oncampus@osu.edu

Stuart Lishan, English, OSU Marion

June 2, 2011

Stuart Lishan is an associate professor of English at OSU Marion. He writes and publishes poetry, essays about poetry and fiction.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, King Lear by William Shakespeare, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, The Essential Haiku edited by Robert Hass and tied for fifth place: The Collected Poems of Pablo Neruda or The Tempest, by William Shakespeare (yeah, yeah, I know I’m cheating a bit).

Ask me the same question next month or a year from now and the list may shift. I know I’m heavy on golden-oldies here, and light on gender and ethnic/racial diversity, but I list these because they’re writers and books that I keep returning to year after year, to drench myself in specific passages mostly, but sometimes to read the whole book again. There’s a sort of comfort there, even in their darker passages.

Who is your favorite character in literature?

Today it’s a toss up between Roy Cohn in Angels in America (A close also-ran in the list above, Cohn is a creation that Shakespeare would have been proud to have created, I think), King Lear (as he stands on the verge of darkness inside us and professes) and David Copperfield (a totally likable dude in my book).

What is the last book you’ve bought?

The Lost Continent of Mu, by Col. James Churchward. Churchward believed that a lost, sunken civilization called Mu was responsible for the great achievements in the ancient world, from the Egyptian pyramids to the Mayan and Incan civilizations. He’s one of those great Victorian-era pseudo scholar looney-tunes, and the book is part of research for a novel I’m working on.

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

Speculative fiction, especially young adult speculative fiction, which I must say is often hard to distinguish from adult speculative fiction. My latest find in this genre is Guy Gavriel Kay, who writes beautiful historical-based speculative fiction. I’d particularly recommend his novel, Under Heaven.

To nominate a colleague to appear in BookTalk, send an email to oncampus@osu.edu.

Bill Shkurti, adjunct professor, John Glenn School

May 18, 2011

Bill Shkurti, former senior vice president for Business and Finance, is an adjunct professor in the John Glenn School of Public Affairs and author of Soldiering on in a Dying War: The True Story of the Firebase Pace Incidents and the Vietnam Drawdown.
What are your five favorite books and why?
Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth — one of the first books I ever read. Opened up the idea of alternative worlds.

James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the  Mohicans — also one of the first books I remember reading as a child. I got very much caught up in the spirit of adventure.

George Orwell, 1984 — a great warning of the dangers of Big Brother, especially the part about rewriting  history.

Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1960 — although now dated, it still captures the spirit of a unique and exciting period while I was growing up

Phil Caputo, A Rumor of War — one of the first and still one of the best narratives about the ambiguities of the Vietnam War.

Who is your favorite character in literature?
Natty Bumppo (Hawkeye) from The Last of the Mohicans. Represents a classic American hero, loyal, honorable and resourceful.

What is the last book you bought?
Jeff Greenfield’s Then Everything Changed. A fascinating alternative history.

What’s your “guilty pleasure?”
Terry Pluto, The Curse of Rocky Colavito — the classic chronicle for long-suffering Cleveland Indians fans.
What books did you enjoy reading with your children?
The Day You Were Born by Debra Fraser. My wife and I must have read this together with our son at least 50 times.
What classic novel disappointed you?
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Had to read it in high school. Thought it was tedious in the extreme.
What books have helped you most in your career?
There are many, but among my favorites are David Halberstam’s two classics, The Best and the Brightest and The Reckoning, because they show the dangers of arrogance and overconfidence on the part of people in leadership positions.

To nominate a colleague for a future BookTalk, send an e-mail to oncampus@osu.edu.

keep looking »