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Mo Yee Lee, College of Social Work

November 18, 2009

Mo Yee Lee is a professor in the College of Social Work and recently co-authored the book Integrative Body-Mind-Spirit Social Work: An Empirically Based Approach to Assessment and Treatment.

What are your five favorite books and why?

On Creativity by David Bohm
David Bohm describes creativity as a state of the mind rather than talents or special talents or abilities belonging to a few. We usually think of the creative process as complex and extraordinary. Instead, Bohm suggests a person creates by the everyday, fundamental, simple and ordinary process of “trying something out and seeing what happens, then modifying what one does (or thinks) in accordance with what has actually happened.” What distinguishes a creative person from others is the ability to maintain an extremely perceptive state of intense passion and high energy that dissolves the take-it-for-granted assumptions of commonly accepted knowledge and enables him or her to see something in a new or unfamiliar way that extends the frontiers of knowledge. I appreciate such a perception of creativity, as it is inclusive and also insightful.

No Boundary by Kenneth Wilber
Ken Wilber convincingly speaks about the problem of creating an imaginary boundary between the “self” and the “not-self.” I guess this is a by-product of a linear and reductionistic thinking style that permeates our culture. While this boundary creates a sense of self-identity for individuals and also advances knowledge in useful ways, it also leads to polarities, oppositions and conflicts. He speaks insightfully about the idea of “shadows” that exists in every phenomenon when we try to create a boundary, to define what is right or wrong, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, etc. To me, the idea of “shadows” reminds me to be more humble, embrace differences, and be appreciative of the dynamic balance of diverse forces in life that help us to change and grow.

The Seven Life Lessons of Chaos by John Briggs and David Peat
John Briggs and David Peat are both interested in chaos theory. The Seven Life Lessons of Chaos is a thoughtful translation of the principles and ideas of chaos theory into everyday life. The courage to embrace and appreciate uncertainty and even crisis as a window for change is uplifting.

The Song of the Bird by Anthony de Mello
This is a book that I read when I was younger. However, the simple but thought-provoking stories still challenge me to revisit assumptions about life, religion, knowledge, etc.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
This is the inspiring story of Greg Mortenson, a mountaineer, who, after getting lost in a failed K2 expedition, was saved by locals of a small Pakistani village, and then promised to build them schools. He kept his promise to build schools, especially for girls, in the remote region of Pakistan’s Karakoram Himalaya. It is the courageous story of how an ordinary person can change the world, and how one can change the world in a different way. To me, it is also a story of a man who carefully makes a promise and actually keeps his promise despite difficulties. I think that this is an inspiring reminder for us in our hyper-speed world where we hastily make all kinds of promises and are not always able to live by them.

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

Doug Dangler, Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing

November 4, 2009

Doug Dangler administers the OSU CSTW Writing Center and Digital Media and Writing programs, as well as hosting and producing Writers Talk, a tv, radio and Internet show about writing.

What are your five favorite books and why?
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Hypnotic and seductive. You accept without question that good people float off into the wind.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Crazed, unreliable narrator with a lifetime’s worth of puzzles and false clues.

Beloved by Toni Morrison
Stunning and moving.

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
I have not laughed harder at anything else.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
Tragic, funny, unforgettable. Plus, another opportunity to read a book and use an accent.

Who is your favorite character (villain or hero) in literature?
Villain: Humbert Humbert.
Hero: Oddly, this one is much harder. Maybe the Stainless Steel Rat?

What is the last book you’ve bought?
Something for my kids or for Writers Talk. I plan to buy Andrew Hudgins’ Shut Up, You’re Fine for my more easily offended relatives this year.

What “important book” have you not read?
Moby Dick. Sorry, my wife waded through it and her description turned me off. I feel special guilt because a former adviser of mine specialized in Melville. Shh, don’t tell Dr. R.

What book would you most want your kids to read? What would you want them NOT to read?
When they are older, I want them to read Kurt Vonnegut novels. His humanistic take on the madness and beauty of life is priceless. I would not want them to read most of the political trash on bestseller lists.

What classic novel was a disappointment?
I’ll probably have my doctorate revoked for this but I was bored silly by George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

What genre of literature do you prefer to read?
I usually read fiction, but I’ll read almost anything, and with the guests on Writers Talk, I do read anything now. The story and the writing are what pulls me in.

What magazines do you subscribe to?
New Yorker for the cartoons (oh, and the writing) and Newsweek so I know just how bad the world is getting.

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

Julia Watson, professor of comparative studies

October 21, 2009

Julia Watson is associate dean for admissions and undergraduate affairs in arts and humanities and professor of comparative studies.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Essays by Michel de Montaigne
The book I would take to a desert island, my secular Bible. I wrote my dissertation on this vast collection of reflections by the 16th-century “inventor” of the essay, though I haven’t written on them in many years. No matter — Montaigne lives in my head as a speaking voice ruminating about intellectual questions, a physical presence with all its infirmities and quirks, a non-judgmental ethical force and a teacher, companion and ami (friend).Visiting the tower near Bordeaux a few years ago where he composed the essays was a thrill. Would that our accelerated 21st-century world still allowed such a life of retreat and contemplation!

The Odyssey by Homer
I didn’t read this until I began teaching, but its complex journeys and fable of quest deferred and pursued have stayed with me as a template for understanding life as an open-ended, creative and often mysterious journey toward the (ever-receding) horizon of wisdom. The challenges, seductions and dilemmas encountered by Odysseus, and in different ways — over his 20-year absence — by his son Telemachus in search of a father, and wife Penelope confronting unwanted suitors and surviving on her own — offer insights into interpreting experience that remain fresh.

The Red and the Black by Stendhal
The novel that, for me, pulls the hunger for love and learning together with the desire for a kind of justice that political arrangements rarely allow. Julien Sorel, like his female counterpart Mathilde, is a self-ironizing, passionate, yet half-blind and stirring figure who both embodies and undoes the notion of heroism in modernity.

Sula by Toni Morrison
My favorite of all the books by women writers I love and admire. While I’ve taught this short, intense novel perhaps a dozen times, I’m repeatedly astonished by its story of casual cruelty, bitter social inequities and moments of fierce attachment and abiding affection in adversity. The ferocity and truth in its passages of ecstasy and recognition move me to tears.

The Trial by Franz Kafka
Kafka characterized books as “an axe for the frozen sea inside us.” And his, from brief parables to The Trial, have that effect. But the “sea” that needed charting in my own experience was the vast ignorance I grew up in about the experience of people of color. The slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs were stirring, and the cool way Malcolm X tells his story of multiple conversions is unforgettable. But the stories that taught me about the structural injustices of colonialism and new ways writers are engaging with history and humanity are by African writers such as Mariana Ba in So Long a Letter and Ousmane Sembene.

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

Wes Boomgaarden

October 7, 2009

Wes Boomgaarden is associate professor and preservation officer in the University Libraries. He recently completed his assignment as project lead in the renovation of the Thompson Library. In October he’ll celebrate the completion of his 25th year here at Ohio State.

What are your five favorite books and why?
The response to this question probably changes every year or so for most people, including me. Right now, I’d rank my top six as these:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
This book is well-known in some circles but unknown by many. To me the book is epitomized by this quotation from Frankl, a Holocaust survivor: “Everything can be taken from a man but … the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”


American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
So good a novel that I read it again right after I finished it the first time. To me it was the story of a very likeable Job, but without the happy ending.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A novel told from the point of view of a mother and four daughters of a missionary family in the Belgian Congo in 1959. I was captivated by the intertwining of these females’ description of the doomed and self-righteous missionary father in the story.

Yale Book of Quotations edited by Fred Shapiro
Full of great modern selections and a very enjoyable way to spend an hour — for weeks on end.

Stengel: His Life and Times by Robert Creamer
The funniest biography — of baseball legend or anyone else — that I’ve ever read.

Class by Paul Fussell
A quick analysis of the American class system, with truths certain to entertain (or offend) almost anybody in America. I’ve loaned my copy of this books to probably 20 friends — and I always have gotten it returned to me!

What is the last book you’ve bought?
I recently bought Markus Zusaks’ The Book Thief as a gift for my daughter’s 21st birthday.  However, for myself, with the great library resources here in Columbus — from Ohio State, Columbus Metropolitan Library and OhioLINK — I borrow nearly everything I ever want to read and buy very few books.

What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?
I have started to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude about six times, and have yet to get halfway through it. What’s wrong with me? Well, yes, I plan to give it another try one day soon.

What books have helped you most in your career?
Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper had a big effect on me professionally just after it was published. Baker’s work — a non-fiction exposé — got many in my specialized field of library materials preservation quite riled up. But in looking back on it now, and with all the problems we face now as a society, the topic seems so much less important.

Kurt Knebusch

September 23, 2009

Kurt Knebusch is an editor in the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, based at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster. He writes “Smart Stuff with Twig Walkingstick,” a science and nature column for children, as a part of his work.

What are your five favorite books and why?
The Fool’s Progress by Edward Abbey
Abbey’s semiautobiographical “Honest Novel.” Follows Henry Holyoak Lightcap, self-professed pig and lover of life, from the Appalachian hills to the Southwest deserts and back. There’s wilderness, whiskey, multiple wives, music (Waylon, Mahler), misanthropy, slapstick and memorable scenes involving his father, his second wife, a childhood baseball game, a kid named Leroy Ginter trying to suckle a sow and his ultimate going home — a slowly building, methodically marching, sad sweet beautiful climax. Greatest. Last line. Ever.

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac on the road and also now the trail, sparked by his new encounters with Buddhism, rucksacking and Gary Snyder (“Japhy Ryder”) — all eager, earnest and idealistic. Three great, long, joyous mountaintop scenes. I remember the first time reading it, thinking, “You mean you’re allowed to write like this?” — the enthusiasm and flow. It led me to most of the rest of his books and also to Snyder and Han-shan (to whom the book was dedicated).

The Way of Life by Lao Tzu
Taoism in a nutshell. I bought it at SBX on High Street back in 1982 or so. It’s faded and wrinkled from me spilling houseplant water on it. I like its directness. “Those who say, don’t know. Those who know, don’t say.” Ouch.

Cold Mountain Poems by Han-Shan
Small clear gems about mountains and impermanence. “Clack, clack, goes my wife at her loom / jabber, jabber, goes my son at play.” I like the sounds of the words, the pictures they paint (hermit as homebody!), and how they mix sadness, joy, melancholy and silliness often all at once. Old friends die, winds blow through pines, monkeys throw figs at your head — he sees it and accepts it.

The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder/ A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen
Both changed how I see people and nature, people and other species and how we are together or can be. Both “speak for those who can’t speak for themselves” — other species, the oppressed, the planet. I think of Snyder as one of our wisest writers, Jensen as one of our bravest.

What is the last book you’ve bought?
Seekers: The Quest Begins by Erin Hunter
A birthday present for my daughter, with a talking black bear, grizzly bear and polar bear in the title roles, and that’s hard to beat. I preordered David Orr’s new Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Change the other day. Mostly I’m a big user of the Wayne County Public Library in Wooster and through it the Cleveland Public Library and have the fines to show for it.

Patty Carro

August 12, 2009

What are your five favorite books and why?

My list changes yearly, but here are the ones that come to mind right now:

A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
This was the first of Bryson’s travel books that I read, and I enjoyed it so much that of course I had to read all his others. Novice hiker Bryson finds out that the Appalachian Trail is so much more challenging than his book title suggests. It is laugh-out-loud funny, and no one finds more humor in trying circumstances than Bryson. I also recommend his hilarious memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. Continue reading ‘Patty Carro’

Donna Distel

July 15, 2009

Donna Distel is the ReadAloud program coordinator for the Ohio State University libraries. She also is the outreach assistant for collections, instruction and public services. Continue reading ‘Donna Distel’

Terry Gustafson

June 18, 2009

Terry Gustafson is the associate executive dean for interdisciplinary programs in the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences. He is a professor of chemistry and an adviser for the SPHINX senior class honorary society.

What are your five favorite books and why?
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
This is my all-time favorite book. No book captures the human condition through fiction the way that Dostoevsky does. Each of the brothers presents the world view of Dostoevsky at various times in his life. And “The Grand Inquisitor” chapter is an amazing work of literature in its own right.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
No book has been simultaneously so entertaining and so frustrating to read. There were so many times when I wanted to slap Anna across the face and get her to make sensible choices.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
I would read this book every Christmas break while I was in college. This book fine-tuned my cynical side and helped formulate my perspective on war and politics.

Perelandra by C. S. Lewis
I could have said any book by Lewis, but this book, the second of his space trilogy, helped me to understand the nature of free will. There are images from that book that still come to mind on a regular basis.

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
The first time I read the series I did so in two weeks; I could not put them down. Tolkien’s ability with words to create an entire world and help his readers understand good and evil is remarkable.

Who is your favorite character in literature?
Yossarian from Catch-22 has always been my hero.

What is the last book you’ve bought?
Christ and Culture by H. Richard Niebuhr
This 1951 classic is still considered key to understanding faith and its interaction with culture.

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

I confess that I have read most of Robert Ludlum’s books, mostly while I was in graduate school. They were a nice break from the reality of research.

What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
The unabridged version is just too long! Justice, redemption and mercy require a lot of words to explain.

What classic novel was a disappointment to you?
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
After a while the repetitiveness was just too much to take and I never finished the book.

If you were to ban one book, what would it be and why?
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Actually, I see no good reason to ban any book, although I would discourage anyone from wasting their time on romance novels.

What genre of literature do you prefer to read (history, fiction, biography, etc.) and why?
Of the 50 or so books on my bedside table, they are all non-fiction with an equal distribution of history, philosophy and theology. When I look at the list of my “must-read” books, I realize that I need to focus on non-fiction for now. These are all books I never read while studying science.

What are some of your favorite Web sites?
Aside from news sites, I love to visit Northern Images Photography (northernimages.com).
The images from northern Minnesota, where I grew up, remind me of home — and why I moved south to Columbus for the warmer winters!

 

Alexander Thompson

June 3, 2009

Alexander Thompson is an assistant professor of Political Science. His book Channels of Power was published in 2009. Continue reading ‘Alexander Thompson’

Gordon Gee

April 9, 2009

President Gordon Gee

What are your five favorite books and why?
As a young man, I was absorbed with Shakespeare and Homer and all of the usual suspects. But to answer your question, I will stick with five contemporary authors. Continue reading ‘Gordon Gee’

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