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Hannibal Hamlin, Department of English

December 8, 2010

Hannibal Hamlin is an associate professor in the Department of English and editor of the journal Reformation. He teaches and writes about Renaissance literature and the English Bible.

What are your five favorite books and why?

King Lear, by William Shakespeare

The problem with favorites is that they keep changing. Also, certain all-time classics are bound to be on everyone’s list. I first read King Lear, for instance, in high school, and I’ve never gotten tired of it. It really is the Stonehenge of the mind, as one critic put it.

Poems by John Donne

John Donne’s poems also are important to me, though I love his sermons and meditations too.

The Bible

Some wouldn’t think of it as literature, but I’d have to include the Bible on my list –– Job, the stories of Saul and David, Abraham and Isaac, Adam and Eve, the Crucifixion. It’s no surprise that they’ve been foundational for so many cultures and the subject of thousands of years of interpretation and rewriting.

The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard

For something less “classic,” how about Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love? It’s less well-known than his Arcadia, but just as brilliant. It’s a terribly moving story about love, but in a way it’s also a celebration of learning. The central character, poet and scholar A.E. Housman, says that scholarship is “where we’re nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the fainthearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where or on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness, it’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God.” Wow.

The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald is an amazing writer whose books, like The Rings of Saturn, are mesmerizing in a totally, weirdly, original way. Sebald isn’t a cheery writer –– one of his books is called On the Natural History of Destruction, and he’s always interested in decay, entropy and death –– but he’s strangely exhilarating in his gloom.

What is the last book you’ve bought?

I bought Robert Alter’s translation of the Wisdom Books of the Bible (Job, Ecclesiastes, Proverbs) since I buy pretty much everything he writes. The last novel I bought was Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, a creepy WWII story but with a strong allegorical undercurrent like so much of Greene.

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

I’ve never read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or some other American classics like A Farewell to Arms and My Ántonia. I’m stuck halfway through Absalom, Absalom. I grew up in Canada and so read all sorts of Canadian literature that most Americans don’t know about, like Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners, Tomson Highway’s amazing play Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing or the poems of Earle Birney or Jay Macpherson. There are lots of things I haven’t read, though. So many books, so little time. Anyone who says they’ve read all the important books is lying or deluded.

To nominate a colleague for a future BookTalk, e-mail Julia Harris at harris.587@osu.edu.

Katherine Burkman, Department of English

November 17, 2010

Katherine Burkman, professor emerita, was a professor in the Department of English specializing in Shakespeare and modern drama, with a special focus on playwright Harold Pinter.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

I love Mrs. Dalloway because Woolf takes a very ordinary and in some ways superficial character, Clarissa Dalloway, and reveals her profundity partly through the fascinating use of a double, whom she never meets but understands, Septimus Smith. Also, the stream of consciousness writing is elegant and beautiful.

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I love The Brothers K for the way it captures human suffering and redemption with a passion that lifts one out of the daily grind into an intensity that enlarges and deepens the living of one’s life.

Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

The next three favorites are plays, but Shakespeare, Beckett and especially Pinter are my special interests. The way Hamlet, one of the most complex characters in all literature struggles with his situation and finally comes to terms with death and his fate is endlessly fascinating and, of course, has some of the most beautifully tragic writing as well as wonderful scenes that are tragi-comic.

Happy Days, by Samuel Beckett

I came to love Happy Days, which I had always admired, because I had the chance to play the part of Winnie and get inside her. This character, imprisoned in the earth up to her waist and then to her neck, deals heroically with her captivity. Her situation becomes a metaphor for all of us. Unlike Hamlet, there is not much action she can take, but she says it all and finally even sings. Again, the tragi-comic has a special appeal for me.

The Homecoming, by Harold Pinter

I consider Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming to be the most important modern drama. Beneath the surface of the play, which shows characters who behave as if they live in a jungle, there is, as Pinter himself has said, love. Under its brutal exterior, the subtext reveals a modern version of the biblical Ruth. The villain is the professor as jungle wins over desert and Ruth offers her special brand of hope and redemption.

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

Perhaps an un-serious answer would be Queen Elizabeth in Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader. It is just so much fun to see the queen get interested in reading and find that the interest transforms her. She is neither villain nor hero, but she becomes delightfully human.

What is the last book you’ve bought?

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carré. I always buy his new books and this one, as all the others, is fascinating. You can’t (or I couldn’t) put it down. Le Carré is angry at our world today and the book is relentlessly dark, but somehow sustaining in its bleak but honest look at the world of politics and spying. The spying becomes a metaphor for how we all behave.

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

Even though my field is drama, I prefer to curl up with a good fiction novel. A good novel draws me in and takes me to other realities that reflect on ours. I suppose that could be said of history, biography, drama, poetry, etc., but I think there is an element of sustained escape combined with involvement in a good novel that lasts over time and gives sustained entertainment. Drama is a close second and poetry a close third. Why not history or biography? I just enjoy truth as it evolves in fiction, drama and poetry more.

To nominate a colleague for a future BookTalk, e-mail Julia Harris at harris.587@osu.edu.

Andreá Williams, English

November 3, 2010

Andreá Williams is an assistant professor of English who specializes in African American literature and American literature to 1900. Her current research focuses on class stratification in 19th-century African American fiction.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison.

Even though I love Morrison’s body of work, it’s easy to place this novel at the top of my list, even above Beloved. I appreciate Morrison’s attention to detail, especially in her representation of tense emotion and speech. My favorite line describes how the protagonist Milkman Dead takes his lover for granted, not really feeling excited about her. The narrator explains, “She was the third beer…the one you drink because it’s there.” The metaphor is so colorful and clear that even if you resent Milkman for feeling that way, you have to love the sentence itself.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

I’m compelled by protagonist Edna Pontellier’s coming to consciousness, her desire to challenge female conventions of marriage and motherhood. And I enjoy Chopin’s lush language. I delight in reading passages of this novel aloud in class. The last time I taught The Awakening, I paired the final chapters with Lizz Wright’s Song for Mia, which begins, “I went down to the water/all night long.” Water imagery is so central to Edna’s awakening. Chopin’s prose, which has its own musical quality, nicely elicits this musical accompaniment.

Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed.

I read a lot of slave narratives as a specialist in 19th-century black literature, but this was the first neo-slave narrative I read back in graduate school. Neo-slave narratives are modern fictions written as though they are antebellum accounts. Reed’s novel integrates modern twists, like having the fugitive slave escape by plane. It’s a clever novel, especially if you know your American history and literature and can catch all the allusions. This book really rewards re-reading.

Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks.

I tell my students that they will feel especially intelligent after interpreting Brooks’ sometimes arcane language. By using epic and sonnet forms to describe Annie Allen as a kind of everywoman, Brooks contends that black women’s lives are worthy subjects of serious art and contemplation.

Overshadowed, by Sutton Griggs.

I like 19th-century melodramas and romances: The clearly identifiable heroes and villains, page-long speeches, suspense and deathbed scenes. These are great fun. I can’t always get my 70-something-year-old mom to read about my work, but I have been able to turn her onto Griggs.

What is the last book you’ve bought?

The last novel that I bought was Andrea Lee’s Interesting Women. Most of the stories in this collection, as elsewhere in Lee’s fiction and nonfiction, focus on privileged women (usually African American women) who travel or live abroad. Lee’s first novel, Sarah Phillips, was one book that initiated my thinking about fictional representations of the black middle class, and I’ve gone on to make the topic of intraracial class difference part of my ongoing scholarly research.

What book would you most want your kids to read?

As a teen, I read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and learned about the psychological damage that black children suffer when their sense of identity is enmeshed with an unattainable “whiteness.” During my 8-year-old niece’s visit, I started her off with something a bit more accessible than Morrison. We read I Love My Hair! by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley. It’s about an African American girl acknowledging her roots — both in terms of hair roots and ancestors. Because popular culture fetishizes long, straight hair, I think it’s especially important for children of color to aesthetically value their own varied hair textures, colors or lengths. The illustrations in this book are really cute.

What classic novel was a disappointment?

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! It just didn’t hold my attention.

What magazines do you subscribe to and why?

Vegetarian Times. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than a decade, and I like reading recipes. Just scanning the ingredient list or looking at pictures in cookbooks and food magazines gets me excited.

To nominate a colleague for a future BookTalk, e-mail Julia Harris at harris.587@osu.edu.

Molly Farrell, English Department

October 20, 2010

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

Robyn Warhol, Department of English

October 6, 2010

Robyn Warhol is the vice chair of the Department of English and director of Project Narrative. Her book, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Popular Forms, was published in 2003.

What are your five favorite books and why?

The first list of favorites I drew up for this issue of Booktalk was excellent: Middlemarch; Pride and Prejudice; Absalom, Absalom!; Lolita; and Beloved. But then I looked up what my English faculty colleagues had put on their lists for this publication, and I found that they had anticipated every one of these titles. I decided I should suggest five more favorites that might not yet have made their way into this series.

My favorite author has always been Jane Austen, and I think Persuasion is her most underrated novel. The story begins as if it were the ending of an Austen novel gone wrong, with a backstory of girl-meets-boy, girl-loses-boy, girl-and-boy-lose-each-other-in-the-end. That’s where the heroine of Austen’s last novel begins her story, which proceeds from the question, “If an 18-year-old heroine’s marriage plot turns sour, does it mean the story of her life is over?” I think of it as Jane Austen for grownups.

Since I read it in graduate school in the late 1970s, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been a favorite. It’s got a well-deserved reputation for racialist depictions of African American characters, but nobody who has read it could doubt that the novel powerfully indicts the institution of American slavery and the individuals who upheld it. It changed my understanding of the economic history of the US, of the legacy of slavery and of what a novel can accomplish in the so-called real world.

To me Uncle Tom’s Cabin is most powerful when read in tandem with Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published by an ex-slave in 1861 and believed until quite recently to be a fiction written by a white woman abolitionist. Under the name Linda Brent, Jacobs wrote of her own experience of sexual harassment and physical confinement under slavery, speaking to the same white audience Stowe’s novel had addressed 10 years before. Jacobs reminds sympathetic white readers that however much they might wish to, they could not imagine her sufferings unless they had been slaves themselves.

My love for women’s writing found its voice my junior year in college, when I read A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Part lecture, part essay, part literary and feminist theory, part fiction and part spoof, it’s the only book like it. From Woolf I learned, along with feminist readers who re-discovered A Room in the 1970s, what it meant for women to write in a culture where as recently as the late 18th century Mary Wollstonecraft had to argue that females were fully human. And it’s a laugh riot.

The funniest and saddest book I’ve read in the last ten years is Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a beautiful graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, author of the syndicated cartoon strip, Dykes to Watch Out For. In hilarious drawings and touching narration, Bechdel tells about how she came to know her father was a closeted gay at the same time she herself came out as lesbian. The story of an unhappy family with a wicked sense of humor, Fun Home is my latest favorite.

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.

Maura Heaphy, English Department

September 22, 2010

Maura Heaphy is a senior lecturer in the English Department, where she teaches Science Fiction, Introduction to Fiction Writing and Business Writing. She is the author of Science Fiction Authors: A Research Guide (2008) and 100 Most Popular Science Fiction Authors (2010), both published by Libraries Unlimited, Santa Barbara, Calif.

What are your five favorite books and why?

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick Alternate history, in which Nazi Germany and Japan won a much-changed version of World War II. Dick constructs a plausible alternative reality — banal and horrifying at the same time — and like so many Dick stories, this gets its punch from the realization that, like the characters in the novel, we are not being told everything.

Time and Again by Jack Finney

Auto-hypnosis allows artist Si Morley to transport himself back to 1880s New York City to solve a mystery. A book that beautifully captures the bitter-sweet lure of the past, and — for me, as an exiled New Yorker — the timeless attraction of The Big Apple.

The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss

A Quaker community establishes a perfectly balanced world for itself on a starship escaping the dying planet Earth. But as their descendents approach their destination, doubts surface about leaving the “safety” of their artificial home for an inhospitable new planet. This beautifully written book is one I can read over and over again, and get something new every time.

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

An amazing linguistic tour de force. Two thousand years after nuclear war, England has been blasted back to hard-scrabble primitivism, an alien landscape where the Iron Age meets Heironymous Bosch. A boy on the verge of manhood makes two discoveries — one threatens renewed destruction, the other offers hope. Written in a version of English that is, like its setting, rusted and eroded and “just woar down a littl.”

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

“Winter” is a snow-bound world whose androgynous inhabitants are male or female as circumstances require. The naïve young ambassador of a galactic confederation is sent there to make first contact with the people of Winter and learns a hard lesson about himself and his prejudices. Contains the immortal line, “the King was pregnant.”

What classic novel was a disappointment to you? What “important book” have you not read and why haven’t you read it?

I’ve combined these two questions because the answer to both can be summed up in one name — Robert A. Heinlein. I tried to like Stranger in a Strange Land, honest, I did. About halfway through it, I decided that one of us had to go.

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.

Steven Conn, Department of History

August 11, 2010

Steven Conn is a professor in the Department of History and the director of the Public History Program. He specializes in 19th- and 20th-century cultural and intellectual history.

What are your five favorite books and why?

That’s really an impossible question. I have a long list of favorite books and books that were favorites at certain points in my life. In high school I read Crime and Punishment and was totally absorbed. After I graduated from college I read Moby Dick and loved it; when I arrived at Ohio State I read The Education of Henry Adams twice. As I was going through the Flaming Hoops of Tenure, I read a lot of Graham Greene, including The Quiet American. More recently I’ve read most of what Ian McEwan has written. Though they each write differently, each writes beautifully. And they all capture a certain sense of life that resonates with me.

What is the last book you’ve bought?

I can’t remember — but I am looking forward to buying Sharon Pomerantz’s new novel Rich Boy. It is just out, getting rave reviews and Sharon is an old, dear friend of mine.

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

I never feel guilty about anything I read. But I love John LeCarre and Alan Furst spy novels, and I think in his prime Hunter Thompson was a great American writer. I suspect some
people would look down their noses at those.

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

Satan from Paradise Lost.

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

That too is an impossible question — and the list grows longer the more books I read.

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

My kids are 11 and 9 and they both are voracious readers. My son read both The Odyssey
and The Iliad this summer, and my
daughter loves biographies. There isn’t anything I don’t want them to read, but there are certain books that they need to be a bit older to read.

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

I read history books all the time as part of my work, so for pleasure I prefer essays, fiction and poetry. We read poetry out loud at home.

What magazines do you subscribe to and why?

The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. I read them both for the excellent writing and because they help me stay a bit better informed about the worlds of politics, culture and ideas.

What are some of your favorite websites?

My favorite website is the one I run. Through the history department I co-edit Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, a monthly online features magazine. It is, if I do say so, a terrific site. I also edit a book review site where we feature history books of scholarly importance that have a broad public appeal. All of the reviews are written by history department grad students. We highlight one new book each month. Both sites can be found at ehistory.osu.edu. Click on “Origins” or “reviews.”

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.

Jill Galvan, assistant professor of English

July 14, 2010

Jill Galvan is an assistant professor of English who specializes in  Victorian and turn-of-the-century literature and culture. She is the author of The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult and Communication Technologies, 1859-1919.

What are your five favorite books and why?

Villette by Charlotte Brontë
I’m drawn to rich character studies, along with unusual narrative points of view, and the protagonist Lucy Snowe is a classic unreliable narrator. Then there’s her wryness; there are moments of her narration that make me laugh out loud. For a long time, I preferred this one to Brontë’s Jane Eyre. But I still have to work to get my students to appreciate Villette as much as I do.

Middlemarch by George Eliot
Eliot is a master of character psychology, and I find her perspective on humanity dead-on. It’s amazing how well she understands sympathy as the basis of morality, but also the many difficulties of sympathy — and how she can manage to build a great story around those heady ideas. With its long, intricate plot that you can easily sink your teeth into, this is just the type of novel that drew me to the Victorian period.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
More unreliable narration, wonderfully executed. The last paragraphs of the novel give me chills — they’re that masterfully ambiguous. Now that I have kids especially, I find Humbert Humbert difficult to stomach sometimes, but I’ll keep coming back to this novel because it’s that good.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
I love the way the novel dances around Caddy as its center, but only ever lets you just glance at her. That structure exactly, movingly captures what she means in the other characters’ lives.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
While I might not call it a favorite, it is a great book I only discovered recently — a kind of lost modernist work. It’s an interesting deconstruction of the idea of childhood innocence.

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.

Les Tannenbaum, English

June 16, 2010

Les Tannenbaum is an associate professor of English who specializes in  British Romantic literature, especially the works of William Blake. His current research focuses on the writings and illustrations of Maurice Sendak.

What are your five favorite books and why?

I’ve read this several times and consider it to be possibly the world’s greatest novel. It asks all the big questions about good and evil, the human and the divine, and it does so in a very dramatic and compelling way. Each of the brothers represents a different aspect of the human psyche —Ivan the intellectual, Dmitri the sensualist, Alyosha the spiritual seeker and Smerdyakov (if we can believe that he is an illegitimate brother) the murderer.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

I don’t know why such a sad story is so “delicious” to read, but I think it’s because of Flaubert’s great relish in telling the story and in his combined ironic and sympathetic treatment of Emma Bovary. She may be flawed, but the people around her are no better and are often downright stupid or despicable.

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

This has to be one of my favorite American novels. It has such a powerful narrative voice, and Huck’s outlook on life is so engaging. Twain’s satire is brilliantly filtered through Huck’s ingenuous personality, and the novel also is the ultimate “road trip” story.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I don’t know how many times I’ve read this, but I never get tired of it. The story and the prose style are so riveting, and all the characters are so deftly drawn. Charlie Marlow, the narrator-hero, is such a sharp observer of others and of his own reactions to things that a reader always feels so close to him and to what he is experiencing. As with Huck Finn, we also see around him, notice his blind spots and Conrad’s ironies, which adds to the pleasure.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

It’s played such an important part in my life and is probably the archetypal American fantasy, involving so much of what we are all about. Besides the political content, there also is the sheer delight of following the adventures of Dorothy and her friends.

What book have you bought recently?

Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I was reading Stephenie Meyer’s New Moon (to figure out my students’ reading tastes) and got so fed up with the characters and the writing that I had to detoxify by reading something great.

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

I may be the only person in the world who hasn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe I haven’t read it because the film version made such a strong impression on me that I’m afraid to break the spell.

What books have helped you most in your career?

William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell turned me around completely and led me to become a Romanticist and a Blake scholar. I felt as if Blake were talking directly to me and teaching me life lessons. Also, Elizabeth W. Flynn and John F. La Faso’s Group Discussion as Learning Process helped me to become a better teacher by helping me develop skills as a discussion leader.

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.

Raimund Goerler, University Libraries

May 19, 2010

Raimund Goerler is assistant director of OSU Libraries, with responsibility for special collections and archives and also university archivist. Goerler has been writing a one-volume history of OSU, which OSU Press has accepted for publication later in the year.

What are your five favorite books and why? My reading tends to be somewhat eclectic but largely historical in nature.

Alone by Richard E. Byrd
A gripping and true account of Byrd’s wintering alone in the interior of Antarctica during his 1933-35 expedition.  The drama is that the stove, which is keeping him alive in the perilous temperature, is also believed to be killing him by leaking toxic fumes.

Building Sullivant’s Pyramid by William Kinnison
Anyone interested in the history of OSU should read this account of the early years of the university as the outcome of intellectual ideas and people who had differing views and personalities.

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
I enjoyed and highly recommend this book, which portrays Lincoln, his cabinet and the context of Civil War so well.

Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis
Not to be missed; a wonderfully lively account of our Revolutionary War leaders.

I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves
Old favorites of mine, both of which became a PBS series, but the books offer more vivid depictions of personalities and murders in the struggle for power in classical Rome.

What is the last book you’ve bought?
I have a Kindle that I like to use for leisure reading and downloaded, but have not read yet, Robert Harris’ Imperium, a novel of ancient Rome.

What’s your “guilty pleasure” – a book you love but don’t often talk about because it’s not “serious” literature?
Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons is a favorite because of the story and the setting.

What genre of literature do you prefer to read (history, fiction, biography, etc.) and why?
Biography and historical fiction appeal to me most, probably because of my degrees in history.  Although even as a child I liked to read historical fiction, which made the people seem more dramatic and real than some of the textbooks.

What magazines do you subscribe to and why?
Mostly, I read Newsweek for news and Chronicle of Higher Education to keep up with trends in higher education.

What books have helped you most in your career?
Of the many books on leadership and personal development, my favorites are Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and Jim Tressel’s The Winners Manual.

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

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