By Michael Nicholas Osborn
Throughout our educational careers and throughout our literary lives we have amassed various amounts of books under our belts. Whether these books have been read for fun or assigned readings, we all have different views on our literary knowledge and preferences. Below is a compiled list of the top five books that our english professors here at Fitchburg State deem necessary for us as college students to read before we graduate.
Take note, these lists are not in order of importance.
From Frank Mabee, a British Literature professor:
- “Frankenstein” by: Mary Shelley
- “Oroonoko” by: Aphra Behn
- “Robinson Crusoe” by: Daniel Defoe
- “Wuthering Heights” by: Emily Bronte
- “Pride and Prejudice” by: Jane Austen
“I don’t always teach what I like” -Frank Mabee
From Ben Railton, an American Literature professor:
- “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by: Mark Twain
- “The Awakening” by: Kate Chopin
- “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by: Gabriel García Márquez
- “The Namesake” by: Jhumpa Lahiri
- “Native Son” by: Richard Wright
From DeMisty Bellinger-Delfield, a Creative Writing professor:
- “Disgrace” by: J. M. Coetzee
- “Beloved” by: Toni Morrison
- “The Inheritance of Loss” by: Kiran Desai
- “Typical American” by: Gish Jen
- “Waiting” by: Ha Jin
Disgrace reached this list “because it’s an uncomfortable book with no easy allegiance and Beloved is “so well written. It has the momentum of a horror movie and it’s so hard to look away.” -DeMisty Bellinger-Delfield
From Wendy Keyser, a Secondary Education professor:
- “Crime and Punishment” by: Dostoyevsky
- “Just Above My Head” by : James Baldwin
- “Corelli’s Mandolin” by : Louis de Bernières
- “Mrs. Dalloway” by: Virginia Woolf
- “Interpreter of Maladies” by : Jhumpa Lahiri
From Joseph Moser, “our film guy” -Diane Lucas :
- One of Cormac McCarthy’s Novels: “Blood Meridian”, “All the Pretty Horses”, or “No Country for Old Men”.
- One of Patricia Highsmith’s Novels: “The Talented Mr.Ripley” or “Strangers on a Train”
- “Candidate” by: Voltaire
- “Dubliners” (short story collection) by: James Joyce
- “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
As you see there is a wide variety of input from our professors. It’s clear that there is a lot of great literature out there. Every professor we spoke to was taken aback and took a while to decide on choices for this important question. When we first asked Professor Mabee, he retorted with “what do you want to read”, and we felt the impactfulness of the question we were asking. In the end, the more you read, the better knowledge you will have and these books were all highly recommended by some of the best.
