Over the next three and a half months, many of us will resolve to finally read for pleasure—a novel concept (no pun intended) for people who drudge through course packets and Blackboard readings throughout the school year. So what’s first on the list? While it can be tempting to mindlessly reach for a celebrity magazine, re-read your favorite young-adult fantasy series or finally get your chick lit fix, it’s kind of hard to conceal a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey while you’re working on your tan at a packed public beach. Instead, satisfy your inner nerd and beef up your intellectual status by heading to the local library and checking out these professor-acclaimed works. You can even get some of them on your e-reader if you’re fully intent on not taking your eyes off a screen.
Phyllis Lassner, professor of instruction, Writing Program
Soundless Roar
by Ava Kadishson Schieber
"The story has enormous appeal, both because of its dramatic circumstances and the author's pungent memories of various dangerous incidents in hiding. In fact, I teach the book in my course 'Writing About Children in the Holocaust,' and the students invariably love it. Even though the Holocaust experience is so far removed from their own, the feelings and responses of Ava Schieber resonate with them as she recounts them in such vivid detail. With students' ability to relate to Ava, it very effectively teaches many lessons about honoring Holocaust victims and survivors."
John Cutler, assistant professor of English
The Barbarian Nurseries
by Héctor Tobar
"It's a really fun book—Tobar has a great sense of humor and a satirical eye for absurdities of contemporary American culture. In the book, an undocumented Mexican domestic worker is accused of kidnapping two children from the home she is working in. It dramatizes aspects of the illegal immigration debate that's happening right now, and I think it's a great book to be reading."
Michal Ginsburg, professor of French and Italian
“Swann’s Way”
volume one of In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
"2013 is the one hundredth anniversary of this book. I think people know something and have a certain idea that it's a difficult book, but it's a profound book, a great masterpiece, and it takes a great time to read it. The narrator talks about the person who he used to be in the past and it's ironic—a gentle mockery, a light tone. We have to take it seriously, but not too seriously, because the tone invites distance. It takes a lot of patience to read Proust, and it takes the type of patience that most of us don't have anymore. It's not a page turner, and since you cannot change the book, the only thing you can change is your own attitude."
Goldie Goldbloom, visiting assistant professor of English
Being Dead
by Jim Crace
"I've read it with lots of my students, and many people who read it say it's their favorite book—the kind of book that they'd take with them to a desert island. It's the unwinding story of two scientists who were murdered in the fictional Baritone Bay, how they came to be there and what happens after that. Crace is writing as a man who is an atheist, but despite every single word in it, it still gives a suggestion of reincarnation. It's awful in that it talks about death in a very graphic way, but it's also very beautiful and moving."
Reginald Gibbons, director, Center for the Writing Arts
Where I Must Go
by Angela Jackson
"The novel is set at a fictionalized school Jackson calls Eden University, but Northwestern students will certainly recognize it. Jackson herself was a student here. The narrator of the novel, Magdalena Grace, who is in her first year, is an observer and a ponderer who follows the unfolding of campus events and romantic relationships during the year. She narrates how the lives of the students are gathered or pulled or lifted into the larger life of American itself by the cataclysmic event of the spring of 1968: the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. The conclusion of the novel is surprising, remarkable and memorable."