2008 Woodie Awards
URI English professors: What's your favorite book?
Lisa McGunigal
Issue date: 11/1/07 Section: Special Features
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They range from books they have read several times before to books they teach in class.
Travis Williams requested a minute to think about his favorite book.
"I like "Enma" [by] Jane Austen," he said. "I read it about once a year. It's my favorite book because in some ways it's about nothing and yet the sentences are so complex that it convinces you otherwise."
David Rutschman acknowledged the difficulty in choosing a single book.
"Such a hard question. It changes all the time," he said.
Rutschman decided on "Far Tortuga" by Peter Matthiessen, which he has read several times and reread recently.
Speaking about Matthiessen, Rutschman said, "I really admire him. He wrote this book, setting out not to have any metaphors it. You end up with this book where everything is what it is. It's a really amazing kind of reading experience."
Andrea Yates said one of William Faulkner's works was her favorite.
"'The Sound and the Fury,'' she said. "Which I just taught again."
Yates enjoys this book for different reasons.
"Partially, the way he experiments with form, and partially, how moving the story is," Yates said.
Jean Walton does not have one favorite book, but often comes across great books when preparing to teach a course. One such book is Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic." In an email, Walton wrote, "Bechdel is a lesbian cartoonist whose strip 'Dykes to Watch Out For' is widely syndicated and has been enjoyed by queer audiences for over two decades. The thing about her memoir is that it's a GRAPHIC memoir, that is, told in frames. It's an incredibly layered, poignant, moving account of her childhood and youth, with her family, and really explores her relationship to her father, who as it turns out, was himself a (closeted) gay man."
Another book Walton enjoys is "Despised and Rejected" by Rose Allatini, who used the pseudonym A.T. Fitzroy.
Walton wrote, "This novel is extraordinary, really: published in 1917 in England, during the Great War, it presents the story of a young man who is coming into consciousness of his own homoerotic desire for other men, and who eventually embraces his love for another man in the novel; but as if that wasn't enough to get this novel in trouble, it is ALSO a novel all about the politics of pacifism during the first world war."
The novel, initially banned in the 1910s but then republished in the 1970s, is still difficult to purchase.
Ryan Trimm first said there were too many books to name when asked about his favorite. He then settled on James Joyce's "Ulysses."
"It's a really inventive book. It speaks on many levels," he said, adding that it addresses politics and cultural politics.
Another English professor and director of the URI film media program, John Leo, said one of his favorite books is "Ulysses." Leo explained how "Ulysses" was named as the Most Influential Book of the 20th Century. Leo considers the book a "novelist's novel."
Leo said the story takes place over the course of one day.
"It's basically one day in the life of June 16, 1904 in Dublin. It has 18 episodes," he said.
The book explores the writing technique of stream of consciousness. "[This] allows Joyce to show there's more than one thing on the mind," he said.
Leo enjoys how the novel incorporates different writing styles.
"It's almost like going into multiple layers of consciousness," Leo said.
The novel was published in 1921, but it was charged with pornography and banned until 1933.
Leo recalled another favorite book, Jane Didion's "Play It As It Lays."
"I like literature that troubles me, gets under my skin," Leo said. "I want to have the comfort of my worldview aggressively undermined."
Didion's novel follows a Los Angeles woman driving in her car with no specific destination.
Two other books Leo cites as his favorites include Modernist writer Andre Gide's "The Immoralist" and Andre Aciman's "Call Me By Your Name."
"The Immoralist" is about a French middle class man who leaves his wife to explore his sexuality and "Call Me By Your Name" is a tragic novel about a romance between two men.
"I read it twice in one weekend," Leo said. "I haven't done that in years."
The interim head of the English department, Alain-Philippe Durand, chose a book he read in high school, Albert Camus' "The Stranger."
"That's the favorite because it's probably the book that had the strongest influence on me." he said. "It's very deep, so complex, touches on many things that make you think about being human. It always makes you think more."