My Alphabet of Favorite Literature

A: Austen, Jane. I haven’t read all of her novels, but I want to; they always make me smile and cringe at the same time. Pride and Prejudice gets better every time I read it, and Persuasion impresses me as remarkably modern.

B: Beloved by Toni Morrison. I’ll be honest: I am not a huge Morrison fan. But Beloved? Wow. You go, girl.

C: cummings, e.e. his work is original. i like that.

D: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. The ending affects me deeply every time.

E: Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The ultimate essayist. I love “The American Scholar.”

F: Faulkner, William. Don’t give up on him. I found his work to be initially challenging but eventually illuminating and ultimately rewarding. His work utilizes layers and manipulates language and syntax better than most. Absalom, Absalom! might be my favorite, with As I Lay Dying a close second.

G: (The) God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. My favorite book in college.

H: Heaney, Seamus. First of all, he translated Beowulf into a readable, accessible text for students. Bravo. I also heard him read his poetry one summer, and his already lyrical, magical poems came alive for me even more just by listening to his thick Irish accent.

I: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. Again, I think GPS students wouldn’t be able to put this recently published collection of short stories down. Her stories, ranging in topic from a couple dealing with the birth of their stillborn child to the heartache a young woman feels after moving from India to the U.S. after her arranged marriage, manage to capture both the emptiness and the beauty of life in the modern world. The Namesake and her most recent Unaccustomed Earth are similarly brilliant.

J: Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan. An endearing portrait of two generations of Asian women and the friendships they develop, rely on, and learn from as they navigate their way through American culture and their individual searches for identity. A beautiful, beautiful work.

K: (To) Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I teach this to my 8th graders, and I find myself more impressed and thoughtful every time I read it. The fantastic GPS production hopefully encouraged everyone to read it, or read it again, this year. This novel is worth revisiting every 5-10 years.

L: Lewis, C.S. I loved the Narnia series as a child, and I loved them again as an adult. The Screwtape Letters is also a clever work; it profiles a series of lessons one mature devil gives to his understudy.

M: Morehead, Maureen. Another personal favorite; Morehead was my high school AP English teacher and probably the first person who inspired me to become an English teacher myself. I thought she was the coolest person—and then I read her poetry and knew she was the coolest. A Sense of Time Left has brought me much comfort and inspiration through the years; this particular collection is comprised of several poems she wrote while I was her student, one of which is about one of my high school friends who was tragically killed in a car accident when we were sixteen. I always appreciated Morehead’s words on that difficult time in my life.

N: Night by Elie Wiesel. I took a course on the Holocaust in college, and this short account and Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower both haunted me long after we finished discussing them. One of the greatest portraits of one of the world’s greatest tragedies.

O: One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty. Place and purpose intersect in this short autobiography as Welty acknowledges the impact her family and Mississippi home had on her view of the world. It is divided into three sections: Listening, Learning to See, and Finding a Voice. A worthwhile read for developing writers.

P: Personal History by Katherine Graham. I wrote one of my college applications on this fascinating autobiography by the first female publisher of The Washington Post. It definitely reminded me that life doesn’t always turn out the way you plan…

Q: (Don) Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes. Okay, I confess: I have only read the first half of this epic novel, but it was the only “Q” I could think of…my husband and I read it together and definitely shared a few laughs. While I believe the title character’s adventures with Sancho Panza do get a bit repetitive, there is a reason this is a classic: it is a ingenious parody. It was also reportedly Faulkner’s favorite book (other than the Bible).

R: Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier. This one is a sentimental pick: my grandmother used to narrate this story to me in such great detail that I couldn’t imagine a better tale. She inspired me to pick it up one day, and while I kept hearing “Nonna’s” voice in my head, it proved to be the “devastating examination of the sexual politics of marriage, a haunting study of jealousy and psychological obsession, and classic of suspense” that many reviews claim it to be.

S: SHAKESPEARE!! Come on, now! It wasn’t until my favorite professor in college, Professor Kinney, illuminated the beauty and power of his plays for me that I “got it.” Ever since then, I can’t get enough. No one captures the human spirit, heart, and mind like Shakespeare.

T: (A) Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. A readable, fast-moving fictional story of the strength and solidarity of a couple of women in Afghanistan. A perfect relaxing read for GPS students.

U: “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. One of my favorite all-time poems. “Come, my friends. Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”

V: Virgil. I’ll admit it: I am jealous of all those students who get to read Virgil in Latin. What a treat. The summer I read The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, I was in literary heaven.

W: Wharton, Edith. My roommate in college hated reading; she adored this Pulitzer Prize winning book and forced me to read it. I am glad I did; it illustrates the tension between desire and duty, between passion and practicality in a heart-wrenching fashion.

X: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I was an English and Religious Studies double major, so this book presented itself pretty early in my studies. Fascinating.

Y: Yeats, W.B. If you are looking for a challenge, this is it. I’m still not sure I totally understand his poetic visions or motivations, but perhaps that is what keeps drawing me back to “The Second Coming” or “Meditations in Time of Civil War.”

Z: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. This might be my favorite book to teach. “It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.” How can you put this language down?