Today we did part two of our top ten favorite books.  Bob Waxler, recently retired English professor from U. Mass, Dartmouth, joined Mindy and me for the monthly book show on WCAI’s  The Point. Our topic was the second half of our top ten favorite books. As it happened, it was also pledge week at WCAI, which may account for our not having any callers today. However, if you missed the show, you can always listen to it online, in fact even if you DID listen to the show this morning, you will have missed the very end which we had to record after we were off the air. You can always listen online! To read about our first top five books head over to this blog entry.

Jill Erickson, Head of Reference & Adult Services

Bob’s Picks

Middlemarch by George Eliot

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Frankenstein, or, The modern prometheus by Mary Shelley

Night by Elie Wiesel

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin

Jill’s Picks

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, pictures by Garth Williams

Martha Quest by Doris Lessing

A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf  (or read ALL of her diaries!)

Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust. Not currently available in CLAMS, but feel free to read any Proust. Or you could try reading about people reading Proust as seen in the New York Times.

The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, drawings by Robert Lawson

And if you want to know other people’s top ten books, try My Ideal Bookshelf with art by Jane Mount and edited by Thessaly La Force. Fascinating lists in part because all sorts of people suggested titles, typeface designers, architects, musicians, filmmakers, athletes, chefs, as well as writers.

Listener Pick

We got an e-mail from a listener after we were off the air. He writes: “I respectfully wish to add a few plays to the must read books mentioned in today’s Point, perhaps Shakespeare’s Othello — and certainly one or two from George Bernard Shaw, perhaps drawn from Pygmalion, Major Barbara, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession. All remain extremely relevant with issues that still speak to us, and the Shaw plays are all exceptional and entertaining reads.

Today we had the pleasure of having Bob Waxler, recently retired English professor from U. Mass, Dartmouth, join Mindy and me for the monthly book show on WCAI’s  The Point. The topic was our top ten favorite books, which was indeed a challenge for both Bob and I. Our lists kept shifting until the last moment when we were finally forced into making choices knowing we were going to be live on the air the next morning. As Robert Pinsky says in The Top Ten:  we were really talking about the “Ten works of fiction that have been great for me.” Below you will find the list of our top five books, because we ran out of time. However,  Bob has agreed to return to Woods Hole for the March show, and do the second half of our lists! Of course, if you listened this morning, you know that our lists are very fluid, and it is possible they will have morphed by March 28th. I’ve also posted all of the listener picks, which will give you enough great reading to take you right through the spring. Miss the show? You can always listen online!

Jill Erickson, Head of Reference & Adult Services

Bob’s Picks

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

The Stranger by Albert Camus

Jill’s Picks

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Lolly Willowes; or the Loving Huntsman by Sylvia Townsend Warner

The Making of Americans: being a history of a family’s progress by Gertrude Stein (If you’re interested in reading about the link between Gertrude Stein and Goodnight Moon, head over to In the Great Green Room.)

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell (Not only is this a great novel, it also has a great section on house guests, which everyone who lives on Cape Cod should read before the summer hits.)

High Rising by Angela Thirkell (You can read Verlyn Klinkenborg’s New York Times article about this series here.)

Books About Great Books

The Top Ten: writers pick their favorite books edited by J. Peder Zane

Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books edited by Leah Price

Listener Picks

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Sula by Toni Morrison (and as Bob said, anything written by Toni Morrison)

A Man Called Ove by Frederick Backman

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Herzog by Saul Bellow