In honor of World Book Day, which is celebrated internationally every year on April 23 to promote reading, we asked Â鶹´«Ă˝ faculty about books that have left an indelible mark on them–either personally or professionally. Whether it’s a page-turner or a journey into intellectual parts unknown, each book on this list holds a special place on these professors' shelves.
Anne Dwyer, Associate Dean of the College and Associate Professor of German and Russian
Book(s): Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Petersburg by Andrey Bely
Two books came to me as a life-changing pair in a course on the Russian novel: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Andrey Bely’s Petersburg (in the astonishing translation by John Malmstad and Robert Maguire). Both are strange crime stories set in that “most fantastical” of all cities, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Each book haunted my dreams during that winter quarter in Northfield, Minnesota. I was living in an off-campus apartment and sleeping on a mattress in an unheated bedroom. Our professor gave us about 500 pages to read each week. I was a fly on the wall as Inspector Porfiry Petrovich interrogated the murderer Raskolnikov. One night, coming home from studying at one of two cafés in town, I experienced the windy night, grey sky, yellow streetlamps and swaying electrical wires as a passage from Petersburg—a modernist novel full of geometry, color and sound.
Even as the grey and yellow colors of these novels had a hallucinogenic effect on me, I loved the semiotic analysis proffered in class: yellow was the color of the trashy press, the ticket carried by prostitutes; St. Petersburg was a city built on a swamp, on the bones of serf workers; the shapes, colors, aural leitmotifs of the novel illustrated the cross-fertilization of visual, musical and literary arts. And I became a Russian major.
I absolutely recommend both books to students. Especially if they have some extra time on their hands. But have some patience with both texts; they’re long. You need to have the mental space to dive in.
Janice Hudgings, Seely W. Mudd Professor of Physics
Book: Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine CapĂł Crucet
I just finished reading the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers by Jennine Capó Crucet. It tells the story of Lizet, a first-generation, low-income college student who is the daughter of immigrants. The novel focuses on Lizet’s first year at an elite small liberal arts college in New York (a thinly disguised Vassar, I suspect) and the resulting dislocation she feels at both home and college.
I picked up the book initially because the surface narrative reminded me of one of my students, who wrote a haunting piece about the clash between her family-centered life at home and the individualistic, competitive world of higher education. However, as I read onwards, I started to hear pieces of the stories of so many of our first-generation students that the novel began to read almost like a parable, offering the reader valuable lessons together with a great deal of empathy.
If you live or work in higher ed, I highly recommend this book. By the end of it, you’ll find yourself questioning the meaning of “home.”
Gizem Karaali, Professor of Mathematics
Book: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
Godel, Escher, Bach is a big book, over 700 pages. And according to its author, most people who love the book missed its main point. I was one of them. Apparently, Hofstadter wrote the book to explain how complex behavior such as cognition and consciousness emerges from the essential complexity of a system. I totally did not get that, until decades later when I read his next book: I Am a Strange Loop. This latter book played a central role in my first ID1 course (Can Zombies Do Math?) But Godel, Escher, Bach for me was something different altogether.
Godel, Escher, Bach was a tour de force, it employed various literary tools to intertwine the stories of the three, great people in its title. It was funny and quirky and curious, and I enjoyed the many fictitious dialogues between all sorts of characters (Achilles, the tortoise, the crab and so on). The themes in the book were very exciting! Even though I had seen Escher's fascinating art before, I had not been exposed to the mathematical context of Bach's music (unfortunately my musical education is quite limited). This book was also where I learned all about Godel's results about the incompleteness of mathematics. I was spellbound—I wanted to learn more! Devouring all my college library had to offer on the topic, I eventually ended up deciding to pursue graduate work in set theory, logic, philosophy and foundations of mathematics. That is what led me to the graduate program in logic and the methodology of science at Berkeley. Even though I subsequently moved into the more straightforward mathematics department at Berkeley, I still have a soft spot for (and an undying fascinating with) foundational and philosophical questions about mathematics.
Tom Le, Assistant Professor of Politics
Book: Pragmatism by William James
Pragmatism is a philosophy book that talks about what is truth, big T and little t. The book has shaped my life since I read it as an undergraduate over a decade ago. It has a very good organizing principle for how we should interpret the world and explains how things that are “untrue” have value depending on how it shapes our lives.
Also, the book was really just a series of lectures by James—it has set the standard for me in terms of teaching. I hope that I can get to the level where someone can just record it, put it to the page, and call it a day.
I recommend the book all the time to students because I think it makes their thinking less rigid. If you’re not a pragmatist, then you’re just a romantic. Although, I love the romantics as well!
Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History
Book: The Plague by Albert Camus
We live in crises, viral and climatological. Each is elemental. Each existential. At moments like this, as was true nearly 50 years ago during the Vietnam War, one of the texts I reach for is Albert Camus' The Plague (1947).
By its title, the novel seems too obvious in its relation to COVID-19, as does the city of Oran’s indifference to and denial of the pestilence that is engulfing it. Countering the community’s blithe disregard is Dr. Bernard Rieux, at once the central character and unacknowledged narrator. But the complex narrative isn’t what struck me when I first read The Plague in Pitzer Professor Lucian Marquis’ Politics and the Novel class in the early 1970s. Instead it is Rieux’s recognition that one needs to act in the world despite not having complete information; that we have agency but must be vigilant in its articulation and engagement. His embodied assertion reverberates still.
Joanne Nucho, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Book: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sydney Mintz
Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by the late anthropologist Sydney Mintz has had a profound impact on me. The book is about the modern history of the production and consumption of sugar, and what this history can tell us about colonialism, slavery and the making of the industrial world.
I first encountered the book in graduate school and found it a compelling example of how one does a history of the present by following an object, in this case, a food product. I highly recommend this book to students because it provides a grounded example of how to think about interconnected global processes and histories of dispossession. Anyone who reads this book will never think about sugar in the same way again.
My hope is that readers use this as a starting point for demystifying the production of all goods and services and better understand the social, political, economic dimensions of violence that bring these now mundane objects to our doorsteps.
Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History
Book: Laozi (Old Master)
After spending 14 years making my way through the Confucian classics, in the summer of 1983 I turned to the Laozi, the Daoist classic from the first millennium BCE. I had read it many times in English translation and had taught different versions of the text for several years, but I had never attempted to read it in the original classical Chinese. Once I started, I was completely entranced and fell under its spell.
It was so unlike the Confucian works I had been reading. If they were written in a staid prose, the Laozi was written in couplets, which made it surprisingly easy to memorize. Its opening lines are typical, consisting of two, six-character lines:
Dao ke dao fei zhang dao
ming ke ming fei zhang ming
(The Way that can be spoken of is not the true way
the name that can be named is not the true name.)
I can still recite these and other lines of the Laozi from memory, which I do from time to time in my introductory Asian history course, as a way of showing my students that great ideas can be expressed simply and even remembered.
The Laozi is also full of advice on how to survive in an age of increasing political and social disorder. It suggests living without making stark distinctions of any kind—between what is beautiful and what is ugly, good and evil, humane and inhumane, righteous and unrighteous, filial and unfilial—and calls this state “nonaction,” “keeping to the female,” or “embracing the uncarved block.” It recommends such spiritual practices as “quieting the breath,” “reducing desire,” and “having no desire,” which echo South Asian yogic practices. I wondered whether wandering gurus had come to China along the Silk Road, bringing the ±«±č˛ą˛Ôľ±˛őłó˛ą»ĺ˛ő’ techniques for achieving spiritual equipoise, which must have appealed in an age of intensifying interstate conflict.
How could I not have been affected by the Laozi? After all, it is full of advice about so much that matters—health, language, knowledge, gender relations, history and government. When we discuss the Laozi in my introductory Asian history course, I always urge my students to consider studying a classical language—be it Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, classical Arabic, Japanese or Chinese—and to read old books written in that language. If you study classical Chinese, I promise them, you will be able to read the Laozi in the original. It is, I add, the perfect desert-island book and will never cease to please, instruct, comfort and mystify you.