The Bookshelf 2025

Annie and Lucy's list of book recommendations from their English Literature professors! (This is our first summer without a reading list and we cannot think for ourselves)

Andrew Bennett
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
James Joyce, Ulysses (Skip the first three chapters)

Theo Savvas 
Thomas Hardy, Tess of D'Urbervilles
Thomas Mann, 'Death in Venice' (short story)
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
James Joyce, Ulysses
Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

William Wootten 
John Richardson's four-volume biography of Picasso
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Penguin Translation (and all of Pessoa's Poetry)

Stephen James
Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer 

Ad Putter
George Eliot, Silas Marner
His own book, Medieval Love Letters (lol)

Noreen Masud
Noreen Masud, A Flat Place 

Stephen Cheeke
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (Swann's Way) translation by Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin "I felt (and still feel) that if God had written a novel, this would have been it."
Rainer Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Annie and Lucy 
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of the Darkness

Natalie Ferris 
Miranda July, All Fours
Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha 
Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life 
Nathan Hill, Wellness 
Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection 
Charlotte Wood, Stoneyard Devotional 
Anna Funder, Wifedom (her Stasiland is also excellent)
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Cazalet Chronicles

Tim Gao 
Virginia Woolf, The Waves 'Finishing your undergrad is an especially affecting moment to read this particular novel. It charts the lives of a group of schoolfriends who go their separate ways after graduation and then meet up sporadically throughout their lives, each time having changed and not changed.'
Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This

Abs Ashley
Ian Penman, Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite 'definitely fun, rather than solely cerebral'
Claire Oshtesky, Chouette
Ursula Le Guin, Earthsea quartet


Emma Parker
Graphic Narratives!!!
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Joe Sacco, Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde
Una, Becoming/Unbecoming
Nora Krug, Heimat
Leila Abdul Razzaq, Baddwai

Shauna Roach
Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers
Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows
Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiographies (start with Real Estate)

Matt Steggle 
Oliver Morton, Mapping Mars

Michael Kalisch
Philip Roth, American Pastoral


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