Social Distancing Toolkit brought to you by the Department of English
As English majors, graduate students, faculty and friends of the English department, many of us find solace in our favorite books. During this unprecedented and challenging time, the department reached out to our community, including faculty, alumni and current students, and asked for their Top Ten Favorite Books, which has led to the creation of this Social Distancing Toolkit!
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Recently Added Alumni Top Books Lists

Matthew Purcell's Top Ten List:

R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

K.J. Parker, Academic Exercises

Dan Simmons, Hyperion

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor

J. V. Jones, A Cavern of Black Ice

Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

Steven Erikson, Midnight Tides

Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow

Sean Russell, The Initiate Brother

Clara Davison's Top Ten List:

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter series

Tracy Vezdos Healy's Top Ten List:

Current:

Tana French, The Witch Elm

Kiley Reid, Such a Fun Age

Sally Rooney, Normal People

Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

Matthew Dicks, Twenty-one Truths About Love

Classics:

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

David G. Roberts's Top Ten List:

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

José Saramago, Death With Interruptions

Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Madeline Anderson's Top Ten List:

Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet

Jeff VanderMeer, Borne

Jeff Vandermeer, Dead Astronauts

Malcolm Gladwell, Talking to Strangers

Alan Moore, Watchmen

Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

Liz Bohannon, Beginner's Pluck

Helena Goscilo's Top Books List:

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

Aleksandr Pushkin, Evgenii Onegin

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Henri Stendhal, Le Rouge et Le Noir

Federico Garcia Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York

Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence

William Shakespeare, Sonnets

Ann Wilson Constien's Top Books List:

Right now: Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

J.K. Rowling, The Harry Potter series

Peter Godwin, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

Nancy Farmer, The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits

Rachel Stewart's Top Ten List:

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Florence Marryat, The Blood of the Vampire

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Tana French, In the Woods

Ann Leckie, Imperial Radch trilogy

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, Monstress comic series

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

Nicole Craven's Top Ten List:

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

Fredrik Backman, Beartown

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Joseph L. Brand's Top Ten List:

These are books I loved when first I read them and I come back to them now and again.

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Carolyn Forché, The Country Between Us

Pat Barker, Regeneration

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

MW Larson's Top Books List:

Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment

Yūko Tsushima, Territory of Light

Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human

Ben Lerner, The Topeka School

Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

Jeff Anderson's Top Ten List:

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Susan Meissner, As Bright as Heaven

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

William Shakespeare, Othello

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Jim Griffith's Top Books List:

Jane Austen, Persuasion

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills

James Joyce, Dubliners

Bernard Malamud, The Natural

William Keepers Maxwell Jr., They Came Like Swallows

Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato

Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider

Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington

John Edward Williams, Stoner

James Vander Hooven's Top Books List:

Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code

Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

Fredrik Backman, Beartown

Fredrik Backman, Us Against You

Kate Moore, Radium Girls

Stephen King, Under the Dome

Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins, Into the Water

Patrick Conley's Top Books List:

Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master's Son

Adrian Goldsworthy, The Encircling Sea

[Shameless Self-Promotion] Patrick Conley, Two Tales for the Twenty-Twenties

Patrick Conley, The Thirty by Thirty Solution

Patrick Conley, Broken Families, Dreams, and Hopes

Patrick Conley, Conversations with the Living and the Dead

Terrence Sowers's Top Books List:

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

Franklin Toker, Fallingwater Rising

Charlotte Hamilton's Top Books List:

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Mark Kurlansky, Salmon: A Fish, the Earth, and the History of Their Common Fate

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women who Run with the Wolves

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Pam Muñoz Ryan, Echo

Brenda Layman's Top Books List:

Reading now, or recently read:

Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology,

Julie Satow, The Plaza

Witold Rybczynski, Looking Around

James Thurber, Collected Fables, edited by Michael J. Rosen

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

Old favorites:

Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth;

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors

P.G. Wodehouse, Week-end Wodehouse

Jill McLure's Top Ten List:

Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Madeline L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

CS Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Han Jang's Top Ten List:

Christina Haag, Come to the Edge

Joan Didion, Blue Nights

Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Kristopher Jansma, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

Charles Portis, True Grit

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

Flannery O'Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge

Gerald Moss's Top Ten List:

Frank Norris, McTeague

Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt

Joseph Mitchell, Up In The Old Hotel

Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister

John Dos Passos, U.S.A. Trilogy

Jerzy Kosiński, The Painted Bird

Hampton Hawes, Raise Up Off Of Me

Charles Mann, 1491

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Nye's Top Ten List:

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Nella Larsen, Passing

Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

John Knowles, A Separate Peace

Andre Dubus, Selected Stories

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

Viet Than Nguyen, The Sympathizer

Lauren Pace's Top Books List:

Right now:

Michelle Obama, Becoming

To read:

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

Andy Greene, The Office

Favorite books:

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

Ruth Ware, The Woman in Cabin 10

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Thomas Alan Smith's Top Ten List:

FICTION

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood's End

H. P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space and Others

William Faulkner, Light in August

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

NON-FICTION

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Izzy Darling's Top Ten List:

Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Tommy Orange, There There

Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage The Bones

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Mike Houdeshell's Top Books List:

David McCullough, The Wright Brothers

John M. Barry, The Great Influenza

Michael Finkel, The Stranger in the Woods

Douglas Preston, Lost City of the Monkey God

Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Donald Ray Pollock, The Devil All the Time

Timothy Cheeseman's Top Ten List:

Not reading "now"...but a top ten, some recently revisited:

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Dan Brown, The Lost Symbol

Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

Anitra White's Top Ten List:

Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich

Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad

Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All be Feminists

Philippa Gregory, The Red Queen

Philippa Gregory, The White Queen

Philippa Gregory, The Kingmaker’s Daughter

Philippa Gregory, The White Princess

Philippa Gregory, Three Sisters, Three Queens

Savannah Gress's Top Ten List:

Trevor Noah, Born a Crime

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Justin Cronin, The Passage

Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

Deborah Harkness, A Discovery of Witches

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

Ken Follett, Pillars of the Earth

J. Brendan Shaw's Top Books List:

Brit Bennett, The Mothers

Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Jenn Shapland, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

Toni Morrison, Jazz

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

Mona Awad, Bunny

Molly Rauch's Top Books List:

I'm a school librarian and youth literature specialist, and my focus is reading and evaluating literature for children and young adults -- including picture books, middle grade stories, and young adult literature across all genres. I update books lists and reviews at my website (and on Twitter and Instagram). Public libraries and indie bookstores are also providing great reader's advisory services now too!

PICTURE BOOKS:

Richard T. Morris, Bear Came Along, illustrated by LeUyen Pham

Vanessa Brantley-Newton, Just Like Me

MIDDLE GRADE:

Jasmine Warga, Other Words for Home

Jerry Craft, New Kid

YOUNG ADULT:

Kim Liggett, The Grace Year

David Yoon, Frankly in Love

Mitch Briner's Top Ten List:

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

Bernard Malamud, The Natural

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Esther Swartzentruber's Top Ten List:

The Bible

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope

James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom

A Capella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry, ed. Ann Hostetler

Malcolm Guite, Sounding the Seasons

Vincent Nicolosi's Top Books List:

Reading right now

Stefan Zweig, Montaigne

Revolution and the Meanings of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Isser Woloch

Plutarch, Alexander the Great

My 10 favorites (in no particular order and which change with the wind)

Paul Zweig, The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Hannah Green, The Dead of the House

Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

Judith Freeman, The Long Embrace

Loren Eiseley, The Modern Dilemma

Beverley Donofrio, Looking for Mary: (Or, the Blessed Mother and Me)

Marie Bashkirtseff, I Am the Most Interesting Book of All & Lust for Glory

Alan Hollinghurst, The Folding Star

Nina Hoppes' Top Books List:

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains Of The Day

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

George Saunders, Lincoln In The Bardo

Arundhati Roy, God Of Small Things

Robert Caro, The Passage of Power

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

John Williams, Augustus

T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Jason Gray's Top Ten List:

Recent Favorites:

Esi Edugyan, Washington Black

Brian Evenson, Song for the Unraveling of the World

Brooke Matson, In Accelerated Silence

Wayne Miller, Post

Jenny Molberg, Refusal

Carl Phillips, Pale Colors in a Tall Field

Elizabeth Lindsey Rodgers, The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons

Jeff VanderMeer, Dead Astronauts

Christian Wiman, He Held Radical Light

Patrick Crerand's Top Ten List:

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Ernest Gaines, Of Love and Dust

Charles Portis, True Grit

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

Carolyn Forché, What You Have Heard Is True

Gina Langen's Top Ten List:

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Timothy Egan, The Good Rain

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country

Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

George Eliot, Middlemarch

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

William Kinnison's Top Ten List:

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders

Henry James, The Ambassadors

Jack Matthews, Hanger Stout, Awake!

C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (+ the rest of the trilogy)

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Virginia Woolf, The Waves

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Kristen Beck's Top Ten List:

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice

Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor

Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & The Light

Casey McQuiston, Red White & Royal Blue

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volumes 1 & 2

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Karlton A. Laster's Top Ten List:

Michael Arceneaux, I Don’t Want to Die Poor

Damon Young, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker

Kiese Laymon, Heavy

Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time

Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer

Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

Kevin Young, Brown

Morrison, Song of Solomon

Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills

Kara Spaulding's Top Ten List:

Don Freeman, Corduroy

Lauren Slater, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Jane Austen, Persuasion

A.S. Byatt, Possession

Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds

Margaret Wise Brown, The Runaway Bunny

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Zachary Dean's Top Ten List:

Charles Dickens, My Early Times, ed. Peter Rowland

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man (dense, but appropriate for these times)

Robin Waterfield, Why Socrates Died

Iain McCalman, Darwin's Armada

Richard Dawkins, An Appetite for Wonder

The Great Tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides

Frederick Luis Aldama, Why the Humanities Matter

Ifor Evans, Portrait of English Literature

Lou Cannon, Reagan

Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation

Noah Blacker's Top Ten List:

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah: In Search of Lost Time, Volume 4

David Bohm, On Creativity

Mari Ruti, Reinventing the Soul

Brené Brown, Dare to Lead

Susanna Routte Cerasuolo's Top Ten List:

Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

The Mary Daly Reader, ed. Jennifer Rycenga and Linda Barufaldi

Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now

bell hooks, all about love

Jane Schaberg, Mary Magdalene Understood

Elisabeth Fiorenza, In Memory of Her

Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex

Gloria Steinem, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!

The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, ed. Susan Parsons

Brian McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration

Jacob Gillam's Top Ten List:

James Scott, Seeing Like a State

Stephen Graham Jones, Mongrels

Tade Thompson, Rosewater

John Harper, Blades in the Dark (this is a roleplaying game, but an excellent example of the heist and steampunk genre conventions)

Malka Older, ...and Other Disasters

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

Espen Aarseth, Cybertext

William Covino, Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy

Malka Older, Infomocracy

Robert McKee, Story

Michaela Corning-Myers' Top Ten List:

Ian McEwan, Atonement

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Chanel Miller, Know My Name

Jennifer McMahon, The Winter People

Alan Moore, Watchmen

André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

Marisha Pessl, Night Film

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring

​​​​​​Asha Mall-Graves' Top Ten List:

John Ajvide Lindqvist, I Am Behind You

Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher Series

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Wizard of the Crow

Jose Saramago, Blindness

Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

China Miéville, Perdido Street Station

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun

Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Renee Aitken's Top Ten List:

John Milton, Paradise Lost

William Landay, Defending Jacob

Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns

Jim Crace, Quarantine

Jim Crace, The Pesthouse

Jonathan Kellerman, The Museum of Desire

Rebekah Crane, The Infinite Pieces of Us

Fiona Valpy, The Dressmaker's Gift

Barbara Davis, When Never Comes

Elaine H. Hairston's Top Books List:

Hilary Mantel, Cromwell Trilogy: Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

Ian McEwan, Atonement and Machines Like Me

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence

Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

Non-Fiction:

Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Paul Dyer's Top Ten List:

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Philip Lymbery, Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were

William Shakespeare, Othello

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin

John Updike, ​​​​​​Rabbit novels

Dawn Powell, My Home is Far Away

Amanda Deighen's Top Books List:

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

George Orwell, 1984

William Golding, Lord of the Flies

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Not a book but this speech inspired a book under the same name: David Foster Wallace, "This is Water" Commencement Speech

Patrick Kaune's Top Ten List:

Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command

Homer, Odyssey

George Orwell, 1984

J. Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans

Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force

Bob Woodward, Obama’s Wars

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

Michael Bryant's Top Ten List:

Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon

Robert Graves, The White Goddess

James Wood, How Fiction Works

Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

Aldous Huxley, The Divine Within

Robert McLuhan, Randi's Prize

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

James Waller, Becoming Evil

Dan Theis's Top Books List:

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

George Orwell, 1984

Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

Toni Morrison, Beloved

William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

Simon Singh, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets

Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot

Bill Walton, Back from the Dead

Ruth Staveley's Top Books List:

Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Elie Wiesel, Night

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires

Tommy Orange, There There

Karen Rosenberg's Top Books List:

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice & Sense and Sensibility (tie!)

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border

Annie Pike Greenwood, We Sagebrush Folks

Annie Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

Richard Yates, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

Elizabeth Spencer, The Southern Woman (short stories)

Margie Tate's Top Ten List:

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Elie Wiesel, Night

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

Ayn Rand, Anthem

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

Edgar Allen Poe, All stories

Stephen King, The Stand

Ken Follett, Trilogy: Fall of Giants, Winter of the World, Edge of Eternity

Julie Means's Top Ten List:

Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

Jennifer Chiaverini, Enchantress of Numbers

Louis Bromfield, Night in Bombay

Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

John Jakes, North and South

Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Tory Wagner's Top Books List:

Mo Hayder, Jack Caffery series

C.J. Box, Joe Pickett series

Jo Bannister, Gabriel Ash and Hazel Best series

Candice Fox, Crimson Lake series

Jussi Adler-Olsen, Department Q series

Beverly Henderson's Top Books List:

Anything by Alice Hoffman!:

Practical Magic

Blue Diary

Here on Earth

Skylight Confessions

The Probable Future

Turtle Moon

The Story Sisters

At Risk

The River King

Timothy Bechtol's Top Books List:

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Bram Stoker, Dracula

Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island

Jules Verne, Castle of the Carpathians

E.B. White, Charlotte's Web

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions

Bart Yates, Leave Myself Behind

Jim Grimsley, Comfort & Joy

Michelangelo Rodriguez's Top Ten List:

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction

Manly P. Hall, The Secret Destiny of America

The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni

Mary Higgins Clark, Where Are The Children?

The Oxford Book of English Love Stories, edited by John Sutherland

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night

E. Lynn Harris, If This World Were Mine

Joyce Carol Oates, Night-Side

Joyce Carol Oates, Them

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Karyn Johnson's Top Ten List:

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Diana Gabaldon, Outlander series

Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Elie Wiesel, Night

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Jerrod Rosenbaum's Top Ten List:

Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

1-2 Samuel

Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered

John le Carré, A Perfect Spy

Homer, The Iliad

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Captain Edward L. Beach Jr., Run Silent, Run Deep

Chris Skovron's Top Ten List:

Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport

Paul Beatty, The Sellout

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Nick White, How To Survive a Summer

Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

David Byrne, How Music Works

Leah Seymour's Top Ten List:

Noelle Stevenson, Nimona

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud, Making Comics

Jeff Smith, Bone

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

Richard McGuire, Here

Kate Beaton, Hark! A Vagrant

Linda Medley, Castle Waiting

Ryan North, To Be or Not To Be

Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie, The Wicked + The Divine

Casey McConahay's Top Ten List:

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Raymond Carver, "Where I'm Calling From"

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

Timothy Rieger's Top Ten List:

Stephen King, On Writing

Joe Hill, Full Throttle

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Richard Chizmar, Gwendy’s Magic Feather

Stephen King, The Institute

Joe Hill, Strange Weather

Rae Carson, Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker

Stephen King and Owen King, Sleeping Beauties

Jeffery Deaver, The Coffin Dancer

Stephen King, Elevation

Laura Aberg's Top Ten List:

Holocaust Literature:

Betty Schimmel, To See You Again

Jenna Blum, Those Who Save Us

Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah's Key

Martin Fletcher, Jacob's Oath

Nancy Richler, The Imposter Bride

Historical Fiction:

Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron Mills"

Kathleen Winsor, Forever Amber

James Hilton, Random Harvest

Jean Auel, Earth's Children Series

Memoir:

Trevor Noah, Born a Crime

Mark Mathabane, Kaffir Boy

Courtney Skaggs's Top Ten List:

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

John D’Agata, Halls of Fame

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

Hanif Abdurraqib, A Fortune for Your Disaster

Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

Abi Andrews, The Word for Woman is Wilderness

Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath

Jenny Hval, Paradise Rot

Niviaq Korneliussen, Last Night in Nuuk

David Connerley Nahm, Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

Sharon Hoover's Top Ten List:

John Hart, Redemption Road

Nora Roberts, Chronicles of the One series

Lorenzo Carcaterra, Gangster

Joyce Meyer, Trusting God Day by Day

James Patterson, Criss Cross

Francine Rivers, Mark of the Lion series

Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, Bedlam: an Intimate Journey into America's Mental Health Crisis

Stephen King, The Stand

Gary Sinise, Grateful American

Dick Van Dyke, My Lucky Life in and out of Show Business

Valerie Jenkins's Top Books List:

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (thanks to Prof. Jani)

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies

Ann-Marie Macdonald, Fall on Your Knees

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Sidney Sheldon, The Sands of Time

Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Elie Wiesel, Night

Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat

Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Anything by Agatha Christie

Maggie Brim's Top Ten List:

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift

Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak

The poetry of Mary Oliver

NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree

Anna Lapp's Top Ten List:

As a librarian, I'm using the heck out of my library's e-check outs with the apps Overdrive/Libby and Hoopla! I hope you can check out some of these great reads too.

Emily Henry, Beach Read - out May 18, this is a rivals to lovers romance/ women's fiction with great character chemistry and emotional depth. It's written by an Ohio author too!

Kim Liggett, The Grace Year- a YA dystopian book that is a feminist mix of The Hunger Games and Lord of the Flies.

Jennifer Robson, The Gown - a historical fiction piece about the women who embroidered Queen Elizabeth's wedding gown - absolutely riveting!

Tracey Garvis Graves, The Girl He Used to Know - A great read for fellow book lovers told in part-present, part-flashback of an unconventional love story.

Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars - Historical fiction of the horsepack librarians of Kentucky during the 1930s.

Kerry Winfrey, Waiting for Tom Hanks - A hopeless romantic stumbles into a famous movie actor while filming a romantic comedy in Columbus, OH! What wonderful situation can befall these two?

Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue - a love story between the son of the president of the United States and the prince of England, how fabulous!

Angie Kim, Miracle Creek - A courtroom drama that will keep you on your toes guessing who could have possibly done it!

Sayaka Murata, Convenience Store Woman - A quirky, short book about a woman who is content to work at a convenience store far past the expectations of society.

Courtney Summers, Sadie - A young adult thriller about a young woman who is set out to avenge her sister's murderer. Told in dual POV between the young woman Sadie and an NPR journalist tracking down the missing girl, you'll have goosebumps the whole book! Excellent as an audiobook.

Bethe Lewis's Top Ten List:

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

F Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Labyrinth of the Spirits

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Haley Studler's Top Ten List:

Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

Tara Westover, Educated

Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air

Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Homer, The Odyssey

Caitlin O'Brien's Top Ten List:

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

Joanna Russ, The Female Man

Frank Norris, McTeague

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk

Garth Nyx, Sabriel

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Joe Hill, Heart Shaped Box

Clarissa J. Markiewicz's Top Ten List:

Clarissa J. Markiewicz, Christmas In Whimsy

Jack Finney, Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Stephen King, It

Terence McSweeney, Avengers Assemble!: Critical Perspectives on the Marvel Cinematic Universe

M.K. Wren, Curiosity Didn’t Kill the Cat: a Conan Flagg Mystery

Pander Brothers, Dissident X

Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Ralph Ellison, Three Days Before the Shooting

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

Peter Straub, Ghost Story

Jamie Watson's Top Ten List:

Top 10 of all time, since I started doing Goodreads, and recently.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde

Stephen Kelman, Pigeon English

Dave Cullen, Columbine

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Shadow of the Wind

Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Kevin Wilson, Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine

T. Geronimo Johnson, Welcome to Braggsville

Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil, Please Kill Me

Gregg Heacock's Top Books List:

Right now (in the past year and a half):

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope

Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands

Jim Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

Michelle Kuo, Reading with Patrick

William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer

Anne Tyler, Vinegar Girl

Favorites before these:

Philip Roth, I Married a Communist

Ian McEwan, The Innocent

John le Carré, A Delicate Truth

Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain

Louis Sachar, There’s a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom

George Eliot, Middlemarch

George Meredith, The Egoist

Chloe Goodhart's Top Ten List:

Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus (delightful, engrossing, and magical!)

Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (rich and warm with lovable characters who also can't go outside)

Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl (a fun and fluffy ode to college and fandom)

Kristin Cashore, Graceling (engrossing fantasy with incredible world building)

Tana French, In the Woods and The Likeness (Technically 2, but The Likeness is an INCREDIBLE atmospheric mystery, and it's much better if you read In the Woods First)

Andrew Sean Greer, Less (perfect intersection of travel, publishing, and romance. Funny, insightful, and full of heart!)

Liane Moriarty, What Alice Forgot (This is maybe the perfect moment for any Liane Moriarty book, but Alice is my favorite. Funny and a little biting, Liane's mysteries are a perfect snack)

Gene Luen Yang, Dragon Hoops (Couldn't believe how much I enjoyed this graphic novel about life, storytelling, and basketball. Perfectly fills the sports-shaped hole in our lives right now)

Jane Austen, Persuasion (Second chances and a little more nuance!)

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter series (Just as magical every time, and perfect for comfort reading)

Melissa Bannon's Top Ten List:

Kate Atkinson, Life After Life

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Ian McEwan, Atonement

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Francesca Lia Block, Dangerous Angels

David Nemec's Top Books List:

John Edward Williams, Stoner

David Nemec, The Systems of M.R. Shurnas

David Nemec, The Picture Maker

David Nemec, Mad Blood

George Blecher, Other People Exist

Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury

Alexander Trocchi, Young Adam

Tamika Smith's Top Ten (plus one) List:

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

George Orwell, 1984

James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain

Michelle Obama, Becoming

Alex Haley and Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Richard Wright, Native Son

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Honorable Mention: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Molly Hahn's Top Ten List:

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

Sally Thorne, The Hating Game

Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories

James Joyce, Dubliners

Nicholas Sparks, The Choice

Rachel Winters, Would Like to Meet

Melinda Eliza Sabo's Top Ten(ish) List:

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With The Wolves

Glennon Doyle, Untamed

N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Earth Trilogy

James Victore, Feck Perfuction

Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

Anthony Holden, Poems That Make Grown Men Cry

William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Nikita Gill, Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion Fire and Beauty

Bernard Cornwell, Fools and Mortals

Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

Mitch Mcguire's Top Ten List:

Diane Williams, Excitability: Selected Stories

Patience Gray, Honey from a Weed

Caroline Blackwood, The Last of the Duchess

Jen George, The Babysitter at Rest

Raymond Kennedy, Ride a Cockhorse

Donald Barthelme, City Life

Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer, The Farm in the Green Mountains

Alice Waters, Chez Panisse Menu Cookbook

Horacio Castellanos Moya, The She-Devil in the Mirror

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine

Miranda Miller's Top Ten List:

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman

A.S. Byatt, Possession

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

King Arthur & His Knights

Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Small Fry

Tim West's Top Ten List:

Robert Frost, North of Boston

Ross Gay, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Donald Ray Pollock, Knockemstiff

Steven Millhauser, In the Penny Arcade

Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

Victor LaValle, Big Machine

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Kristen E. Blum's Top Ten List:

Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Dalai Lama, Beyond Religion: Ethics For a Whole World

Robert Iger, The Ride of a Lifetime: 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company

Clayton Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class

Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and a Quest For a Fantastic Future

Clayton Christensen, The Innovators Dilemma

Adam Morgan & Mark Barden, A Beautiful Constraint

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening To Your Life's Purpose

Greg Boyle, Barking To The Choir: The Power Of Radical Kinship

Atul Gawande, A Checklist Manifesto

Natalie Dalea's Top Ten List:

Ada Limón, The Carrying

Elissa Washuta, My Body Is a Book of Rules

Tommy Pico, IRL

José Olivarez, Citizen Illegal

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton

Melissa Febos, Abandon Me

The entirety of the Animorphs series, by KA Applegate

Essays by Cam Rentsch

Matt Fenner's Top Books List:

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Lee Child, Jack Reacher series

George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones