Every Book I Read in College
May 19, 2020
Sarah Dalgleish ’20
This past weekend, I turned in my last final (ever!!!), had my last few meetings with students in the class I’m a Course Writing Associate for, and attended—online of course—the Athletics Department awards ceremony known as the Obies. All of this means that I am officially done with college and I have been trying to use this week before graduation to reflect on the past four years.
There is no way I can express in words the unending gratitude I have for my professors, my Oberlin community, and the college as a whole, but in trying to find some meaningful way to wrap up my college experience, I decided to compile a list of every book I studied in the past four years. As someone with an English major and minors in two other areas of language (Hispanic Studies and Rhetoric & Composition), it’s safe to say I am a serious literature nerd and looking back at everything I have read has only increased how thankful I am that I got to study literature at Oberlin.
The list I created is imperfectly reconstructed from old syllabi. The classes I read these books in were a mix of English, Rhetoric, Hispanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and History courses. I decided to only include books that I completely or almost completely read for a specific class, which is to say that there are so many amazing poems, films, and sections of other books that I didn’t put on this list. I also decided to leave out the theory that I read, but studying theory was also a hugely influential part of my experience as an English major. So while this is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of everything I studied, looking back at all these books, I am struck by a few things about my time at Oberlin.
I think it’s really cool to see how much the genre of books I read shifted from semester to semester. Depending on the classes I was in, there are some years I read dozens of classic books while other times I took classes much more focused on experimental texts. I’m so grateful that I got to read works from such diverse authors in every sense of the word—background, time period, culture, genre, and purpose for writing. I gained more than I can express by not just reading this range of literature, but by doing so at Oberlin where every class focused on questions of whose voices were represented, what the effect of the text was on the world, and how to reconcile with the complexities and atrocities of the past.
I decided to pick one favorite book from each year, and believe me that was painful, to reflect a little more about my experience studying literature here.
Freshman Year
In the Palm of Your Hand: A Poet’s Portable Handbook by Steve Kowit
Bright Felon by Kazim Ali
Seneca Review, Fall 2014: We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay edited by John D’Agata
The Winged Seed by Li-Young Lee
Vanishing Point by Ander Monson
On Looking by Lia Purpura
Bending Genre edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker
America is in the Heart by Carlos Burlosan
Rolling the R’s by R. Zamora Linmark
Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
No-No Boy by John Okada
Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston
Sia(b) by May Lee-Yang
The Walleye Kid by R.A. Shiomi and Sundraya Kase
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies is one of my favorite collections of short stories. I read it in Professor Harrod Suarez’s class, Asian American Literature, which was the first English class I took at Oberlin. I loved the way the course was designed, because we spent the first part of the semester reading canonical works before moving into more experimental pieces later in the semester. We read Interpreter of Maladies in the middle of the semester, kind of as a transition between these two styles of writing, and I remember being struck by Lahiri’s ability to capture so many people’s lives beautifully in such short stories. I also wrote my first English essay of college about this collection, so it holds sentimental value to me.
Sophomore Year
Citizen 13660 by Miné Okubo
Citizen by Claudia Rankine
The Hungry Woman by Cherríe Moraga
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Othello by Willliam Shakespeare
The Sun, The Idea, and the Story without Words by Frans Masereel
The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
The Major Works by John Donne
The Major Works by Francis Bacon
Paper Bodies by Margaret Cavendish
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors by Lauren Fitzgerald and Melissa Ianetta
Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams
My sophomore year, I declared my English major and started taking more English classes. I took Literature and the Scientific Revolution with my advisor, Professor Wendy Hyman, second semester. Coming from a background of preferring modern literature, I was at first skeptical about everything we read, but ended up having my mind blown in some way by every single book. We covered such an interesting mix of texts while also studying various visual pieces and objects. I ended up learning so much not just about the pieces themselves, but about how literature functions and is important in the world, making this class my favorite in all my time at Oberlin. We ended the semester reading Frankenstein, which I had never read before that point but which is now one of my favorite books. Studying it within the context of the Scientific Revolution gave me so much perspective I otherwise would not have had, and the essay I wrote comparing Frankenstein and the sketches of the anatomist Andreas Vesallius is one of my favorite assignments I wrote in college.
Junior Year
Othello by William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Coriolanus by William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare
Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
All’s Well that Ends Well by William Shakespeare
Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare
Cymbeline by William Shakespeare
Pericles by William Shakespeare
The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare
S/Z by Roland Barthes
Sula by Toni Morrison
Love in A Fallen City by Eileen Chang, translated by Karen Kingsbury
The Pillow Book by Meredith McKinney
Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig, translated by Thomas Colchie
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Portable Thoreau by Henry David Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode
Emerson’s Prose and Poetry by Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Joel Porte and Saundra Morris
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Estrella Distante por Roberto Bolaño
Operación Masacre por Rodolfo Walsh
Insensatez por Horacio Castellanos Moya
La Hora de la Estrella por Clarice Lispector
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia por Rigoberta Menchú y Elizabeth Burges
I studied abroad in Chile first semester my junior year, so all of these books are from Winter Term, during which I participated in the Shakespeare in Italy trip, and second semester. At the time, I wondered why I was so busy and now looking back I realize it was because I spent so much of the semester reading! I have to say I think this was my ultimate literature semester at Oberlin, because I read so many books and plays that I absolutely loved and the classes I was in were so distinct from each other—I took Transcendentalism and Nature, Introduction to Comparative Literature, Political Exclusion and Violence in Latin America, and was a Course Writing Associate in Shakespeare and the Limits of Genre. Picking a favorite book from this semester is so hard, but I think I have to choose Insensatez because it was the first difficult novel I read in Spanish, which was really exciting. I loved the class I read the book in, Political Exclusion and Violence in Latin America, because we used literature as a lens to understand how various artists made sense of dictatorships and other injustices in Latin America, which was fascinating.
Senior Year
The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts
The Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St. Domingo by Leonora Sansay
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Ormond; Or the Secret Witness by Charles Brockden Brown
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
Standing on Common Ground by Geraldo Cadava
Suspect Freedoms by Nancy Mirabal
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Death of Truth by Michiko Kakutani
The Aeneid by Virgil, translated by Fitzgerald
The Confessions by Augustine, translated by Pine-Coffin
Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney
The Lais of Marie de France translated by Burgess & Busby
Tristan and Isolde by Gottfried von Strassburg, translated by Hatto
Inferno by Dante Alighieri, translated by Mandelbaum
La Comedia Nueva por Fernández de Moratín
San Manuel Bueno por Miguel de Unamuno
Yerma por Federico Garcia Lorca
Réquiem por un campesino español por Ramón J. Sender
El Sur por Adelaida García Morales
My senior year stands out to me because as I moved into working on my Honors thesis, I got to choose some of my own texts that I read for the project. I think my favorite book I read this year was In Cold Blood, because it became the basis for much of my thesis, which I wrote about the ethics of the podcast Serial. This has also been an interesting year because while I did not personally love many of the books I read for the classes I took, I actually think I learned more from them because of that. I spent the year trying to fill in gaps in my knowledge by taking Gothic America, Medieval European Literature, and Survey of Spanish Literature and, as a result, I feel like I am coming away from Oberlin with familiarity in a wide historical and cultural range of literature.
If my four years studying English, Hispanic Studies, and Rhetoric have taught me anything, it’s that Oberlin is a powerhouse of professors who have incredibly interesting insight to share about literature of every kind. I know I will take the knowledge I have gained from all of these books, as well as the questions they have taught me to ask about the world, with me far into the future.
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