Mare’s War (ENGL 361)
This book has been my favorite book by far because of how engaging it was. I really couldn’t put it down and felt that I really learned something from the story. It follows two granddaughters Talitha and Octavia on a road trip to a family reunion with their grandmother Mare, a fiery woman who’s still young at heart. On her trip, their grandmother tells the story of her time as a Woman’s Army Corp member (WAC) during World War II. Although it’s marketed as a Young Adult book, I believe that it’s something all ages can appreciate due to its messages about being a woman and family.
Candide (ENGL 222)
This classic novel by an Enlightenment thinker, Voltaire, is a satirical novel about noble people and how they truly don’t seem to understand the real world. A young man, Candide, is raised in the castle of a baron and falls in love with his daughter. However, he’s thrown out of the castle and into the real world where he experiences life’s harsh realities. The plot of the novel is silly, but has its teaching moments. I read it and ended up laughing a lot at the nonsensical plot and characters.
Instead of Three Wishes (ENGL 361)
This magical fairytale like novel kicked off my semester and it filled me with that childlike wonder that I felt as a kid when I used to read. The book is comprised of multiple short stories that all feature fairytale elements in the real world. A leprechaun terrorizes a town and an artist who just wants to paint. A young boy becomes a Viking and the bane of cockroaches. A girl saves an elf prince and starts to receive her wildest dreams. A boy is terrorized by nightmares because he himself is a nightmare. All these fun ideas really hooked me from start to finish and I couldn’t help but read into the night when it came to these stories.
Frankenstein (ENGL 303)
The classic story that we all know. I actually read this book both semesters for two classes and I enjoyed it both times. I have to say that reading it made me recognize the media inaccuracies we see when it comes to Frankenstein movies. The monster is actually intelligent and Victor Frankenstein ends up coming off as a whiny little child. It’s a fantastic horror story and finding out that Mary Shelley wrote it on a trip to a cabin where her and her friends were all telling ghost stories made it eerie and a more sensational read rather than a boring classic.
The Bhagavad Gita (ENGL 353)
The Bhagavad Gita is something that’s really important to me culturally, so I enjoyed reading it from an academic perspective. It was fascinating to analyze the inner battle that the characters go through as they fight a great war and it really inspired me to try to read more texts from India. I hope to continue to analyze texts from different countries through these courses because I truly enjoyed this one.