The Books That Changed Us in College

Compiled by Dr. Lisa Blankenship

Assistant Professor, Department of English, Baruch College

Mine:

1. Beloved, Toni Morrison

2. Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf
3. Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
4. Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
5. Shakespeare (plays)
6. Christopher Marlowe (plays, esp Tamburlaine)
7. Egalia’s Daughters, Gerd Brantenberg
8. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
9. At Swim-Two-Birds, Brian O’Nolan
10. The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway
11. Tender is the Night, F. S. Fitzgerald
12. Little Man, What Now? Hans Fallada
13. Eudora Welty (short stories)
14. Flannery O’Connor (short stories)

Other professors at Baruch and beyond I polled on social media with the question:
What books changed you as an undergraduate?

15. The Revolt of the Cockroach People, Oscar Zeta Acosta

16. The Clouds, Aristophanes (play)
17. A History of God, Karen Armstrong
18. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
19. The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood
20. The Shield of Achilles, W.H. Auden
21. Persuasion, Jane Austen
22. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
23. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
24. Going to Meet the Man, James Baldwin
25. Red Cavalry stories, Isaac Babel
26. The Dead Lecturer, Amiri Baraka (poetry)
27. Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
28. Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop (poetry)
29. Labor and Monopoly Capital, Harry Braverman
30. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
31. Gender Trouble, Judith Butler
32. Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Carolyn Walker Bynum
33. My Antonia, Willa Cather
34. Chaucer
35. The Awakening, Kate Chopin
36. Cloud 9, Caryl Churchill
37. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
38. Nervous Conditions, Tsi Tsi Dangarembga
39. Krik? Krak!, Edwidge Danticat
40. White Noise, Don DeLillo
41. Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
42. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
43. The White Album, Joan Didion
44. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
45. John Donne (poetry)
46. Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, Eds. Martin
Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey
47. Middlemarch, George Eliot
48. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
49. Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
50. Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg
51. Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
52. Three Theses on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud
53. Dora, Sigmund Freud
54. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
55. The Buried: Reflection on Spain and the New World, Carlos Fuentes
56. Open Veins of Latin America, Edwardo Galleano
57. Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
58. The Passion of Alice, Stephanie Grant
59. Dreams Die Hard, David Harris
60. Seamus Heaney (poetry)
61. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
62. The Rain God, Arturo Islas
63. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
64. Life and Death of American Cities, Jane Jacobs
65. Tristam Shandy, Tom Jones
66. Ulysses, James Joyce
67. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
68. John Keats (poetry)
69. At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid
70. Sinai and Zion, Jon Levenson
71. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X
72. The Autumn of the Patriarch, Garcia Marquez
73. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
74. The Last Generation, Cherrie Moraga
75. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
76. Paradise, Toni Morrison
 77. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
78. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
79. Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy
80. Ariel, Sylvia Plath
81. His Dark Materials, Phillip Pullman
82. The Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
83. Book of the Dead, Muriel Rukeyser
84. Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
85. Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said
86. Collected Poems, Anne Sexton
87. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
88. Percy Bysshe Shelley (poetry)
89. Cracking India, Bapsi Sidhwa
90. The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
91. Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
92. On Photography, Susan Sontag
93. East of Eden, John Steinbeck
94. Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson
95. Walden, Henry David Thoreau
96. Candide, Voltaire
97. Night, Elie Wiesel
98. Spring and All, William Carlos Williams
99. Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson
100. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf