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This article is a part of The Gazelle’s new series Faculty Top Ten. Every week, we will ask various faculty divisions about the most influential or significant works in their field. For the first week, we asked NYU Abu Dhabi’s Literature department for the top ten books everyone must read. First, is the list of the most repeated entries, as well as The Gazelle’s own personal choice. Below are various professors’ individual list of answers.

Top 10 Books Everyone Must Read

This article is a part of The Gazelle’s new series Faculty Top Ten. Every week, we will ask various faculty divisions about the most influential or ...

Nov 15, 2014

This article is a part of The Gazelle’s new series Faculty Top Ten. Every week, we will ask various faculty divisions about the most influential or significant works in their field. For the first week, we asked NYU Abu Dhabi’s Literature department for the top ten books everyone must read. First, is the list of the most repeated entries, as well as The Gazelle’s own personal choice. Below are various professors’ individual list of answers.
  1. Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote
  2. Gabriel Gárcia Márquez — One Hundred Years of Solitude
  3. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Crime and Punishment
  4. Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
  5. Leo Tolstoy — Anna Karenina
  6. Toni Morrison — Beloved
  7. Dante Alighieri— Divine Comedy
  8. William Shakespeare — Hamlet
  9. William Shakespeare — The Tempest
  10. Mary Shelley — Frankenstein
The Gazelle’s pick:
  1. The Associated Press — The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law 2013
 
Wail Hassan:
  1. Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote
  2. Fyodor Dostoevsky — Crime and Punishment
  3. Ralph Ellison — Invisible Man
  4. Naguib Mahfouz —The Cairo Trilogy
  5. Tayeb Salih — Season of Migration to the North
  6. Gabriel García-Márquez — One Hundred Years of Solitude
  7. Jorge Amado — Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
  8. R.K. Narayan — The Guide
  9. Ibrahim al-Koni — The Bleeding of the Stone
Paulo Horta:
  1. Machado de Assis — The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas
  2. Mikhail Bulgakov — The Master and Margarita
  3. Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote
  4. Mario Vargas Llosa — The War at the End of the World
  5. Jose Saramago — The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
  6. Henry James — The Portrait of a Lady
  7. Robert Musil — The Man Without Qualities
  8. Fernando Pessoa — The Book of Disquiet
  9. George Eliot — Middlemarch
  10. Marcel Proust — Remembrance of Things Past
Jill Magi:
This was ridiculous, hard, impossible.
  1. Sei Shonagon — The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney
  2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari — A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi
  3. Lyn Hejninian — My Life
  4. Paul Celan — Threadsuns, translated by Pierre Joris
  5. Jerome Rothenberg — Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania
  6. Paulo Freire, translated by Myra Bergman Ramos — Pedagogy of the Oppressed
  7. King James translation — The Psalms, The Bible
  8. Gertrude Stein — Tender Buttons
  9. Zora Neale Hurston — Their Eyes Were Watching God
  10. Goran Sonnevi — Mozart's Third Brain, translated by Rika Lesser
Sheetal Majithia
  1. Italo Calvino— Invisible Cities
  2. Toni Morrison— Beloved
  3. Arundhati Roy— The God of Small Things
  4.  Yoshida Kenkō— Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness or The Harvest of Leisure)
  5. Vyasa— The Mahabharata
  6. Louis Althusser— Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
  7. Michel Foucault— The Archaeology of Knowledge
  8. Eduard Glissant— The Poetics of Relation
  9. Judith Butler— Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
  10. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari translated by Brian Massumi— A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
 
Judith Miller:
  1. William Shakespeare — The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
  2. Jane Austen — Pride and Prejudice
  3. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Crime and Punishment
  4. Toni Morrison — Sula
  5. Gabriel Gárcia Márquez — One Hundred Years of Solitude
  6. Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote
  7. Publius Vergilius Maro, or Virgil — The Aeneid
  8. Samuel Beckett — Waiting for Godot
  9. Laurence Sterne — Tristram Shandy
  10. Sophocles — Oedipus Rex
Phillip Mitsis:
My list. Only one per language.
  1. Homer — Iliad
  2. Valmiki — Ramayana
  3. Publius Vergilius Maro, or Virgil, — Aeneid
  4. Dante Alighieri — Divine Comedy
  5. William Shakespeare — Hamlet
  6. Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote
  7. Cao Xueqin — The Story of the Stone
  8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Faust
  9. Leo Tolstoy — Anna Karenina
  10. Marcel Proust — In Search of Lost Time
Wolfgang Neuber:
  1. Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote
  2. Unknown Author — The Gilgamesh Epic
  3. William Shakespeare — The Tempest
  4. Marcel Proust — In Search of Lost Time
  5. Wolfram von Eschenbach — Parzival
  6. Franz Kafka — The Castle
  7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky — Crime and Punishment
  8. Hanshan — Poems
  9. Jonathan Swift — Gulliver's Travels
  10. Carlo Goldoni — The Servant of Two Masters
Cyrus Patell:
These are the ten books that happen to have meant the most to me in my life as a reader. If Star Wars were a book and not a film, I’d have put it in. Don’t ask me which one would have been dropped though.
  1. Charles Dickens — Great Expectations
  2. William Faulkner — Absalom, Absalom!
  3. F. Scott Fitzgerald — The Great Gatsby
  4. James Joyce — Ulysses
  5. Gabriel Gárcia Márquez — One Hundred Years of Solitude
  6. Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
  7. Toni Morrison — Beloved
  8. Thomas Pynchon — The Crying of Lot 49
  9. J. K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
  10. William Shakespeare — Collected Works of Shakespeare
Maurice Pomerantz:
  1. Kingsley Amis — Lucky Jim
  2. David Lodge — The Campus Trilogy
  3. Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī —The Morals of the Viziers
  4. Roberto Bolaño — The Savage Detectives
  5. Mahmoud Darwish — Memory for Forgetfulness
  6. Vladimir Nabokov — Pale Fire
  7. Zora Neale Hurston — Their Eyes Were Watching God
  8. Turgenev — Fathers and Sons
  9. J.M. Coetzee  — Disgrace
  10. A.S. Byatt — Possession
Bryan Waterman:
These are permanent favorites. If I'd been making the list according to most influential on my development, I'd have to include The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Arthur Conan Doyle's complete Sherlock Holmes stories and the King James Version of the Bible.
  1. Herman Melville — Moby-Dick
  2. Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition
  3. Vladmimir Nabokov — Lolita
  4. Ralph Ellison — The Invisible Man
  5. Toni Morrison — Beloved
  6. Laurence Sterne — Tristram Shandy
  7. Eugene O'Neill — Long Day's Journey into Night
  8. Albert Camus — The Plague
  9. James Joyce — Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  10. Mikhail Bulgakov — The Master and Margarita
Deborah Williams:
  1. Frank Herbert — Dune
  2. Elizabeth Bishop — Collected Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
  3. John Donne — Collected Poems of John Donne
  4. David Mitchell — Cloud Atlas
  5. Gabriel Gárcia Márquez — One Hundred Years of Solitude
  6. Willa Cather — The Professor’s House
  7. Virginia Woolf — Mrs Dalloway,
  8. Rohinton Mistry — A Fine Balance
  9. Mary Shelley — Frankenstein
  10. Toni Morrison — Beloved
Katherine Williams:
So here’s my current list of the top ten books from the historical period in which I was trained to focus my research, 16th- and 17th-Century literature, mostly English ... my list, here in roughly chronological order, draws from the period of literature that I know best.
  1. Edmund Spenser — The Faerie Queene
  2. William Shakespeare — Hamlet
  3. Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote
  4. Ben Jonson — Volpone
  5. Francis Beaumont — The Knight of the Burning Pestle
  6. John Webster — The Duchess of Malfi
  7. Mary Wroth — Urania
  8. John Donne — Poems
  9. Margaret Cavendish — The Blazing World
  10. John Milton — Paradise Lost
Shamoon Zamir
“Here is what the list looks like for me this morning and no doubt it will look different once I have had breakfast:”
  1. Alejo Carpentier — The Lost Steps
  2. Joseph Conrad — Nostromo
  3. Dante Alighieri — Divine Comedy
  4. Andrew Marvell — The poetical works
  5. Herman Melville — Moby Dick
  6. John Milton — Paradise Lost
  7. George Oppen — Of Being Numerous
  8. Ezra Pound — The Cantos
  9. William Shakespeare — Hamlet
  10. Leo Tolstoy — Anna Karenina
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