Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Was Forced to Read

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Top Ten Books I Was 'Forced' to Read

I ended up looking back at some of my favorite reads at university. At first I intended to divide this into 5 likes and 5 dislikes but I ended up with 10 likes instead. I simply couldn't leave any of these out!

1. The Diviners - Margaret Laurence 

This books basically changed my life, my now PhD supervisor assigned it to me for my term paper after I took my first class with him back in 2002 (I think). It was my first class about Post-Colonial Literature and my first venture into Canadian Literature. And I never looked back. Now I'm doing a PhD in Canadian Literature and he's my supervisor, and I couldn't wish for a better one than him. It's funny because I just realized that he probably has no idea how much he and this book geared my way during my studies.








2. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

A course about utopian and dystopian literature and my first read of Atwood. Another life changer, a couple of years later, I fell in love with her writing and I'm now doing my PhD on Margaret Atwood.











3. 1984 - George Orwell

 Read this for the same class as The Handmaid's Tale and it's still one of my favorites. It's so scary and haunting and something that never seems to be not relevant.

4. The Great Gatsby - Scott F. Fitzgerald

Read this for an exam and I really liked it, I should reread it sometime.













5. Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner

I honestly don't remember what I liked about this but I do remember that I liked a lot. Read it for an American Literature class but I don't remember at the moment what exactly was the topic of the class.











6. As For Me And My House - Ross Sinclair

Read this for a American and Canadian Literature comparative class, I absolutely loved the imagery in the book. So haunting. I also want to recommend Ross Sinclair's wonderful short story collection, The Lamp At Noon and Other Stories.











7. Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner

This was one was also part of the comparative class and as it was paired with my favorite, The Diviners, it was what I took on as my presentation and term paper topic. Faulkner is definitely not an easy read but it's an intriguing one.











8. Who's Afraid of Virigina Woolf - Edward Albee

This one I read for the same exam, I read The Great Gatsby for, and I really liked it as well but it's too long ago to properly say something about why I liked it.












9. The Heidi Chronicles - Wendy Wasserstein

One of my final oral exams was about American plays and this was one of them, granted I was allowed to compile my own list of plays but there were some I enjoyed more than others, and this one I really liked which is probably no surprise since it's a female coming of age story.











10. My Mortal Enemy - Willa Cather

Read this for a class on Willa Cather and again, it's too long ago to remember why but I did like it.