Professor’s Picks with Helen Benedict

Helen Benedict, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of a new book: The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. She will be reading and signing books at Book Culture on Thursday, April 16 at 7 pm. (Learn more about the book and event here.) We recently asked Helen a few questions about what she has been reading:

1) What books are you currently reading?

Sowing Crisis by Rashid Khalidi, endless books about the Iraq War, and, for relief, I’m rereading Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.

2) Is there anything you’re particularly looking forward to the publication of?

The next fiction titles by Paula Sharp, Joan Silber and Mary Morris.

3) Are there standard titles or writers you like to recommend, either within or outside of your field?

Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, W.E.B. DuBois, James Baldwin, Tolstoy and Charlotte Bronte.

4) Do you have a personal favorite book of all time? If so, can you share it and tell us why?

I have three: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – a work that is so human and honest it captures the struggle for freedom that not only women experience, but anyone who has been pigeonholed, oppressed, suppressed anywhere in the world. A highly underrated novel. George Eliot’s Middlemarch – as big and important as my other favorite book, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. These books have the sweep and complexity of life, contain deep wisdom, and grow and grow with each reading. They capture humanity in all its complexity much better than any psychology or nonfiction I have ever read.

5) What’s next? Any upcoming book projects in the works that you can tell us about?

I have a new novel coming out in November that I’m just proofing now. Called THE EDGE OF EDEN, it is a tragicomic novel about an English family living in the Seychelles in 1960, a remote group of islands tucked under the equator in the Indian Ocean. The story weaves between wartime London and tropical colonial decadence in a tale of power, lust and witchcraft.

Professor’s Picks with Rashid Khalidi

For the Professor’s Picks feature this month, we asked Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi a few questions about his favorite books and what he has read recently. Professor Khalidi will appear at Book Culture on Monday, March 9 at 7 pm to discuss his new book, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East.

Here is our short book-related interview with him:

1) What books are you currently reading?

I am currently reading (in sporadic fashion) Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe; Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, and Tarif Khalidi’s new translation of The Qur’an.

2) Is there anything you’re particularly looking forward to the publication of?

I am very much looking forward to the publication of Mahmood Mamdani’s Saviors and Survivors: Darfu, Politics and the War on Terror, which I am reading an advance copy of.

Professor’s Picks with Jenny Davidson

We recently asked Columbia professor Jenny Davidson a few questions about her favorite books and what she has read recently. She shared an abundance of titles with us, which are posted below.

Save the Date: Professor Davidson will appear at Book Culture on Thursday, February 26 at 7 pm to discuss her new book, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. She will be joined by Vassar’s Julie Park.

On to the interview…

1) What books are you currently reading?

I’m in the middle of Jennifer Egan’s The Keep; next in the queue is Heidi Julavits’s The Uses of Enchantment. The last couple books I’ve read were James Blish’s SF classic A Case of Conscience, which I loved, and nineteenth-century novelist Marie Corelli’s melodrama Thelma, which was a surprisingly good read. On a long plane trip recently, I read Jonathan Coe’s The Rain Before It Falls and Rosamond Lehmann’s The Ballad and the Source. Two books I’m looking forward to reading in the near future: Laura Miller’s The Magician’s Book and John Hanc’s The Coolest Race on Earth: Mud, Madmen, Glaciers and Grannies at the Antarctica Marathon.