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What could you read over and over and over again?

Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow once more, which leaves us with six more weeks of winter. As card-carrying bibliophiles we know the only to get through this is to cozy up with a warm blanket, a hot beverage, and your favorite book to read over and over and over again. Some Oxford history authors were kind enough to share the book that is going to get them through the rest of this cold, cold winter.

Harriet the SpyRuth Feldstein, author of How it Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement:

“Books from my childhood– that I read and re-read then– continue to be those that I love going back to now, and not just as I read them to my own children. I still love the heroines who spoke to me as a kid:  in books like Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh; A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett; and Striped Ice Cream, by Joan Lexau (to name a few).”

 

 

 

Lucky JimNancy Unger, author of Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History:

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis, is comfort food for my mind. Published in 1954, the New York Times called this satire of British provincial university life ‘happily savage.’

Neither of my parents went to college. When I am overwhelmed by academic politics in my life as a history professor, I re-read this novel about a young lecturer trying to secure his place in academia–a world that he secretly (and later not-so-secretly) finds pretentious and pedantic. Rereading Lucky Jim is a guilty pleasure that’s strangely satisfying.”
 

Aleph and Other StoriesFederico Finchelstein, author of the forthcoming The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War: Fascism, Populism, and Dictatorship in Twentieth Century Argentina:

“[my] book would be The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges. It simply expands your imagination.”

 

 

 

Stay warm and happy reading!

Punxsutawney Phil

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Image credit: Punxsutawney Phil. Photo by Shannon Ramos. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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