Dr. Robertson’s top five favorite books

Nathan Weinrich, News Editor/Managing Web Editor|December 18, 2014

Photo: Nathan Weinreich

Dr. Robertson holds up one of her favorite books. Her top five favorite books included “Moby Dick,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Jane Eyre,” “Three Men in a Boat to Say Nothing of the Dog,” and “Bleak House.”

The Gryphon Gazette has been catching upper-school English teachers off-guard and asking them their top five favorite books. One of the upper school teacher’s picks will be released every day this week leading up to the break.

After sitting down with Dr. Margaret Robertson, the English III, English IV, and Newspaper Journalism teacher, I finally goaded out her top five favorite novels of all time. While she was able to spit out “Moby Dick” and “Jane Eyre” very quickly, she put a good amount of thought into her other three favorites.

After toying with the idea of adding Charles Dickens’s “Little Dorrit,” subsequently rejecting it, and bringing the fact that “this is very hard, you’re going to have to sit here [in the interview] forever” to my attention, Dr. Robertson was able to narrow down her choices to these five, and give her reasoning behind them.

 

  1. “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville
    • “[Moby Dick] is a genius, brilliant, extraordinary story; you have everything you could possibly want; there’s a whale, there’s a crazy guy hunting the whale, the whale might be God, what could be better than that? Not to mention tons of bad whale science. It’s perfect.”
  2. “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë
    • “She [Jane Eyre] is sad, she’s lonely, she’s starved, she’s an orphan, but she gets the guy at the end, and that’s really what you want in a story, right?”
  3. “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austin
    • “It’s been made into dozens of movies, which are all wonderful because Jane Austin is wonderful. Elizabeth Bennet [the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice] is my hero.”
  4. “Three Men in a Boat to Say Nothing of the Dog” by Jerome K. Jerome
    1. “Turn of the century; three guys take off from their wives, climb aboard a boat, and go sailing down the Thames and bring their small rat terrier with them. It is the funniest book ever, and I’m not the only one to have ever said that; it is hilarious, and everyone should read it… multiple times.”
  5. “Bleak House” by Charles Dickins
    • “More orphans… I like an orphan. My masters thesis was on orphans actually.”