Would you believe a Harlequin for my Narrative Forms course that I'm teaching at Laurier? Otherwise, I'm reading Dickens's Dombey and Son for our UW Dickens Reading Group.
I can best answer this question by saying what I would like to be reading what I currently don't have time for:
And I own all of these in hard cover from when they first came out, so for the first two, that goes to show how long it takes me to find time for books that I don't put on my syllabi!
And a non-hardcover that I own and desperately want to have time to read: The Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology.
Well, I'm not sure about "favourite" since that tends to change every day, but here are some of the ones -- either texts or authors -- I find most interesting and/or enjoyable.
Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea works great in discussions of colonialism and post-colonialism while also functioning great in discussions of narrative theory.
Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! -- a collection of short stories that's particular useful in discussions of gender and the implications of choosing writing as a career.
Believe it or not, various verses from Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter tend to make appearances in many of my courses, not necessarily as required reading, but as example texts during lecture. Hoffmann's text is great for discussions of constructions of childhood, for narrative analysis, and for image/text discussions.
Edwidge Danticat's Brother I'm Dying, but I'm not sure getting to go through the report into someone's death (Danticat's 81-year-old uncle, Joseph Dantica who died in the custody of U.S. Homeland Security in 2004), including the report of his autopsy, should really count as fun. Regardless, it was a different kind of research for me, so it was an especially engaging process.
Well, a figure skating coach (and that's what my five-year-old "When I grow up I want to be..." project said!), but is it too late to become a doctor, a media mogul, and/or the head of a Fortune 500 company? Would I have to have an aptitude for any of those careers?