In honor of Augustana College’s Sesquicentennial, we asked our faculty and staff for the titles of the books they recommend.

Sesquicentennial Book Available

Augustana at 150 tells the history of the College's 15 decades through rarely seen images and content from the College's archives, and interviews with iconic faculty members, administrators and students.

This limited-edition hardcover memento of Augustana's Sesquicentennial is published by Lifetouch. Copies are $45, including shipping and handling.

Place your order today.

This is not a list of the “best” 150 books or the “most important” 150 books, but rather a fascinating snapshot of this group of people in the year 2010 and the books they have loved and want others to also read and enjoy. You may find titles that you already know, titles that surprise and intrigue you, and we hope a healthy list of what you’d like to read next!

During the 2010-2011 celebration, we passed along the recommendations that originated with Augustana readers of note ... it might have been your favorite English professor or a staff person or someone whose taste in reading complements your own.

That’s what this list is ... a way to see the wide variety of reading that Augustana engenders, and a beautiful demonstration how reading enriches our lives.

1. Illusions: Tales of a Reluctant Messiah, by Richard Bach
2. The Snow Tree, by Caroline Repchuck
3. A Very Easy Death, by Simone de Beauvoir
4. Black Child, by Camara Laye
5. If it Die, by André Gide
6. Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust
7. The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkein
8. The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkein
9. The Return of the King, by J.R.R. Tolkein
10. The Bible
11. The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch
12. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safron Foer
13. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
14. Straight Man, by Richard Russo
15. Last Moon Dancing, by Monique Schmidt, '98
16. Saint Maybe, by Anne Tyler
17. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
18. Practical Gods, by Carl Dennis
19. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
20. Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger
21. The Next Place, by Warren Hanson
22. Good-Night Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown
23. Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
24. The Giver, by Lois Lowry
25. The Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein
26. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
27. Up the Down Staircase, by Bel Kaufman
28. QB VII, by Leon Uris
29. Nicholas & Alexandra, by Robert K. Massie
30. The Shack, by William P. Young
31. My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult
32. The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant
33. Dear & Glorious Physician, by Taylor Caldwell
34. The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama
35. My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
36. Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
37. London, by Edward Rutherford
38. Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker
39. A Time to Kill, by John Grisham
40. The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough
41. Love you Forever, by Robert Munsch
42. Wizard of Oz series, by L. Frank Baum
43. The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner
44. Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
45. Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson
46. Stones Into Schools, by Greg Mortenson
47. The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
48. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Magus, by John Fowle
50. The Chronicles of Narnia (series), by C. S. Lewis
51. Christ and Culture, by H. Richard Niebuhr
52. Summa Theologica, by St. Thomas Aquinas
53. Confessions, by St. Augustine
54. The Second Coming, by Walker Percy
55. A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold
56. Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James
57. "The Fixation of Belief" (essay), by Charles Peirce
58. Poetics and Metaphysics, by Aristotle
59. Night Flight (Vol de nuit), by Antoine de St.-Exupéry,
60. Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis
61. Miracles, by C.S. Lewis
62. The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis
63. Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis
64. Tree and Leaf, by J.R.R. Tolkien
65. Smith of Wootton Major, by J.R.R. Tolkien
66. Walden; "Walking", by Henry David Thoreau
67. Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
68. Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
69. Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney
70. Jeeves and Wooster, by P.G. Wodehouse
71. The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers
72. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde
73. Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris
74. Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay
75. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
76. Hop on Pop, by Dr. Seuss
77. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
78. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
79. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
80. Mary Russell series, by Laurie R. King
81. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
82. The Question of Hu, by Jonathan Spence
83. Aging: The Fulfillment of Life, by Henri J.M. Nouwen
84. Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
85. 1776, by David McCullough
86. D-Day, by Anthony Beavor
87. The Whistling Season, by Ivan Doig
88. The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
89. The Life You Can Save, by Peter Singer
90. The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams
91. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See
92. The Sparrow, by Mary Russell Doria
93. Children of God, by Mary Russell Doria
94. Blind Your Ponies, by Stanley Gordon West
95. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
96. Master Butchers' Singing Club, by Louise Erdrich
97. The Greatest Miracle in the World, by Og Mandino
98. Twilight Series, by Stephanie Meyer
99. The Wedding, by Nicholas Sparks
100. The Gift From the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
101. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
102. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
103. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
104. The Cave, by Jose Saramago
105. Free To Choose, by Milton & Rose Friedman
106. Alphabet series mysteries, by Sue Grafton
107. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
108. My Antonia, by Willa Cather
109. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
110. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
111. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
112. The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shield
113. Traveling Mercies, by Anne Lamott
114. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engel
115. A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
116. The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov
117. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
118. Snow, by Orhan Pamuk
119. Night, by Elie Wiesel
120. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
121. Loving Frank, by Nancy Horan
122. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
123. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
124. Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
125. Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoesvsky
126. Don Quixote, by Cervantes
127. King Lear, by Shakespeare
128. Hamlet, by Shakespeare
129. A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry
130. Ulysses, by James Joyce
131. The Witness of Combines, by Kent Meyers
132. Two-Part Invention: the story of a marriage, by Madeleine L'Engel
133. Waterland, by Graham Swift
134. People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks
135. March, by Geraldine Brooks
136. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
137. The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl
138. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
139. Good Harbor, by Anita Diamant
140. Buffalo For The Broken Heart, by Dan O'Brien
141. Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
142. Asylum, by Patrick McGrath
143. Staggerford, by John Hassler
144. The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
145. It's Your Ship, by Mike Abrashoff
146. Once a Runner, by John L. Parker
147. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
148. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
149. Five Smooth Stones, by Ann Fairbairn
150. The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck

The Augustana Bookstore and the Sioux Falls' Barnes & Noble hosted displays of these titles throughout the Sesquicentennial year. You may also note that the Mikkelsen Library has most of these books in its collection.