The Faculty Bookshelf
He reads the protagonist’s journey, from the subcontinent across the sea to Canada, as a search for wholeness through displacement, danger, and reinvention.
Oliur Sun, a sunyatavadin and multidisciplinary creator working across textual and visual forms, is currently a Lecturer at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, and his one essential recommendation for Bangladeshi readers is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
He sees in the novel a powerful mirror for postcolonial societies such as Bangladesh, because Achebe portrays not only the violence of colonial intrusion but also the tensions already present within indigenous culture. For him, the book matters because it does not romanticize the past, nor does it excuse imperial erasure.
Instead, it shows how communities fracture when foreign power enters existing weaknesses. That double vision, critical of both empire and self, makes the novel especially relevant for readers trying to understand identity, memory, and the unfinished inheritance of colonial history.
Shamsad Mortuza, an academic administrator, educator, poet, translator, columnist, professor of English, and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, chooses Life of Pi by Yann Martel as the book he would place in every reader’s hands.
What fascinates him is how the novel turns a simple title into a meditation on existence: Pi is finite in symbol yet endless in expansion, and that paradox becomes the human condition itself. He reads the protagonist’s journey, from the subcontinent across the sea to Canada, as a search for wholeness through displacement, danger, and reinvention.
The novel’s floating island, the tiger Richard Parker, and the layered encounters with Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity make it a rich arena where science and faith meet without easy resolution. He is equally drawn to the ending, where two versions of truth stand side by side: One is factual and the other is imaginative, and the reader must decide which story better explains reality.
Kaiser Haq, a Bangladeshi translator, critic, academic, and the Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, recommends The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, a novel often called difficult yet endlessly rewarding. He returns to it repeatedly because each reading yields a new pleasure.
Set in a sanatorium before the outbreak of World War I, the novel gathers patients who seem withdrawn from ordinary life, and their illness becomes a metaphor for spiritual and social detachment. Within that enclosed world, fierce debates unfold between rival philosophies, one liberal and humanist, the other authoritarian and severe.
Then the Great War crashes into their insulated existence and drags abstraction back into history. For him, the novel remains one of modern literature’s grand studies of ideas, crisis, and the moment when private comfort is shattered by public catastrophe.
Azeema Anhar is an English Language Instructor at ULAB and member of the editorial team at the weekly Counterpoint.
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Azeema Anhar Humaira
Azeema Anhar is an English Language Instructor at ULAB and editorial assistant at Counterpoint.
