I put this on Facebook, too, but I am now on the FYEX (first-year experience) Taskforce (sounds official, right?) and one of our jobs is to select the common reading for Shepherd.
Some guidelines: the book should appeal to lots of different groups (not just freshman, not just English-major types), should be in paperback (or at least an affordable hardcover), and should be no more than 300 pages. You can read about this year's book and the events we've held around it here.
Any suggestions, oh wonderful readers?
4 comments:
What do you think you'd like to accomplish? In other words, is there a particular theme or perspective your "task force" is looking for? I think memoirs are good. You could look at Honky or All Souls that deal explicitly with the intersection of race, class, and gender in interesting ways. I wish I were on your task force. I love thinking about these kinds of questions. A play might also be really interesting, right? You could then have your theater department perform it.
I would like to re-iterate David's play comment and promote Mamet's "Oleanna."
If you haven't read it, it is a two person show about sexual harassment in the college classroom.
It's amazing and both Ouiser and I have had great experiences teaching it.
If fiction is okay, I'd suggest Ernest Gaines' "A Lesson Before Dying," Alan Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams," Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried," Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones" and Alice Walker's "The Color Purple". Maybe even Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses".
For more contemporary/popular fiction, stuff like Diane Setterfield's "The Thirteenth Tale," Geraldine Brooks' "The People of the Book," Ian Caldwell's "The Rule of Four," etc. are all excellent.
If fiction's not cool, I'm not your gal. (Also, most of the stuff I read is substantially longer than 300 pages, so I'm not 100% sure that the above fit your criteria.)
I actually do have a non-fiction suggestion. It's longer than 300 pages, but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct." It's not just for linguists or people studying languages, it's for anyone who's interested in language in general. I haven't finished it yet, but it's well-written and accessible to non-scholars. And it's interesting!
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