John Austin suggests:
1. Gore Vidal, Lincoln. One of the greatest historical novelists working today offers a fictional portrait of the Lincoln presidency.
2. Madison Smartt Bell, All Souls’ Rising. The story of the great Toussant L'Ouverture, a slave who led the revolution against the French in Haiti.

3. Patrick O’Brien, Master and Commander. A commander of an English frigate and his medicalofficer—scientist, linguist, spy—at sea during the Napoleonic wars. This is the first of twenty titles in the series.

4. Barry Unsworth, Sacred Hunger. A suspenseful and powerful account of a slave-trader turned utopianist. Winner of the 1992 Booker Prize.

5. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63. The first of Branch's three-volume history of the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most powerful and inspiring work of history I have ever read. Some its most powerful moments tell of the efforts of young people and students fighting for racial and economic justice.
6. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains. An account of the first human rights movement, the movement to abolish the British slave trade in the eighteenth century.

Darcy Caldwell suggests:
1. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A meditation on the natural world, philosophical, spiritual, a book that will inspire you to see, a sophisticated quadrate, of sorts.

2. Ernest Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying. Young Jefferson’s heroism will remain with you for a long time. This fictional narrative will remind you of Sister Prejean’s special program from 2007 and make you re-think the death penalty.

3. David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars. Don’t let the length scare you. A senior exhibition book that you can read on the beach. Mystery and suspense amid serious questions about identity and race.

4. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses. Cowboy John Grady Cole’s clarity, strength, and optimism amid violence and chaos will make this challenging read well worth the effort, wonderful male bonding moments.

5. Billy Collins, The Art of Drowning. Incredibly readable, thought-provoking, startling, smart,funny collection of poems: “I pour a coating of salt on the table / and make a circle in it with my finger. / This is the circle of life / I say to no one ….”
Childers, Chris
1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov. An unspeakably great book. "If only we would all realize that we are guilty of all things, before all people, there would be paradise on earth."

2. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos. A faux self-help guide complete with built-in quizzes; funny, quirky and intellectually stimulating. A good introduction to this intelligent and neglected writer.

3. Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales. Fantastically surreal stories, magical, mysterious and
beautifully written. Dinesen is a first-rate prose stylist.

4. Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Flaubert spent his whole life working on this book, in which all the demons of the great ascetic's mind and soul rise to tempt him in one night. Beautiful, brilliant, arcane.

5. David Mason, Ludlow. A recent verse novel about the massacre of miners struggling to unionize by mine owners in Ludlow, Colorado around the turn of the last century. Good verse, good story, and an important slice of American history.

Nathan Costa suggests:
1. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated. A sophomoric romp through Ukraine of the narrator's/author's quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Brilliant use of the English language; funny, searingly beautiful.

2. Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease. A sequel to Things Fall Apart, this book depicts the descendents of Okonkwo as they deal with mid-20th century conflicts of Igbo culture and Western values and education.

3. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim. An extended story, told by a narrator, of the attempted redemption of Jim, a romantic seaman who in a moment of crisis abandons his ship as he thinks it about to sink. His self-imposed exile takes him to Malaysia where he lords above the indigenous people, thinking himself unfit for the outside world.

4. James Agee, A Death in the Family. A powerful, kaleidoscopic tale of the unexpected death of a young father, from the viewpoints of his family members.

5. Adam Haslett, You Are Not a Stranger Here. A debut collection of short stories, startling in their frankness and intensity in depicting mental illness and life's liminal moments (coming-of-age, death, personal realization).

Sarah Demers suggests:
1. Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying. This story of a black man on death row for a crime he didn’t commit during the 1940s in the Deep South made me cry for days.

2. Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. An amazing look at what happens when two cultures collide and the struggle to negotiate those issues in a life-and-death medical situation. It really opened my eyes to issues I didn’t know existed in early high school.

3. Ron Suskind, A Hope in the Unseen. It reads on the cover. “An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League.” I couldn’t put it down. It made me both really upset and really inspired.

4. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family. The author implants herself in a drug- and crimeinfested Bronx neighborhood for ten years and follows different characters as they navigate the path they want their lives to take and battle against the path their world forces them to take. I couldn’t put it down.

5. Roy Arundhati, The God of Small Things. The first book that showed me the power texts can have to transport me out of my world and into the world of the story. Every time I had to put it down, I remember counting the minutes until I could return to it.

Jean Garnett suggests:
1. E. M. Forster, Howards End. A series of odd events intertwines the destinies of an unlikely group of characters: The idealistic young Schlegel sisters, the conservative and ‘nouveau riche’ Wilcox family and an impoverished bank clerk with poetic aspirations, Leonard Bast. Floundering through dysfunctional romances and conflicting beliefs, these characters highlight the alienating gulfs created by class differences and the difficulty of transcending them.

2. Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice. University student Edward Baltram gives his best friend Mark a sandwich laced with hallucinogens as a joke. While high, Mark falls from an open window to his death. The novel follows Edward through the agonizing process of coming to terms with his guilt, and gaining insight into himself.

3. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence. Set in 19th century New York City, this novel focuses on Newland Archer, a young member of the exclusive high society. When Countess Ellen Olenska leaves her Polish husband in Europe and returns to her New York roots, her former friends and family are reluctant to accept her back into the fold, and Newland must choose between his true desires and the strict demands imposed by his circle.

4. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, A smart, edgy collection of personal essays by an art critic who knows his stuff. Hickey’s prose is electrifying – poetic and tough –whether he is writing about Hank Williams, Las Vegas, Cezanne, basketball, jazz, Flaubert or psychedelic art. Uniquely American, Hickey’s narrative persona is strong, sprawling, random and a sucker for beauty.

5. J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey. Composed of two sections originally published as separate short stories in The New Yorker, this book features a pair of precocious siblings, Franny and Zooey Glass. Fed up with the maddening ‘phony’-ness of college, Franny has a nervous breakdown and comes home to wallow on her mother’s couch. Zooey, a sarcastic, immature and lovable film actor, joins his sister at home to talk through her spiritual crisis.

Terence Gilheany suggests:
1. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions.
"A marvelous book that is both thought-provoking and highly entertaining, ranging from the powerof placebos to the pleasures of Pepsi. Ariely unmasks the subtle but powerful tricks that our minds play on us, and shows us how we can prevent being fooled." -- Jerome Groopman, author of How Doctors Think.

2. Tal Ben-Shahar, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. “This fine book shimmers with a rare brand of good sense that is imbedded in scientific knowledge about how to increase happiness. It is easy to see how this is the backbone of the most popular course at Harvard today." -- Martin E. P. Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness.

3. Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. “Should be required reading for every American; yes, it is that good. It is hard to imagine a better portrait of 9/11 and its causes emerging anytime soon.” -- The Christian Science Monitor.

4. Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance. "This is a book about failure: how it happens, how we learn from it, how we can do better. Although its focus is medicine, its message is for everybody. . . . It has already been described as a modern masterpiece--and so it is." – Jeremy Lawrence, The Independent (UK).

5. Neil Fiore, The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play. "This book does two things well: helps you think about your work so you are more likely to start doing it, and less likely to worry about it when you are not doing it."


Gretchen Hurtt suggests:
1. Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies. Four sisters in the Dominican Republic respond in different ways to life under the dictator Trujillo. I liked this book for its engaging characters and fast-paced story. I've recommended it to lots of friends and students over the years.

2. Tobias Wolff, This Boy's Life: A Memoir. This is a sharply-written, coming-of-age story about a teenage boy.

3. Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea. This is a true story of a man who follows his dream of building schools in the remote regions of Pakistan. It's an inspiring, timely book.

4. John Steinbeck, East of Eden. This is an epic novel about an American family; it's one of my favorites from high school summer reading.

5. Shirley Hazard, The Transit of Venus. This poetic, beautifully constructed novel follows two sisters across decades and continents. Nan Mein recommended this book to me, and I fell in love with it!

Monica Matouk suggests:
1. A. S. Byatt, Possession. Two contemporary literature scholars research the lives of two Victorian writers. The literary mystery takes over their lives. Gripping and compulsively readable.

2. Charles Dickens, Bleak House. Dickens' epic masterpiece. A searing attack on the British legal system and a literary tour de force filled with a colorful cast of characters. Don't be put off by the length and by the somewhat slow first few pages—it's a lively plot and often hilariously funny.

3. Margaret Atwood, A Handmaid's Tale. A futuristic tale about a totalitarian state called the Republic of Gilead (formerly the U.S.) in which the sexes are segregated and women subjugated. Powerful and thought-provoking.

4. Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love. A family saga, a love story, and a version of Egyptian history, past and present.

5. Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time. The first volume centers on four very different young men in the 1920's and 1930's in England. If you like it, you're in luck: Powell's epic consists four 'movements' or 12 novels that span the decades between the first and second world wars in
England (they can be read as separate, individual books).

Elizabeth Roach suggests:
1. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. Most of you have probably read this great American coming of age novel, but, if you haven't, you simply must. A story about race and justice and reconciliation.

2. Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. An outrageously dysfunctional family . . . but perhaps not unlike our own families. Hilarious and disturbing.

3. Malika Oufkir, Stolen Lives. Oufkir's gripping memoir describing her fifteen-year imprisonment in Morocco. An unforgettable and shocking true story of unimaginable resilience, courage and endurance.

4. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway. A beautiful and lyrical account of one day in the life of an early twentieth-century woman, Clarissa Dalloway.

5. Michael Cunningham, The Hours. A tribute to Virginia Woolf's stunning artistry, this text reimagines the life of the author and her characters.

Morgan Scoville suggests:
1. Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods. A 1998 book by travel writer Bill Bryson, describing his attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his college friend, Stephen Katz. The book is written in a humorous style, interspersed with more serious discussions of matters relating to the trail's history, and the surrounding sociology, ecology, trees, plants, and animals.

2. Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild. A bestselling non-fiction book about the adventures of Christopher McCandless. It is an expansion of Krakauer's 9,000-word article, "Death of an Innocent," which appeared in the January, 1993 issue of Outside. Krakauer intersperses McCandless's story with a discussion of the wilderness experiences of people such as John Muir and John Menlove Edwards, as well as some of his own adventures.

3. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference. This book seeks to explain and describe enormous and "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppie shoes in the mid-1900s and the dramatic drop in the New York City crime rate in the late 1990s.

4. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood. This book details the 1959 slaying of Herbert Clutter, a wealthy farmer from Holcomb, Kansas: his wife, and two children. When Capote learned of the quadruple murder before the killers were captured, he decided to travel to Kansas and write about the crime. Bringing his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird) along, together they interviewed local residents and investigators assigned to the case and took thousands of pages of notes.

5. Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson is a bestselling nonfiction book by American writer Mitch Albom, published in 1997. It tells the true story of Morrie Schwartz and his relationship with his student, Mitch Albom. Both the film and the book chronicle the lessons about life that Mitch learns from his professor, who is dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

Alix Ross suggests:
1. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior. In high school, this book showed me the power of womanhood as it also revealed the complexity of the immigrant experience. The power of place and ancestry and identity are important themes.

2. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance. A heartbreaking and sweeping novel set in India during the Emergency. Read about humanity, hope, persistence and resilience despite great odds.

3. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News. The descriptions of Newfoundland are beautiful and
captivating despite the obvious harshness of the landscape. Journey with Quoyle, a neglected and miserable soul, as he discovers himself and reclaims his dignity by moving back to the land of his ancestors and starting over.

4. Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried. An honest and powerful set of stories, though fictional, based on the author's experiences fighting in Vietnam. O'Brien's seemingly simple language weaves an anti-war morality through the stories of young soldiers and what the war does to them. These voices resonate now with even more fervor given our current situation in Iraq. Incidentally, this was a book we were reading in my senior (college) short story class on September 9, 2001. I will never forget the connection I made with this book as a result.

5. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma. An amazing work of non-fiction detailing the author's four experimental meals he eats as he sets out to understand and explore our food system. Pollan's easy to read, journalistic style make this an enjoyable, if scary and seminal work in the modern environmentalism dialogue. If you don't care about what you eat now, you will after reading this book.

Matt Van Meter suggests:
1. Tatyana Tolstaya, The Slynx. People living in post-apocalyptic Moscow, suffering the
repercussions of nuclear winter 200 years after "the Blast." A dystopian fantasy blitz that reads like a Frightland ride, this is the first great Russian novel of the 21st century.

2. Zadie Smith, White Teeth. An ebullient debut from British novelist, Zadie Smith. This novel shines with energy and life; the characters careen through the story, finding and losing each other, and it's all you can do to keep up with it. She began writing it in high school.

3. John Updike, The Centaur. A beautiful and ecstatic novel, this book is itself a centaur of sorts. It is set simultaneously in a town in eastern Pennsylvania and amongst the gods of ancient Greece, narrated both by a high-school teacher and by his 17-year-old son. An important book to me, as I was growing up.

4. Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan. The tale of Misha Vainberg, 325-pound son of the 1,238th richest man in Russia. He lives in "St. Leninsburg," loves the South Bronx, and ends up in a central Asian republic embroiled in a civil war over how to draw the Orthodox cross. Oh, and he raps, too.

5. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep. Chandler has fallen out of favor recently, but his first novel— perhaps the best detective novel ever—reads effortlessly and, in its hardboiled way, beautifully. There is a fantastic 1946 movie of it with Humphrey Bogart (Chandler wrote the screenplay with William Faulkner.

Tyler Montgomery '04
1. David Ignatius, Agents of Innocence. A thrilling spy story. A fast, fun novel that runs all over the middle east and touches on a lot of relevant topics considering our current situation in Iraq.

2. Marilyn Robinson, Gilead. A multigenerational story of midwestern preachers that touches on large themes of faith, god, and family. A little slow, but perfect for a reflective, rainy afternoon.

3. Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone. A short, powerful tale of an African boy taken in as a child soldier and exposed to the horrors of war. A first person account of what is going on in many parts of Africa right now.

4. Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One. One of the greatest of all time. A true pump up novel that demonstrates why athletics are one of the best educational tools available. A real page turner.

5. David Guterson, East of the Mountains (Guterson also wrote Snow Falling on Cedars.) A touching story of an old man facing his death as he is diagnosed with cancer and heads off for his last hunt with his two loyal hounds, planning to kill himself. A surprisingly captivating narrative, considering the content, that really makes you think about perspective and generational differences.