This section is a collection of titles for students who will be attending college in the fall of 2010. These titles have been chosen from freshman reading lists in humanities and liberal arts courses at several universities as well as from recommended summer reading lists of national journals and publications.
Fiction
City Of Thieves: A Novel
by David Benioff.
Author and screenwriter Benioff second novel is a hard-to-put-down tale based on his grandfather's stories about surviving WWII in Russia. Having elected to stay in Leningrad during the siege, 17-year-old Lev Beniov is caught looting a German paratrooper's corpse. The penalty for this infraction (and many others) is execution. But when Colonel Grechko confronts Lev and Kolya, a Russian army deserter also facing execution, he spares them on the condition that they acquire a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake. Their mission exposes them to the most ghoulish acts of the starved populace and takes them behind enemy lines to the Russian countryside. There, Lev and Kolya take on an even more daring objective: to kill the commander of the local occupying German forces. A wry and sympathetic observer of the devastation around him, Lev is an engaging and self-deprecating narrator who finds unexpected reserves of courage at the crucial moment and forms an unlikely friendship with Kolya, a flamboyant ladies' man who is coolly reckless in the face of danger. Benioff blends tense adventure, a bittersweet coming-of-age and an oddly touching buddy narrative to craft a smart crowd-pleaser.
The Passage
by Justin Cronin
Fans of vampire fiction who are bored by the endless hordes of sensitive, misunderstood Byronesque bloodsuckers will revel in Cronin's engrossingly horrific account of a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the gruesome reality behind the wish-fulfillment fantasies. When a secret project to create a super-soldier backfires, a virus leads to a plague of vampiric revenants that wipes out most of the population. One of the few bands of survivors is the Colony, a FEMA-established island of safety bunkered behind massive banks of lights that repel the virals, or dracs—but a small group realizes that the aging technological defenses will soon fail. When members of the Colony find a young girl, Amy, living outside their enclave, they realize that Amy shares the virals' agelessness, but not the virals' mindless hunger, and they embark on a search to find answers to her condition. (If you have read and enjoyed Stephen King's "The Stand", then you'll love "The Passage"!)
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War
by Karl Marlantes
Thirty years in the making, Marlantes's epic debut is a dense, vivid narrative spanning many months in the lives of American troops in Vietnam as they trudge across enemy lines, encountering danger from opposing forces as well as on their home turf. Marine lieutenant and platoon commander Waino Mellas is braving a 13-month tour in Quang-Tri province, where he is assigned to a fire-support base and befriends Hawke, older at 22; both learn about life, loss, and the horrors of war. Jungle rot, leeches dropping from tree branches, malnourishment, drenching monsoons, mudslides, exposure to Agent Orange, and wild animals wreak havoc as brigade members face punishing combat and grapple with bitterness, rage, disease, alcoholism, and hubris. A decorated Vietnam veteran, the author clearly understands his playing field (including military jargon that can get lost in translation), and by examining both the internal and external struggles of the battalion, he brings a long, torturous war back to life with realistic characters and authentic, thrilling combat sequences. Marlantes's debut may be daunting in length, but it remains a grand, distinctive accomplishment.
The Life of Pi: A Novel
by Yann Martel
Sixteen-year-old Pi Patel, his family and their zoo animals are emigrating from India to North America aboard a cargo ship, but the ship sinks and Pi finds himself sharing a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a 450 pound Bengal tiger. This is a novel that has it all - humor, irony, action and adventure, and a strong hint of spiritualism.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
by Dai Sijie
Two teenagers gain access to forbidden books while working in a “reeducation center” in Maoist China. (A wonderful little read that will soon be a major motion picture.)
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
A comic tour-de-force about a man who is fat, lazy, and useless. But, brilliant and arrogant, he talks his way into a number of jobs and nearly destroys every organization he touches.(Pulitzer Prize Winner.)
The Legend of Hell House
by Richard Matheson
"Hell House is the scariest haunted house novel ever written. It looms over the rest the way the mountains loom over the foothills." --Stephen King --
The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
Men have taken the world back, by firing women from their jobs and cutting off their bank accounts and credit cards. Women now have only two roles: wives, or servant babybreeders for wives. A scary read.
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler
In 2025, all sense of community has vanished with most of the jobs. The people who have a lot live in well-guarded fortress communities, while those with little are continually on guard against the desperate starving people and druggies who raid, rape, murder, and set fire to everything they destroy.
Thank You for Smoking
by Christopher Buckley
A very funny political novel, about the lobbyists for death -- the tobacco, gun and liquor folks.
NON-FICTION
Fateful Decisions
by Ian Kershaw
Tracing the thought processes behind crucial turning points in WWII's most crucial 19 months, Kershaw, the author of a major biography of Hitler and professor of modern history at the University of Sheffield, reminds us that nothing in that titanic struggle was predetermined. Events might have run a very different course had Great Britain decided to negotiate peace with Hitler in June 1940, or if Japan had attacked the Soviet Union from the east as Germany invaded from the west in June 1941. Kershaw shows that Germany's war on two fronts and Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor, though ultimately disastrous for those countries, were the results of chains of reasoning based on political and military goals, however despicable. Though the author makes deep, intelligent use of archival materials, he provides little new information. Rather, his analysis focuses on the structure of decision making and its consequences. Kershaw depicts Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union as severely hampered by one man giving the orders, getting input only from subordinates too fearful to say anything he didn't want to hear. The slower democratic process enabled many voices to be heard and better informed judgments to be made by Churchill and Roosevelt. This subtext adds a note of hope to a text depicting one of humanity's darkest periods.
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-1945
by Max Hastings.
This splendid volume tells the grim tale of the final collapse of the Third Reich. It does so from the viewpoints of the Western Allies, the Russians and the Germans. The research includes previously untapped Russian archives (particularly in the accounts of Soviet veterans) and leads to a gripping and horrifying story.
Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists
by Joel Best
Do you know the difference between “good” and “bad” statistics or how statistics and public policy are connected?
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
by Eric Schlosser
The growth of the fast food industry has changed America’s eating habits and greatly impacted agriculture, the meatpacking industry, the minimum wage, and other aspects of American life.
Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science
by Charles Wheelan
Wheelan makes economics understandable, even interesting, as he demystifies basic concepts and applies them to everyday life.
The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300 - 1850
by Brian Fagan
A fascinating look at how climate change influenced the course of the last thousand years of Western history. Author Brian Fagan highlight’s climate’s profound influence on the Viking discovery of North America, the Industrial and French Revolutions,and the Irish Potato Famine.
The World is Flat: A brief history of the 21st Century
by Thomas L. Friedman
This book is an account of the great changes taking place in our time, as lightning swift advances in technology and communications put people all over the globe in touch as never before.
The story of the 1964 World Series which played out against a backdrop of an America emerging from the Kennedy assassination, an escalating war in Vietnam, and the civil rights movement, marking a turning point: neither the nation, nor baseball, would ever be quite so innocent again.
Stalingrad
by Antony Beevor
One of the best books ever written regarding the savage battle that turned the tide of World War II. This is a must read for anyone with an interest in history or for those planning to major in it.(If you find this book interesting you might want to read The Fall of Berlin 1945 by the same author).
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