Summer Reading Assignments!

Many of our elementary, middle and high schools assign summer reading to their students. Now there's a growing trend among universities to do the same thing for their incoming freshmen. The goal, says U.S. News, is to engage students early with some challenging reading and then carry on discussions when the fall semester starts. One dean adds that participation in such a reading program "eases the intellectual and emotional transition newcomers make when they arrive on campus. [They are] a catalyst to get the discussion started, make new friends."

The themes of the books generally parallel issues confronting today's college students or reflect topics in the daily news and popular culture. Some of the books chosen by various academic institutions for Summer 2007 include:

• The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler
• The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder
• Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
• Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert
• The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri
• Branded: the Buying and Selling of Teenagers by Alissa Quart
• A Hope in the Unseen: an American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League by Ron Suskind
• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson
• The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas
• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
• Year of Wonders: a Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
• The Measure of Our Success: a Letter to My Children and Yours by Marian Wright Edelman
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

What book would you have freshmen college students read? Give us your suggestions! Mine would be from author Tom Wolfe: either Bonfire of the Vanities or I Am Charlotte Simmons.