The atomic bomb. Dire poverty. Immigration. The death penalty. Environmental degradation. Mountain lions.
The topics covered in the Common Reading Experience at Fort Lewis College have included these and more as the program looks back on its first decade.
“We had a committee called Freshman Foundations that Carol Smith, dean of General and Exploratory Studies, led, and I was a member of,” said Bridget Irish, who coordinated the program for nine of its first 10 years. “Our job was to come up with juicy things for freshmen that would get them involved right away, get them excited about being at an academic institution and help them make friends right away. This was one of the ideas, and I grabbed it.”
While the main target is freshmen, Irish has been gratified by the level of community involvement, she said, including the hundreds who generally attend the authors’ lectures.
“By accident, by a stroke of luck, the Common Reading Experience has drawn the community and the college together,” Irish said. “People in book clubs and stores will stop me and ask, ‘What’s the book?’”
Picking the book
The first book selection, Folding Paper Cranes by FLC Professor Emeritus Leonard Bird, was easy, she said. The book talks about Bird’s experiences with early atomic-bomb exercises and his visits to the International Park for World Peace in Hiroshima, Japan.
“Everybody on campus loved him, and he was around to do a lot of things,” Irish said. “He spoke at Convocation and a lot of classes. So many good things came out of that because it led to the creation of the Hesperus Peace Park.”
The next year’s selection, Mountain to Mountain by Tracy Kidder, taught them a lesson about making the book selection, she said.
“We learned not to do it without the author coming,” she said. “We did a Skype presentation with him, but we couldn’t get a lot of people there. He did a radio interview, too, and he was affable and erudite, but he wasn’t here. When the authors come, the students say, ‘I’m so honored that the author came here.’”
By now, in addition to the requirement to include an author visit, the Reading Committee has established several criteria:
Not only does the author need to be able to come, he or she must be affordable. Some charge as much as $30,000 for an appearance.
The book must be available in paperback and preferably 300 pages or fewer, because all 1,000 or so freshmen get a free copy at registration.
It doesn’t have to be beautifully written, but it must be full of engaging ideas.
“A lot of faculty members think of them as ‘Oprah books’ and kind of dismiss them,” Irish said. “But a lot of people forget who our audience is. We are picking books for 18-year-olds who are not necessarily readers and are not sophisticated thinkers. If we show them books are pleasurable to read and make them think, then we’ve done a good job.”
Books are selected by the Reading Committee with input from the Writing Program, said director of the program Erik Juergensmeyer, who also sits on the committee. Writing teachers are among the most active on campus at incorporating the annual book in their curriculum, but whether other departments include it or not depends on the topic.
“I know that the year we read Full Body Burden, (biology professor) Heidi Steltzer used the book extensively in her Environmental Health class,” said Cynthia Dott, who now chairs the Reading Committee, adding that this year’s book, Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, is going to be popular with sociology professors. “It really varies a lot depending on the book, and which disciplines it resonates with.”
Recommendations come from faculty, staff and community members, Juergensmeyer said.
“We’re meeting next week, and Cynthia said to bring our summer reading list,” he said.
The Reading Committee has had a combination of prescience and luck in its selections, often picking books on topics that are just heating up in the national debate.
“If you read papers and magazines, listen to the news and then read book reviews, you can tell what’s brewing,” Irish said. “Two weeks before school started the year we read David Baron’s The Beast in the Garden, a mountain lion came to Park Elementary School and looked in the window, and it had to be killed. A little while later, a mountain lion had to be killed on (West) Second Avenue. That really brought people in.”
Baron’s book was probably the most popular with faculty because of their outdoors lifestyles, she said, as well as bringing in people from both sides of the issue, ranchers and environmentalists.
For the students, the most popular was probably Eric Greitens’ The Heart and the Fist, which recounts the Rhodes Scholar’s experiences in the military in Iraq and his work helping returning veterans when he came back home.
“That was one where we took a big risk, because we weren’t happy it had a gun on the cover,” Irish said. “But we felt his academic career and his philanthropic career outweighed that. And he was really engaging when he came.”
She was most impressed by Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, and Sonia Nazario, author of Enrique’s Journey, who were the two hardest working authors while they were in town.
“Greg drew the biggest crowd,” she said, mentioning the financial scandal regarding his foundation, Central Asia Institute, which led to Mortenson being required to repay $1.2 million in restitution for misused funds in 2012. “Yes, he’s a stupid businessman, but when he was here, I don’t know when he slept. He was always signing books, giving away books, and after he left, the passion about women’s education on campus grew enormously.”
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