Reading with Friends
An interactive reading program co-sponsored by the College of Charleston Friends of the Library and the Alumni Association. Reading with Friends features books chosen by College of Charleston faculty members and friends, as well as the Convocation selection for first-year students.
September/October 2009
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
With the creative verve of the greatest fiction and the intimacy of a searing autobiography, The Things They Carried is a testament to the men who risked their lives in Vietnam, America’s most controversial war. It is also a mirror held up to the frailty of humanity. Ultimately The Things They Carried and its myriad protagonists call to order the courage, determination, and luck we all need to survive.
November/December 2009
South of Broad by Pat Conroy
Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. The book follows the lives of a tightly knit group of high school seniors whose ties endure for years, surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, and Charleston’s dark legacy of racism and class divisions.
January/February 2010
Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
Netherland gives both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st-century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man – of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory.
March 2010
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers’ job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients’ minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalized a generation of young men, and is one of the most acclaimed novels of the past 20 years.
April/May 2010
Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon
Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by Another Name unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. In this groundbreaking historical expose, Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history-when a cynical new form of slavery was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War and re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans until the dawn of World War II. It is the most recent Pulitzer Prize Winner in general non-fiction.
Summer 2010
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
Brilliantly conceived as a relay of scientific stories, The Age of Wonder investigates the earliest ideas of deep time and space, and the explorers of “dynamic science,” of an infinite, mysterious Nature waiting to be discovered. The Age of Wonder is a riveting history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science.
Visit http://blogs.cofc.edu/fol for information on interactive discussions for each book with College of Charleston faculty members and friends. You can also find information about the Friends of the Library and the Alumni Association.
Selections will be available for sale at the College of Charleston Bookstore, 160 Calhoun Street, 843.953.5518.
