Book 'em, Danno!

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- You're looking for something fresh to read, but holy granola, there are more than 1,879,000 titles out there - 46 by Dr. Seuss alone!

To help University at Buffalo undergraduates separate the good from the bad and ugly, the UB Undergraduate Academies working with the University Libraries recently launched "The Good Books Project."

Its goal was to develop a list of 48 books that embody the mission and spirit of the university's three undergraduate academies, which focus on civic engagement, global perspectives and research exploration, respectively.

The books and a synopsis of each can be found on the UB Libraries Web site.

Barbara Bono, professor of English and director of the Civic Engagement Academy, agrees that "good books lists" tend to mean dead white men. Not so in this case.

"This project -- the book project -- was developed by Hadar Borden, administrative director of the Undergraduate Academies, who worked with the UB Libraries to come up with a program that could help our undergraduates become informed generalist readers," said Bono.

The resulting list includes 48 novels, memoirs, books of poetry, histories, books of essays and social sciences, many by Asian, African and Latin American authors, nominated by members of the Undergraduate Academies Council, an advisory board of 25 faculty and staff members from throughout the university, who cited the books as personally important to them.

The selection committee says you could read one book from this list each month over the course of four years for an eclectic education grounded entirely in "unrequired reading" that would inspire inquiry, pleasure and renewed engagement with civic life.

"There was a rhyme and a reason for the selection of every book," Borden says.

"The idea was to bring together all of our students from different disciplines to focus on the three themes -- research, civic engagement and global perspective -- by reading one book a month during a typical four year undergraduate experience and discussing them with faculty members and fellow students. This is what college is all about," she says, "being exposed to new ideas, learning to think critically and develop new perspectives."

To that end, the list features new works like "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages," classics like "Waiting for the Barbarians," J.M. Coetzee's award-winning allegory of the war between oppressor and oppressed, and illuminating local works like "Farm hands: hard work and hard lessons from Western New York fields," by Batavia reporter Tom Rivers, who spent a year laboring in a dozen different jobs on a variety of Western New York farms.

There are novels, of course, but many are stories of struggle and deliverance set in distant and (to most students) exotic places that often are undergoing dramatic social change. Other books help students understand how change is produced, consider dramatic change in a historical setting or offer a micro-focus on individuals confronted with the inexplicable or astonishing.

Bridget Schumacher, an information literacy librarian in the UB Arts and Sciences Library, worked with Borden on the project.

She says, "Many times throughout the semester -- often just prior to breaks -- students approach librarians asking for 'a good book to read' while on vacation or as they take a short break from their studies. With this list, we are able to take a different path from just making suggestions from typical reader's advisory tools, such as review sites, and instead, encourage students to look at what others within our own UB community recommend – and after reading, return to that same community and indulge in conversations.

"On a personal note," she says, "I look forward to indulging in the books and resulting conversations myself. I've checked out a title from the public library, as the UB copy was checked out upon launch of the project. Actually, quite a few of the titles from the list were checked out upon the project launch! So I guess we selected some very popular titles."

Among them are Paul Loeb's "Soul of a Citizen," a classic handbook for budding social activists; "Stars in their Courses," historian Shelby Foote's graceful and sobering chronicle of the Gettysburg Campaign, and old friends like Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" and Peter Matthiessen's classic, "The Snow Leopard."

The list includes celebrated nonfiction by Richard Feynman and Eve Curie, Jonathan Safran Foer ("Eating Animals"), Naomi Klein, and that old standby, St. Augustine, whose juicy fourth-century AD "Confessions" (this translation by Henry Chadwick) of his sin-soaked youth and conversion remains a masterpiece of Western literature.

Another recommend is Michael Mandelbaum's tour of "The Frugal Superpower," which suggests that the era of expansive American foreign policy is dead in the water, and daredevil archaeologist Ian Morris, whose "Why the West Rules – For Now," offers a work of history eminently suitable for non-academics and likely to alter readers' perceptions forever.

No list of recommendations would be complete without "Crime and Punishment," but vying with it for narrative power are Anzia Yezierska's immigrant novel, "The Bread Givers" and "The Farming of Bones" by Edwidge Danicat, a book that memorializes the forgotten victims of the 1930s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Haiti, something with which most Americans are completely unfamiliar, but which richly informs our understanding of that nation and its people today.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, a flagship institution in the State University of New York system and its largest and most comprehensive campus. UB's more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities