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The Good Books Project features 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.

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

By PATRICIA DONOVAN

Published: June 20, 2011

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 UB undergraduates—as well as faculty and staff bookworms—separate the good from the bad and the ugly, the UB Libraries and Undergraduate Academies recently launched “The Good Books Project.”

Its goal was to develop a list of 48 books that embodies the mission and spirit of the university’s three Undergraduate Academies, which focus on civic engagement, global perspectives and research exploration.

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.

Bono says the Good Books 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.”

The resulting list includes 48 novels, memoirs, poetry, histories and 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 students can read one book from this list each month over the course of four years for an eclectic education grounded entirely in “unrequired reading” that has inspired inquiry, pleasure and renewed engagement with civic life.

“There was a rhyme and a reason for the selection of every book,” Borden notes.

“The idea was to bring together all of our students from different disciplines to focus on the three themes—research, civic engagement and research—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 developing 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 Arts and Sciences Library, worked with Borden on the project.

“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 away from their studies,” Schumacher says. “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 adds, “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.

Other recommendations are Michael Mandelbaum’s “The Frugal Superpower,” which suggests that the era of expansive American foreign policy is dead in the water, and daredevil archaeologist Ian Morris’ “Why the West Rules—For Now,” which 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 that richly informs our understanding of that nation and its people today.