As the academic year begins and fresh frosh settle into their dorm lofts, relatives and friends worry: What are our freshmen reading in the Age of Texts and Twitter? Perhaps your freshman goes to a college that urges every matriculating student to sample Toni Morrison or Colum McCann or Judd Winick, but what about everyone else?
Here are some books Slate staff members think might help a college freshman make sense of the new world of university (and beyond).
Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas
Common Ground - epic, thrilling, boisterous - tells the story of three families living through the Boston school integration crisis of the 1970s. With tremendous subtlety and sympathy, Lukas portrays poor Irish-Americans, poor black Americans and prosperous yuppies. The book tells you almost everything you need to know about race in America, class conflict, white flight,gentrification, newspapers, the Catholic Church, and grassroots organizing. If college is about learning to understand the Other, there is no better introduction. - David Plotz, editor
Python in a Day by Richard Wagstaff
Take a break from soul searching and learn to code. It won’t make you lifelong friends (unless you get really good at artificial intelligence), but a small investment will save you weeks of crunching numbers at a tedious summer internship, make you a wicked problem-solver, and put a highly marketable skill in your bag in case that anthropology major doesn’t work out. - Chris Kirk, interactives editor
Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition
The technology of ink and paper invites you to linger profitably on the definition of the word you were looking for. Even better, it forces you to submit yourself to the serendipity of stumbling upon a mot or a diagram that accidentally changes the way you think about thinking about the world. Likewise, random encounters with the volume’s many handsome illustrations will clue you into the correct names for architectural and design features of your campus, from the squinches on the chapel to the bun feet on the chairs of the disciplinary committee. Random House Webster’s Unabridged offers a self-directed course in Whatchamacallitology. Also, it works OK as an ironing board. - Troy Patterson, writer-at-large
Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould
Gould was best known as an evolutionary biologist, but he could hold forth knowledgeably on any number of topics, as evidenced by his many collections of essays. He could describe complicated scientific theories in ways that nonscience majors could grasp, and he never condescended. - Rachael Larimore, managing editor
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles
Not only because knowing the story is academically useful, but because reading (and loving) The Odyssey is a rite of passage sort of akin to going off to college, or even to setting sail across the Mediterranean. Fagles’ translation delivers an immortal set of myths wrapped in exquisite, moving language: all bright eyed goddesses, high halls and bodies tumbling in the dust. This 3,000-year-old poem will teach you what literature can do. - Katy Waldman, assistant editor
Emily Post’s Etiquette by Peggy Post, Anna Post, Lizzie Post and Daniel Post Senning
Etiquette isn’t just a bunch of silly little rules. Behaving graciously is valuable in its own right, and doing so could be the extra something that makes you stand out from the crowd. - Emily Yoffe, Dear Prudence columnist
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
If you don’t have time for the whole thing, just read Federalist No. 10, in which James Madison writes that the role of government is to find the fulcrum between upholding personal liberties and preventing humans’ factious nature from turning us violently against one another. - Emma Roller, editorial assistant
Dubliners by James Joyce
“The Dead,” from the 1914 short story collection Dubliners, is a heaping serving of despair, but every incipient adult could benefit from an evening spent at the Morkan sisters’ annual dinner and dance. Joyce eerily evokes the emotional distance that can haunt relationships, the melancholy of recalling a long-ago love, the deep sadness that floats in on snowflakes. (Oh, by the way, it’s the best-written prose in the history of the English language.) - Seth Stevenson, contributor
White: Essays on Race and Culture by Richard Dyer
An insightful read on the oft-ignored subject of “what it means to be white.” The English scholar traces the concept of whiteness through an utterly amazing scope of entry points including Christianity, photography, muscle-men in movies, and death. And with such an array of subject matter, pretty much any college freshman is certain to gain an important understanding of Western culture that will be useful in the long run. - Aisha Harris, Brow Beat assistant
Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson
If a liberal arts education should begin with a novice trekking through the endless epithets of The Iliad, it should end with a graduate capable of erudite, useful and engaging critical thinking such as that displayed in Slate music critic Carl Wilson’s delightful study of Celine Dion. If more of our college students emerged from the experience with the mix of curiosity, critical empathy and intellectual capaciousness on display in this little book, our society may well hope, as Dion so bewitchingly puts it, to “go on.” - J. Bryan Lowder, editorial assistant
Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Journalist Ehrenreich gives a detailed and moving first-person account of her experience of working a number of minimum-wage jobs. At 18, this book gave me concrete insight into how economically unfair America is and it inspired a tremendous sense of empathy in me, which is a good sentiment to take with you to college. - Katherine Goldstein, innovations editor
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
According to painstakingly collected anecdotal evidence, everyone will either become a vegetarian, take a break from being a vegetarian, date a vegetarian and/ or attempt to come up with a convoluted philosophical argument against vegetarianism while in college. Foer’s book is surprisingly readable and nonannoying - a gentle primer on the moral and cultural stakes of eating meat (or not). - L.V. Anderson, assistant editor
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I don’t think reading any book would be as useful as following this piece of advice: Go have a job for two years and then go to college. In lieu of that, students should maybe read Mrs. Dalloway? Virginia Woolf’s book about a society hostess preparing for a party is really a book about looking beyond the seeming parameters of one’s own life. Plus it suggests that your college-age romantic choices will have lifelong repercussions. - Julia Turner, deputy editor
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
In my first few panicked years of college, the idea of “reading for pleasure” was laughable. In graduate school I learned that the charge I got from picking up an engrossing novel completely unrelated to my research would give me energy to carry on with the difficult stuff. So I’d encourage a college freshman to keep reading for fun - and Red Mars is escapism of the most worthy kind. - Rebecca Onion, Vault editor
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
College students are going to get plenty of nonfiction in class. And who can’t relate to a Russian military officer assigned to occupation duty in the early 19th-century Caucasus region? The themes are universal: boredom, alienation and youthful pingponging between idealism and cynicism. A beautifully written reminder that people have (with some justice!) been dumping on the Young People These Days for quite a long time now. - Matthew Yglesias, Moneybox columnist The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan’s masterpiece is much more than a slap on the knuckles of anti-science promulgators. It’s a love poem for reality, a thoughtful paean to science as a way of making sure we don’t fool ourselves.He describes why people tend to believe things despite a lack of evidence and what kind of damage this does to society. Demon-Haunted World also is a wonderfully uplifting story on the wonder of science and our place in the universe. - Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy blogger
Stoner by John Williams and Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Lucky Jim is wildly funny. Stoner is contemplative and sad. Both, I think, might help college freshmen better understand and relate to the men and women who will be teaching their classes - and help them understand that the professors, too, are often just making it up as they go along. - Justin Peters, Crimeblogger
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
I know you’re supposed to wait till some sloe-eyed lover gives it to you. But it’s the book that changed my whole circuitry freshman year. - Dahlia Lithwick, contributor
Family, Pages 34 on 09/25/2013