Future Book Selections
 While many other honors programs and colleges offer book seminars, Commonwealth Honors Seminar is distinguished by the texts selected and its method of selecting them.
Who selects the books
The books are selected for each year’s seminar series, not by faculty or administrators, but by a committee of Commonwealth College students themselves.
How the books are selected
This group of students, known as the Honors Seminar Scholars, works in a yearlong course under the Seminar Director’s direction. Each year the Honors Seminar Scholars narrow a list of some forty books to six before reviewing and presenting their selections to one another and their peers and finally choosing two for the year ahead.
What criteria are used in selecting books
The books chosen are not the typical classics of the Great Books Course tradition. Rather, they are contemporary books by living authors or with ties to living translators, survivors, etc., and the College often features readings by the authors and discussions with them.
The Honors Seminar Scholars look for engaging books that offer a rich array of themes for research and discussion. They may be fiction or non-fiction or personal memoir; they may represent just about any academic discipline--political, scientific, business, literary--but must be accessible and potentially interesting to a general readership.
Books are chosen not because they offer the final word on their subject but because they open up a range of subjects for deliberation, debate, and futher discovery. Some of the most successful books chosen for the course share many of the following criteria:
• Appeal to an audience of differing academic and personal interests;
• Present a rich array of topics for research and discussion;
• Incorporate and illustrate varied approaches to research;
• Represent an expanse of social and cultural experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives in content & authorship;
• Represent contemporary and, when possible, local authors;
• Offer students an uncommon reading experience;
• Stand out in style and/or content;
• Promise to sustain a semester of exploration and discussion;
• Work well to complement other seminar selections; and
• Have the power to delight as well as instruct.
Your comments on the book possibilities listed below, as well as suggestions of other books fitting our criteria, are very much welcome. Please send them to Alex Phillips, Honors Seminar Series Director, at honorsseminar@comcol.umass.edu.
Books Selected for 2009-2010
Ten Little Indians – Fall 2009
 Sherman Alexie
Grove Press; 2003; 243pp
From Publisher's website:
"Sherman Alexie is one of our most acclaimed and popular writers today. Now, with Ten Little Indians, he offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heartrending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love ... Even as they often make us laugh, Sherman Alexie’s stories are driven by a haunting lyricism and naked candor that cut to the heart of the human experience. The result is a short-story collection that has been hailed as Alexie’s 'best in years' (Austin American-Statesman) and 'proves once again that he is a fearless writer'(Rocky Mountain News)."
In Persuasion Nation – Spring 2010
 George Saunders
Riverhead Books; 2006; 228pp
From publisher's website:
"Saunders's work in the last six years has come to be recognized as one of the strongest — and most consoling — cries in the wilderness of the millennium's political and cultural malaise. In Persuasion Nation's sophistication and populism should establish Saunders once and for all as this generation's literary voice of wisdom and humor in a time when we need it most."
Initial List (Suggested by faculty, staff, and students)
Ama Ata Aidoo, The Girl Who Can
Sherman Alexie, Ten Little Indians
Tamim Ansary, West of New York, East of Kabul
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name
Sarah Burd-Sharps et al, The Measure of America
Marie Curie, Something Out of Nothing
Charles D’Ambrosio, The Dead Fish Museum
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Jared Diamond, Collapse
Jim and Jamie Dutcher, Wolves at Our Door
Freeman Dyson, The Scientist as Rebel
Dave Eggers, What is the What
Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister’s Pox
David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
Ron Hansen, Atticus
Mohja Kahf, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains
Jamaica Kincaid, Among Flowers
Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side
Cammie McGovern, Eye Contact
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Bill McKibben, The End of Nature
Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Elizabeth Moon, The Speed of Dark
Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise
Patrik Ourednik, Europeana
Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture
Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis, tr., Swann’s Way
George Saunders, In Persuasion Nation
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Alan Weisman, The World Without Us
Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life
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