Previous Books
In the first year of the project, 2005-06, over 1,000 WSU students read—and discussed, and wrote about, and attended events related to—Rochester Author Fan Shen’s Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard. The book was taught in dozens of WSU classes, primarily first-year composition, and WSU students met and discussed the book and its topic, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its author in classroom settings, with other panelists and readers, and in the context of other narratives and perspectives.
In the second year of the project, participation increased considerably. During the 06-07 year over 1,800 students read Kent Nerburn’s Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Trails with an Indian Elder, and the evening reading sessions featuring the author brought a near-capacity crowd of almost 700 students to Somsen auditorium. Over one hundred students also attended each of the additional sessions featuring the author during his two-day visits each term. Author Nerburn’s surprising comments about fictionalizing events and compositing characters brought an unforeseen and unanticipated energy to the classroom discussions that followed as readers debated the ethics of representation in nonfiction writing. 
In 2007-08, WSU selected Ruth Ozeki's novel My Year of Meats. My Year of Meats tells the story of Jane and Akiko, two women on opposite sides of the planet, whose lives are connected by a TV cooking show. My Year of Meats was an international success, translated into eleven languages and published in fourteen countries. It won the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award, the Imus/Barnes and Noble American Book Award, and a Special Jury Prize of the World Cookbook Awards in Versailles. "Students from numerous disciplines have been truly enthusiastic about this wide-ranging novel, which addresses cross-cultural understanding, the complexities of denial, and the effects of growth hormones in our food," says WSU Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Oness. "My Year of Meats is both penetrating and entertaining, and it’s a testament to Ozeki’s skill that she delivers an important message in a provocative and humorous novel." My Year of Meats was read by over 2,000 students and faculty.
In 2008-09, over 2.000 students and faculty read Dr. Robert Morris's The Blue Death: The Intriguing Past and Present Danger of the Water You Drink. Dr. Morris's book was not only adopted widely in first-year composition courses but also across the curriculum, from biology, geoscience, and physics courses to social science, political science, and history classes at all levels of instruction. The university focused its attention on the growing crisis over water safety, with a lecture series, film festival, and community events all addressing this vital contemporary problem. The events culminated with a university-wide celebration of drinking water on Earth Day.
The WSU Common Book Project ultimately aims to grow cross the entire campus and into the local community, if in small, incremental, and methodically implemented stages developed toward that goal. We hope to seek ways to make the selection more interdisciplinary and more fully integrated with the extracurricular (and co-curricular) programming already in place.
Last Modified: Monday, July 27, 2009 8:57
