St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX has selected Max Brook’s World War Z  as their freshman studies common text for the Fall 2012 semester. All incoming freshmen for the upcoming school year will be reading this book and discussing… The Zombie War.

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the world, from decimated cities to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and children who came face-to-face with the living and undead hell of that time. World War Z is the result, a document that conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance.

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“I expected about half to skip it, another half to say it was too difficult. Instead I got one unanimous round of applause. They all loved it. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It’s like us on steroids,’ said one. Fourteen other heads bobbed in agreement.”

She goes on to mention in her article on buzzfeed.com how refreshing it was to find a contemporary novel like Shteyngart’s that deals with or even seems to understand technology.

“Super Sad true Love Story is one of the few in recent memory to tackle this theme head on — and it’s the one I think we’ll be reading in 10 years from now, after the award winners are forgotten.”

Set in an alternative future, America is crushed by a financial crisis and our patient Chinese creditors may just be ready to foreclose on the whole mess. Then Lenny Abramov, son of an Russian immigrant janitor and ardent fan of “printed, bound media artifacts” (aka books), meets Eunice Park, an impossibly cute Korean American woman with a major in Images and a minor in Assertiveness. Could falling in love redeem a planet falling apart?

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I recall so well my freshman class’s heartfelt reactions to the suffering of young Elie Wiesel as we became immersed in the story of Night. Class discussions revolved around the cruelty of humankind and the necessity of hope, and their journals reflected just how engrossed they were in the journey. They experienced a similar reaction when the students (who were, like the school, about 92% Caucasian) dove into the life of Richard Wright and his shocking experience of growing up in the Jim Crow South in Black Boy.  During our conversations we explored topics such as the use of the “N word,” poverty, racism, religion, and, of course, the cruelty of humanity.

Those conversations fed me, and as we went on to read works by Maya Angelou, Frank McCourt, and Amy Tan, a small part of me couldn’t help but wonder: How would my students react to Dear Marcus, my self-published memoir about being shot in the back when I was 13? I had sworn never to bring up my book in class, believing it was best to maintain a “professional distance.” Despite my students’ constant prodding (“Are you married, Mr. McGill? Do you have kids? Were you in a car accident?”), I always respectfully declined discussions about my personal life.

Then a funny thing happened. Students being students, many of them “googled” me and, lo and behold, discovered that the life story of their mysterious teacher was right there for the entire world to read. Many found ways to purchase my memoir, and soon word about it spread.

Whether it was between classes, during lunch break, or in study hall, students would find me and, clutching their copy of my book, would then ask me questions about it. Their questions were soon followed by the inevitable demand that I autograph their copy. Not long after the first students read it, a fellow teacher doing a unit on the African-American experience in America asked if I would come speak to two of her classes. When word got out that I had agreed to do it, the teacher had to move the event to an auditorium because so many other students wanted to join the discussion.

At first I was apprehensive that disclosing so much about myself would be harmful to the student-teacher relationship, but much to my pleasure it had the opposite effect. Even students whom I knew clear well didn’t like me (I was a pretty demanding teacher and could be a harsh grader) came up to me after the talk to tell me how moved or fascinated they were by my story. In the weeks that followed, I had an untold number of healthy conversations with students about my life and about their own, and about the broader themes that my book touches on: poverty, class, faith, family, loyalty, trust, and destiny—topics that we may not have had a chance to explore in such depth otherwise. For the first time, I began to think, Well maybe, just maybe, someday there could be a place for Dear Marcus on a curriculum. . . .

I am so pleased that Dear Marcus will now be available for a wider audience, and it is my sincere hope that educators will find it worthy of sharing with their students. Though it is my own story, it addresses issues of race, class, disability, inner-city violence, the importance of education, the repercussions of our actions on other people’s lives, and, most of all, the importance of hope and perseverance—issues that are relevant and that warrant classroom discussion.  Ultimately, I hope that Dear Marcus will help young people see the beauty in their own lives while reminding them that even if things don’t go the way that they expect, they are in control of their futures.

-Jerry McGill

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The Other Wes Moore is a thought-provoking look into the “fates” of two men with the same name. One man became a Rhodes Scholar, a White House Fellow, and a successful investment banker, while the other is now spending a life sentence in prison for the murder of a police officer. Both emerged from similar environments, yet they now inhabit two different worlds; author Wes Moore sets out to answer how and why. The book has already been adopted for common reading at more than twenty colleges & universities.

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Acts of Faith is Eboo Patel’s remarkable account of a coming of age and learning to understand what led him toward religious pluralism rather than hatred. His story is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people, and to the notion that we find the fulfillment of our identities in the work we do in the world.

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My Orange Duffel Bag tells of Bracken’s battles with homelessness, poverty, abuse, abandonment at age 15, and how he eventually turned his life around to successfully earn a full-ride football scholarship to the Georgia Institute of Technology. When he left for college, everything he owned fit in an orange duffel bag.

Now, in this award-winning illustrated memoir and road map to personal transformation, Bracken shares his story as well as everything he’s learned about overcoming the odds and radically changing his life so that students can create positive, lasting change of their own.

At Saint Louis University, Selection committee member Patrice French said:

“Enrique’s Journey provides a completely different lens from which human beings live their life. It’s a raw account of how some people fight and risk their lives just to find a better lives for themselves. As well, I believe that there are elements in this book that demonstrate aspects of true service, which is in direct alignment with SLU’s mission.”

More than 50 colleges and seven cities have chosen Enrique’s Journey for their common or one city reads. Many colleges select the book because it goes beyond a platform to talk about immigration. While encouraging global awareness, the book provides broad and deep discussions of large themes students grapple with: loss and hope, survival, community, family, diversity, and redemption. Students relate to a boy close to their own age who steels himself with great determination to get through difficult circumstances.

One Texas student simply said: “Never has a non-fiction book so strongly engaged my imagination and emotions. Never before has a book inspired me to use what talent I do  possess . . . to make a difference in the world”

For a list of other schools that have adopted Enrique’s Journey, and related teaching guides and videos, visit Sonia Nazario’s website.

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From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity, is a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities. In this fast-paced book based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.

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“I love this book!   I’m really enthusiastic about it and I hope you will be, too,” said Dr. Sara Jorgensen, Assistant Professor, African and World History, serves as chair of the FYRE committee.  “This is not a feel-good book, but it is an inspiring book. It will make people think about a lot of important issues.”

To read the university’s full announcement of this selection, click here. Also be sure to check out UTC’s unveiling video posted here!

Outcasts United tells the true story of a soccer team of refugee teenage boys coached by a Jordanian-born woman in Clarkston, a small town outside Atlanta, Georgia. The book follows a pivotal season in the life of the refugees, their families and their charismatic coach as they struggle to build new lives in a fading town overwhelmed by change. Theirs is a story about resilience in the face of extraordinary hardship, the power of one person to make a difference and the daunting challenge of creating community in a place where people seem to have so little in common.

The reception my novel Ready Player One has received has been, quite simply, beyond any debut author’s wildest dreams. Much to my amazement, the book spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, showed up on several Best of 2011 lists, and is even in development as a big-budget movie with Warner Bros.

But the facet of Ready Player One’s success I’ve found the most surprising—and gratifying—is how much younger readers love the book.  More precisely, they seem to be enjoying it not just as a big dumb adventure story.  They’re actually thinking about the chewier issues I was thinking about as I wrote it.

You see, Ready Player One is in part a love letter to the books, video games, movies, TV shows, and music of my childhood.  Although I knew these artifacts would resonate with readers of my generation, I was never sure how today’s students (with no memory of the Big Hair Decade) would respond to them, or if they would respond to them at all.

But since last August, I’ve found dozens of wonderful messages in my inbox from teenage readers who tell me Ready Player One is their new favorite book. I’ve been equally thrilled to hear that Ready Player One is a 2012 Alex Award winner, and that it’s been selected as the common read for this year’s incoming freshman class at the University of Massachusetts.

For some of the younger readers I’ve heard from, the 80s pop culture in the book seems to work a lot like the references to ancient mythology in an Indiana Jones movie—you don’t have to be familiar with them to enjoy the quest. But better still, many of them read the book with a web browser open, looking up the references as they go. And it seems that for every teen who gets excited about the Atari 2600 or sticks Ladyhawke in her Netflix queue as a result, there’s another who comes across my loving references to authors like Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick and gets inspired to pick up a classic and, you know,  actually read it.

I have a confession to make here: while I never thought it would actually happen, I did always secretly hope that younger readers would get Ready Player One. I wrote it as the kind of classic good-vs-evil, underdog-triumphs-over-all adventure story that I loved reading as a teen. And—also in emulation of my favorite books—I tried to make it touch on some more serious themes too.  In short, I tried to write the kind of book I wish I’d been assigned back when I was wearing pegged acid-washed jeans—a book that picks you up and grabs you with spaceships or wizards, with great action or an amazing love story, but sneakily manages to leave you with something more meaningful to chew on as well.

Ready Player One takes place in a near future where all-too-plausible social horrors like poverty, disease, and energy crises have run rampant, and I think—or hope—there’s something thought-provoking about seeing our futures portrayed that way.  Its hero is a loner who’s pretty much given up on the ugliness he sees in the real world and taken refuge in a virtual one—but by the end of the book, he learns that escapism isn’t the panacea he thinks it is, which is a lesson I figured out the hard way growing up.  And at the very center of the story is the role technology plays in our modern lives and how it shapes modern identity.  I think that subject in particular really resonates with readers who, in the course of growing up themselves, are finding their own identities increasingly defined by the virtual worlds of Facebook, Twitter, and the web.

If I had a time-traveling DeLorean, the first thing I’d do with it is head back to 1986 Ohio and give a copy of Ready Player Oneto my own teenage self, because the truth is, I really wrote it for him.  Sadly, the flux capacitor on my DeLorean isn’t operational, so the closest I can come to fulfilling that dream is asking you to consider the book as common reading for incoming freshman.

The reception my novel Ready Player One has received has been, quite simply, beyond any debut author’s wildest dreams. Much to my amazement, the book spent several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, showed up on several Best of 2011 lists, and is even in development as a big-budget movie with Warner Bros.

But the facet of Ready Player One’s success I’ve found the most surprising—and gratifying—is how much younger readers love the book.  More precisely, they seem to be enjoying it not just as a big dumb adventure story.  They’re actually thinking about the chewier issues I was thinking about as I wrote it.

You see, Ready Player One is in part a love letter to the books, video games, movies, TV shows, and music of my childhood.  Although I knew these artifacts would resonate with readers of my generation, I was never sure how today’s students (with no memory of the Big Hair Decade) would respond to them, or if they would respond to them at all.

But since last August, I’ve found dozens of wonderful messages in my inbox from teenage readers who tell me Ready Player One is their new favorite book. I’ve been equally thrilled to hear that Ready Player One is a 2012 Alex Award winner, and that it’s been selected as the common read for this year’s incoming freshman class at the University of Massachusetts.

For some of the younger readers I’ve heard from, the 80s pop culture in the book seems to work a lot like the references to ancient mythology in an Indiana Jones movie—you don’t have to be familiar with them to enjoy the quest. But better still, many of them read the book with a web browser open, looking up the references as they go. And it seems that for every teen who gets excited about the Atari 2600 or sticks Ladyhawke in her Netflix queue as a result, there’s another who comes across my loving references to authors like Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick and gets inspired to pick up a classic and, you know,  actually read it.

I have a confession to make here: while I never thought it would actually happen, I did always secretly hope that younger readers would get Ready Player One. I wrote it as the kind of classic good-vs-evil, underdog-triumphs-over-all adventure story that I loved reading as a teen. And—also in emulation of my favorite books—I tried to make it touch on some more serious themes too.  In short, I tried to write the kind of book I wish I’d been assigned back when I was wearing pegged acid-washed jeans—a book that picks you up and grabs you with spaceships or wizards, with great action or an amazing love story, but sneakily manages to leave you with something more meaningful to chew on as well.

Ready Player One takes place in a near future where all-too-plausible social horrors like poverty, disease, and energy crises have run rampant, and I think—or hope—there’s something thought-provoking about seeing our futures portrayed that way.  Its hero is a loner who’s pretty much given up on the ugliness he sees in the real world and taken refuge in a virtual one—but by the end of the book, he learns that escapism isn’t the panacea he thinks it is, which is a lesson I figured out the hard way growing up.  And at the very center of the story is the role technology plays in our modern lives and how it shapes modern identity.  I think that subject in particular really resonates with readers who, in the course of growing up themselves, are finding their own identities increasingly defined by the virtual worlds of Facebook, Twitter, and the web.

If I had a time-traveling DeLorean, the first thing I’d do with it is head back to 1986 Ohio and give a copy of Ready Player One to my own teenage self, because the truth is, I really wrote it for him.  Sadly, the flux capacitor on my DeLorean isn’t operational, so the closest I can come to fulfilling that dream is asking you to consider the book as common reading for incoming freshman.