By Emily Esfahani Smith, author of The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters (Crown, January 2017) When I was a senior in high school, I thought I knew what I wanted to do with my life: I was going to be a doctor. I loved science, and easing the suffering of others, I

By Wayne Maines, father of Nicole Maines.  The Maines family is the focus of Amy Ellis Nutt’s Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (Random House, October 2015) Recently I had the opportunity to speak at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. Before the lecture I spent an hour walking around their beautiful campus, thinking

By Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown, March 2016) I began this project because I wanted to write a different kind of book about poverty in America. Instead of focusing exclusively on poor people or poor places, I began searching for a process that involved poor and well-off

Welcome to the new Common Reads website!  Featuring a highly-curated list of titles from across all publishing divisions of Penguin Random House, this site was created and designed to help you find the right book and the right resources for your school reading program. Whether you are an educator or a librarian looking for an