The Sorum Book Club, which recently received almost 50 suggestions for good reads, is offering two main selections and two student favorites for the club’s next readings. Participants can request as many as they can read over the coming term break.
The picks of the season include National Book Critics Circle Award winner “Atonement,” by Ian McEwan, a “masterfully crafted” novel that chronicles an event that changes the lives of half a dozen people in an upper middle class English country home in 1935.
In the non-fiction “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” writer Michael Pollan examines America’s precipitous rise in obesity from the perspective of a naturalist: “The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world.” Pollan has been called thoughtful, funny and adventurous, and his book, an eye-opener.
Student favorites include, from Ariel Palter ’10, “The History of Love,” by Nicole Krauss, a poetic and “hauntingly beautiful” novel, spanning more than 60 years, about two characters whose lives are woven together in complex ways. The book takes readers from Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe to present day Brighton Beach.
House Council Chair Emma Labrot ’09’s choice is “If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” by noted Italian journalist and writer Italo Calvino. “I love this book because it is such a different writing style that automatically includes the reader in the story. The reader is just as much a character as the characters themselves,” Labrot says. The book’s 10 interrelated stories include alternate chapters told in second-person narration.
Sorum House’s Prof. Suzanne Benack and Devin Harrison ’09 note that the cost of each book is $5, and they’ll be delivered right to individual mailboxes. For more information, contact Benack at benacks@union.edu .
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