Best Books For College Students: National Association Of Scholars List

As a follow-up to their report on "common reading" programs that assign texts to incoming college freshman, the National Association of Scholars recently released a list of 37 books they deem appropriate and necessary for college students to read. The list comes as a reaction to a number of colleges that were upset by the association's Beach Books: What Do Colleges Want Students to Read Outside of Class, which criticized many of the popular titles chosen by schools nationwide -- titles such as Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father and Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma.

For their own list, the association selected books based on intellectual diversity, length, ambition, lack of cynicism, narrative and complexity in non-fiction and importance of ideas and clarity if writing in non-fiction.

Below, check out the first 12 titles. Let us what you think about the the association's recommendations below -- If you were to assign freshman reading, what books would be on your list?

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Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott

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Comments

[Suzanne Boswell]

04:42 PM on 10/09/2010

The lack of female authors is quite disturbing. Where is Austen, the Brontes, Shelley, Atwood, Woolf, Beecher-Stowe, Eliot, Morrison, Lessing, Flannery O'Connor, Plath, Wharton, Gaskell (to name a few)?

[MJVs Common Sense]

03:20 PM on 09/29/2010

Good list (and the full list of 37 books is even better), sadly most of these books have been made controversial by people who don't understand them, so they will probably be censored in public schools to appease angry ignorant parents.

Students who value a full uncensored education should definitely look up these titles, though I would also recommend they look up the 200 or so "great books" and make a few selections from there as well.

[uhavenoface]

12:11 AM on 09/30/2010

actually the full list is godawful west-centric tripe that's designed specifically to remove any hint of multiculturalism from university reading lists.

[rstewart3]

02:13 AM on 09/29/2010

I would probably add Beowulf and Canterbury Tales to the list.

[J R Kaplan]

09:23 PM on 09/28/2010

I read Death Comes for the Archbishop while in high school, but it was not assigned. Same with Darwin. I didn't read St. Augustine until I was in college, and I read perhaps a dozen other Dickens works. starting when I was maybe ten years old, before I reached the one suggested here, and I didn't miss anything by waiting for this lesser work. I've never read the Fischer book; as the son of an American history teacher, I probably read twenty different accounts of the American Revolution, and in my early fifties, didn't feel a great need to revisit the subject. Flatland was assigned to us in seventh grade, All of the others were standard assignments in high school. I agree with the other numerous comments that curricula have been hopelessly dumbed down in the last thirty to forty years. Pitiful.

[Jeffrey Diehl]

08:46 PM on 09/28/2010

the Invisible Man. What a story. Although I would have chosen"Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde" instead.

[Jeffrey Diehl]

08:14 PM on 09/28/2010

Pilgrim'sProgress. The very first hard cover book I ever read was "Little Women" ." Pilgrim's Progress"plays an important part i the plot of that book.

[Jeffrey Diehl]

07:30 PM on 09/28/2010

I was a math major, but I learned about"Flatland" while still in high school. We were studying logic .Did you know that Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are both exercises in logic?

[jackstpaul]

02:17 AM on 10/08/2010

Yes. Lewis Carroll was a logician at...Cambridge or Oxford?

[Donna Berger]

04:43 PM on 09/28/2010

Check out Self-management for College Students: The ABC Approach (Partridge Hill Publisher) - a book every college-bound high school student and undergraduate should read

[C Rutledge Wilson]

01:49 PM on 09/28/2010

These really are books that should be read in High School. And no one should have to suffer through Last of the Mohicans.

[gangwayjan]

02:44 PM on 09/28/2010

Oh, so true -- no one should have to read Fennimore Cooper's drivel. Go visit his home when you are at the Baseball Hall of Fame; see the movie -- great movie -- I know no woman who doesn't swoon over Daniel Day's Hawkeye ("I will return"). But the book itself ? Only as punishment for some literary lapse.

[GraniteSkyline]

10:49 AM on 09/28/2010

The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooperrs? Spellcheck HP?

[GraniteSkyline]

10:43 AM on 09/28/2010

The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin should be required reading for graduating from high school or earning your GED in Texas.

[rstewart3]

02:05 AM on 09/29/2010

Pfft, why would we want to read that?
"How to clean your gun in 60 seconds" is more like it.

[EducatedObserver]

09:45 AM on 09/28/2010

As I - and others on this thread - read several of these novels in our early teenage years, I really do not understand the point of this list's demographic aim.

Next I suppose university students will be requiring remedial English to help get them through the Twilight books.

[duhtruth]

10:12 AM on 09/28/2010

I wouldn't doubt that it might be beneficial for some (not all). There are many from poor academic high schools that are well below your academic prowess.

[MJVs Common Sense]

03:17 PM on 09/29/2010

Hey now! those books are so poorly written anybody could have trouble understanding them, especially those of us who grew up with shakespeare and J.D. Salanger.

[-swift]

09:38 AM on 09/28/2010

Flatland is a great book...if you want to discuss how much the author hates women.

[Suzanne Boswell]

04:37 PM on 10/09/2010

That would be the social satire in Flatland: Abbot was making fun of the Victorian's beliefs on women's intelligence and emotions. In reality, Abbot was one of the strongest proponents of more education for women.

[-swift]

10:06 PM on 10/09/2010

Interesting. The publishers might want to put that in a preface.

[traumabob]

09:37 AM on 09/28/2010

I'm not sure anyone should read The Last of the Mohicans, but they should read Mark Twain's essay on the book. It's a hoot!

[chaya]

09:30 AM on 09/28/2010

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.