White Noise is Don DeLillo’s National Book Award-winning novel from 1984 that was turned into a Netflix movie in 2023 starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, and Don Cheadle. The main question we will tackle in our reading group will be: why now? This is a deeply ironic story about a family trying to navigate the relatively petty challenges and distractions of consumeristic modern life in a small middle-American college town. All-of-a-sudden, they and their community are faced with an environmental disaster caused by an industrial accident.

Here at UT, the saying is “What starts here changes the world.” But there’s so much wrong with the world. How do we really change things? Mariame Kaba outlines her methods and philosophy related to “transformative justice,” which focuses on reducing harm rather than punishing people. In addition, a powerful component of transformative justice is that it starts with us. How do we solve conflicts in our own lives? How do we maintain friendships and keep people in community? That is the first step to making a more just and safe world.

If you’ve ever had a teacher that touched your life in a very positive way, this book is for you. Short, very readable, and yet, quite profound in its reflection, Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie describes rediscovery of that mentor and a rekindled relationship that goes beyond the classroom and brings us to lessons on how to live.

At a small bookstore in Laguna Beach, CA I was chatting the owner up about wanting to pick out a summer book to share with incoming students at UT. My criteria: a fun novel that’s hard to put down, but with the depth to spur an interesting discussion. With no hesitation, she immediately pulled this book off the shelf and essentially forced me to buy it. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a novel about two childhood friends, one from Harvard and one from MIT, who become reacquainted in college and join forces as video game designers.

This very short book is actually a transcript of a commencement speech given in 2005 by the late David Foster Wallace, an author celebrated as one of the best in recent American history. Is it a bit weird to read a commencement speech the summer before you even take your first college class? Maybe. But maybe this is a chance to “begin with the end in mind,” to think about what we all hope to gain (beyond a degree) from our time on the 40 Acres.

Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn.

The Talent Code explores the nature of talent and expertise. Is talent something inherent – with each person having some aspect of talent only waiting to be discovered? Or, is talent something that is developed through intentional and guided practice? Coyle offers examples from different hotbeds of excellence across numerous skills and discusses finding from neuroscience to address this question in an easy to read and enjoyable book. I have my own ideas about talent and practice and expect you will too. I look forward to discussing these.

This novel retells the story of Homer’s Iliad in the voice of Briseis, the captive woman whose seizure by Agamemnon sparks Achilles’ rage and sets the plot in motion, but who is allowed to speak only a few lines in the Iliad itself. From Briseis’ perspective, and from the perspective of the other captive women in the Achaean camp, the familiar story takes on a new dimension, giving us a sense of the way war affects all those who are pulled into its orbit, not just the male combatants.

“The book is a collection of Paisley Rekdal’s enlightening and humorously insightful personal stories of growing up in a “Third Culture” as a mixed-race person in the U.S. As a Norwegian/Chinese native of Seattle, Rekdal takes us to Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and the American South. Her running commentary on the significance of being mixed-race in today’s global culture reveals insightful and thought-provoking observations delivered in a light-hearted style.

T.S. Eliot called The Moonstone “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” Its multi-narrator format allows us to assess the evidence piecemeal, almost like a jury hears testimony, in order to solve the mystery, and along the way to recognize the elements that Collins introduced that have come to define the detective story we know today.