{"id":96400,"date":"2014-09-12T09:43:05","date_gmt":"2014-09-12T13:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=96400"},"modified":"2023-06-27T13:11:40","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T17:11:40","slug":"a-book-that-changed-my-life-the-short-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2014\/09\/a-book-that-changed-my-life-the-short-list\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018A Book That Changed My Life,\u2019 The Short List"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some years ago, the novelist Anna Quindlen wrote a meditation on the central role that reading plays in her life. How Reading Changed My Life <\/em>(1998) is insightful, touching, and often funny, and many of us will find we share Quindlen\u2019s sense that \u201creading is my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion.\u201d Quindlen shares her experience of many different kinds of books, from classics to Nancy Drew to contemporary literary fiction. In recounting her youthful discovery of John Galsworthy\u2019s The Forsythe Saga<\/em>, she notes, \u201cEvery reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the secrets of life and love, all the mysteries of the universe … a book that was, for some reason, the <\/em>book \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Every book that was nominated is the <\/em>book, in Quindlen\u2019s sense, for a reader in our UConn community. But how to choose a book that can be the<\/em> book for many of us? One that can work for students and alumni, faculty and staff, stimulate great programming, and be a catalyst for transformative classroom experiences?<\/p>\n

After a wide-ranging and productive discussion, these are the books the Steering Committee has chosen for the Short List:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n
  2. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness<\/em> (1969).<\/strong> A groundbreaking book of feminist science fiction. In the introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s The Left Hand of Darkness (Modern Critical Interpretations)<\/em> (1987), the literary critic Harold Bloom noted, “Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time.”<\/li>\n
  3. \n
  4. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em> (1949).<\/strong> A dystopian novel set in a future version of Britain where there\u2019s constant war, ubiquitous government surveillance, and insidious propaganda, all under the control of a privileged elite. Perhaps not surprisingly, sales of this classic have recently surged.<\/li>\n
  5. \n
  6. Henry David Thoreau, Walden<\/em> (1854).<\/strong> An American classic, Thoreau\u2019s account of a year of living simply and in tune with nature is a foundational text of the environmental movement. We have deep ties with this book through the Honors curriculum and the work of Robert Thorson, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who recently published Walden\u2019s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-century Science<\/em> (2013).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The Steering Committee plans to announce its selection the week of Sept. 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Find out which six titles made it to the UConn Reads short list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":96266,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2234],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[117],"class_list":["post-96400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-university-life"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-22 11:59:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96400"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105086,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96400\/revisions\/105086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/96266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96400"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=96400"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=96400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}