In the Mastering Academic Conversations class we offer for incoming college freshmen, we typically read a book together. Or perhaps I should say, we assign a book to read together, I’m not sure how much of it actually is read.

There is always a “common-read” book that is selected for use throughout K-State each year and it always has interesting programming associated with it such as bringing in the book’s author to speak and so forth, however, those books vary widely in subject matter and interest area from year to year. Sometimes they are works of fiction and other times they are non-fiction works.

Nex year we are planning to do the book Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelly and there is a nifty, annotated version for scientists and engineers we are planning to use. I’m pretty excited about this. I think our students will benefit from reading classic literature and I think the work is still very relevant to our times as we seem to think that science and technology is our salvation. It is not.