<p>Scroll to the bottom of the page referenced above and you'll find a suggested reading list for first years.</p>
<p>Maybe it's a testament to my son's teachers this year. He's read 25% of the books on the list! I suggested he fill out the end of his senior year by reading a few off the list. Here's what he has picked:</p>
<p>Thirteen Days - RF Kennedy</p>
<p>This Book Is Not Required - Inge Bell</p>
<p>Maus - Art Spiegleman (actually, this was required reading for the college he WAS to attend before he was chosen from the waitlist - and, he finished it the day he got the Swarthmore call...)</p>
<p>Uncle Tungsten - O Sacks</p>
<p>Parasite Rex: Inside The Bizarre World Of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures - C Zimmer</p>
<p>Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in US History - R Smith</p>
<p>Cryptonomicon - N Stephenson (an 1,100 page page-turner!)</p>
<p>Wow. One of the Swat profs recommended the Bible? Don't let that get out; it'll ruin Swat's reputation as a whipping boy for the religious right!</p>
<p>I-Dad, may be Swat is not as liberal as the reputation suggests. </p>
<p>D came to my office and a co-worker asked her what was the most unexpected experience at Swat. She said, "perhaps the fact students are less liberal than I thought." Then she added, "that's a good thing."</p>
<p>(She is very liberal and activitist, but says likes to hear all views.)</p>
<p>From the Swarthmore (just can't get myself to say Swat) Bulletin - about 50% of grads have found their way into the business community, not known as a bastion of excessive liberalism. </p>
<p>"Yet that same education also seems to have preparedalmost by accidentnearly half of the alumni for work in business"</p>
<p>Jerome Kohlberg, namesake of Kohlberg Hall, I believe, was a founding partner of KKR - an investment banking firm specializing in hostile takeovers. </p>
<p>The rest of the list makes interesting reading., too.</p>
<p>Perhaps that's why Swarthmore's grads have a reputation for critical thinking ability - all those late night arguments with those who hold differing views. Nothing shuts a mind down faster than constant positive feedback (in an engineering sense) - it just swings further and further in one direction. </p>
<p>Plus, I'd venture the hypothesis that students in this environment will learn that liberalism and conservatism are multi-dimensional constructs once one gets past the hot button issues.</p>
<p>There are lots of Swarthmore grads in the investment banking division of my company - which is a large retail bank with an investment banking division in NY. Lots of I-Bankers and analysts and traders.....</p>
<p>In fact, when I contributed to Swarthmore this year, I had no trouble finding Swarthmore in our matching database - it has apparently been there for a long time..</p>
<p>"Crypto" is a great book, a great beach book, but it is a work-out - amazing - math, history, computer science, a little romance! Learn how a pipe organ works</p>
<p>They are reasonable. Now what's the definition of "reasonable" depends on your course load. It does involve a lot of reading but 1100+ pages in two nights? Well, I don't know about that...</p>
<p>Just checked with darlin' D (who is reading on the couch). She says the most reading she was assigned from one class to the next was a book by French philosopher Michel Foucault -- the first half (200 pages) for one class, the second half for the following class. Dense reading.</p>
<p>She adds, "But that was freshman year. It gets worse...."</p>
<p>Does anyone out there have any "must reads" or "must avoids" from this list? I'd love to know - I'm getting into summer reading mode myself. My workplace publishes a summer reading list, but in honor of my son's accomplishments and future place of toil, I'm choosing from this list.</p>
<p>He just read Thirteen Days by RFK. For me those days are something my parents lived, and I'm catching up on my current events from the pre-Vietnam days. It's a quick read, and worth it he reports.</p>
<p>My current read is Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. It juxtaposes the nature around Great Salt Lake with the author's struggle of coping with her mother's breast cancer. So far so good.</p>
<p>I can feel my soul being crushed as I read this list. I recognize maybe five of these, and have read maybe one... And so the soul-crushing has already begun.</p>
<p>"I can feel my soul being crushed as I read this list. I recognize maybe five of these, and have read maybe one... And so the soul-crushing has already begun."</p>
<p>Hey - don't feel that way! That would be like feeling bad because there were so many amazing places in the world that you hadn't been to yet. </p>
<p>For every great book that you haven't read, there's a wonderful experience that awaits you. (As Emily Dickinson famously put it: "There is no frigate like a book.") And that holds true no matter how old you are or how many books you may have read.</p>