Reading Guide

Every incoming Coe student has a summer reading assignment. In my opinion, it's a great way to do a little homework over the summer to gear up for college, and also the book becomes this common talking point for the 400 some incoming students. I still fondly remember reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, and I know I've made or heard Outlier jokes up until graduation (it doesn't go away!).

My various Coe connections allowed me to sit on the First Year Experience (FYE) Book Committee and I'm proud to say I've helped picked the first-year common reading for four incoming classes. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis followed Gladwell's book the following year and then I became more involved with the first-year experience.

The following year, as the first-years read the infamous "baboon book" aka A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky, I was able to create a reading guide for them. I completed the same project the following year for Peter Godwin's When the Crocodile Eats the Sun. 

And this year is no different.

The book for this year's incoming class is Sarah Vowell's A Partly Cloudy Patriot. Now, I've seen Vowell this summer, and seeing her was just the motivation I needed to help finish off the reading guide for summer 2014.

However, this year, I stepped up my reading guide game. While I do have the reading guide, complete with enough questions to keep you discussing the books for hours, I also created a Storify story with some additional media.

Storify is a neat website I've been plugging since my experience at the Paley Center for Media. I think it's a great way to pull media and information across so many different platforms. In a Storify story, I can pull tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Instagram photos, and articles from the entire web. It creates a story that moves you around the web and also contains all the information in one handy spot. I've embedded the story below, it might be something cool to see, just to have a taste for what A Partly Cloudy Patriot is all about!