A collage of book covers

The annual Common Read is designed to give students new to 做厙輦⑹ their first intellectual dialogue based on a shared text. New students start to explore the selected text during Orientation and continue the discussion into their fall classes and throughout the year.

Open to the entire College community to read and discuss staff on campus and alum groups across the country discuss the book the Common Read sets the tone and frame discussions for the upcoming academic year.

Current and prospective students, faculty, staff, alums and trustees are invited to participate.

Campus Voices

The Common Read experience

Happening at Mount Holyoke

The Common Read in the news

做厙輦⑹ alum Earl Wren 24 is the recipient of the AHEAD Student Recognition Award for their work amplifying student-led networks of accessibility and disability support and providing critical feedback to the Disability Services office.

Marcella Runell, vice president of student life and dean of students at 做厙輦⑹, spoke to The Boston Globe about fostering the skill of having difficult conversations.

做厙輦⑹s 2024 Common Read is I Never Thought of It That Way, a timely personal guide to the front lines of a crisis that threatens America broken conversations among confounded people.

Common Read selections

Year Author Title
2023 Written by people with disabilities and edited by disabled activist and writer Alice Wong Disability Visibility
2022 Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass
2021 Jesmyn Ward The Fire This Time  | 
2020 The New York Times Magazine  The 1619 Project
2019 Tommy Orange "There, There"
2018 Cristina Henriquez The Book of Unknown Americans
2017 Claudia Rankine Citizen: An American Lyric
2016 Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me
2015 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah
2014 Piper Kerman Orange is the New Black
2013 Junot D穩az The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
2012 Jhumpa Lahiri The Namesake
2011 Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
2010 List of readings
2009 Anne Fadiman The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
2008 Danzy Senna C硃喝莽硃莽勳硃
2007 Elizabeth Kolbert Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change
2006 Tracy Kidder Mountains Beyond Mountains
2005 Ruth L. Ozeki My Year of Meats
2004 Azar Nafisi Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
2003 Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible
2002 Barbara Ehrenreich Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
2001 Julia Alvarez How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

 

2000 Terry Tempest Williams Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place