Common Reading
Office of First-Year Programs
Ben Trapanick, Director, First-Year Programs
Dwight Hall Room 116
1-508-626-4905
E-mail: btrapanick@framingham.edu
Lauren O'Donoghue, Assistant Director, First-Year Programs
Orientation Coordinator
Dwight Hall Room 116
1-508-626-4637
E-mail: lodonoghue@framingham.edu
Each year a new title is selected to be the Common Reading for that academic year. Discussions that take place assist students in their transition by helping them understand the new cultural expectations of being a college student, the expected level of work and how that may differ from their experiences in high school. Discussions are led by faculty members and administrators during Black and Gold Beginnings as well as in courses that have adopted the book as part of their curricula. Students are expected to have read the selection and be prepared to discuss it when events about it take place. Additionally, multiple events will take place during the fall semester that will allow members of the FSU community to learn more about topics raised in this book. A listing of events will be posted in the coming weeks.
The selection for the Class of 2017 is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.
About the book-
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.
Taken from http://www.junotdiaz.com/books/the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao/
About the Author
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and This Is How You Lose Her, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, and PEN/O. Henry Award. A graduate of Rutgers College, Díaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
