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- Many colleges release summer reading lists for incoming students.
- We compiled some of the best books from university reading lists in 2021.
- Included on the list: "Caste," "The Alchemist," "The Vanishing Half," and more.
Every summer, universities around the country release their recommended summer books and reading lists for incoming students.
This year, schools like Columbia, Duke, UC Berkeley, NYU, Northwestern, and more shared their 2021 reading lists online. They included books like "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent," "The Vanishing Half," "The Alchemist," "The Nickel Boys," "Think Again," and more.
Read below to see some of the best books to have made it on reading lists this year.
Copy provided by Amazon and edited lightly for length.
"Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent" by Isabel Wilkerson
Read by students at: The University of California, Berkeley; The University of Maryland
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more.
Using riveting stories about people — including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others — she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Amazon (Audible) Shop at Bookshop"The Vanishing Half" by Brit Bennett
Read by students at: Bryn Mawr College; The University of St. Thomas
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past.
Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?
Shop at Amazon Shop at BookshopBraiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants" by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Read by students at: New York University
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings ― asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass ― offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.
In reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman
Read by students at: Northwestern University
System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble.
You can read Insider's review of this book here.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Alchemist" by Paulo Coehlo
Read by students at: The University of California, Berkeley; Bryn Mawr College
Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different — and far more satisfying — than he ever imagined.
Santiago's journey teaches us about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.
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Read by students at: Boston University
Through poverty, adolescence, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley Ford wishes she could turn to her father for hope and encouragement. There are just a few problems: he's in prison, and she doesn't know what he did to end up there. She doesn't know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men.
In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates. When the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley desperately searches for meaning in the chaos. Then, her grandmother reveals the truth about her father's incarceration...and Ashley's entire world is turned upside down.
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Read by students at: The University of Maryland
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people's minds — and our own. As Wharton's top-rated professor and the bestselling author of "Originals" and "Give and Take," he makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he's right but listen like he's wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners.
You'll learn how an international debate champion wins arguments, a Black musician persuades white supremacists to abandon hate, a vaccine whisperer convinces concerned parents to immunize their children, and Adam has coaxed Yankees fans to root for the Red Sox.
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Read by students at: Duke University
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
With empathy and piercing social commentary, "Such a Fun Age" explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone "family," and the complicated reality of being a grown-up.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"Exit West" by Mohsin Hamid
Read by students at: Smith College
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet — sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors — doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price.
As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through...
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Read by students at: Siena College
When Elwood Curtis, a Black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood's only salvation is his friendship with fellow "delinquent" Turner, which deepens despite Turner's conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble. As life at the Academy becomes ever more perilous, the tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades.
Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and warped the lives of thousands of children, "The Nickel Boys" is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers and "should further cement Whitehead as one of his generation's best" ("Entertainment Weekly").
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice" by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
Read by students at: The University of Kentucky
In 2014, northeastern Syria might have been the last place you would expect to find a revolution centered on women's rights. But that year, an all-female militia faced off against ISIS in a little town few had ever heard of: Kobani. By then, the Islamic State had swept across vast swaths of the country, taking town after town and spreading terror as the civil war burned all around it. From that unlikely showdown in Kobani emerged a fighting force that would wage war against ISIS across northern Syria alongside the United States. In the process, these women would spread their own political vision, determined to make women's equality a reality by fighting — house by house, street by street, city by city — the men who bought and sold women.
Based on years of on-the-ground reporting, "The Daughters of Kobani" is the unforgettable story of the women of the Kurdish militia that improbably became part of the world's best hope for stopping ISIS in Syria.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"When the Emperor Was Divine" by Julie Otsuka
Read by students at: Augustana College
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans, they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.
In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism.
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Read by students at: Columbia University
Mignon R. Moore brings to light the family life of a group that has been largely invisible — gay women of color — in a book that challenges long-standing ideas about racial identity, family formation, and motherhood.
Drawing from interviews and surveys of one hundred black gay women in New York City, "Invisible Families" explores the ways that race and class have influenced how these women understand their sexual orientation, find partners, and form families. In particular, the study looks at the ways in which the past experiences of women who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s shape their thinking, and have structured their lives in communities that are not always accepting of their openly gay status.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America" by Richard Rothstein
Read by students at: The University of California, Berkeley
Widely heralded as a "masterful" ("Washington Post") and "essential" ("Slate") history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein's "The Color of Law" offers "the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation" (William Julius Wilson).
Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods.
A groundbreaking, "virtually indispensable" study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history ("Chicago Daily Observer"), "The Color of Law" forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption" by Bryan Stevenson
Read by students at: Seton Hall University
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system.
One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn't commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship — and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Death of Vivek Oji" by Akwaeke Emezi
Read by students at: The University of St. Thomas
One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son's body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family's struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious. Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings.
As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek's closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens — and Osita struggles to understand Vivek's escalating crisis — the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race" by Walter Isaacson
Read by students at: The University of Maryland
When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled "The Double Helix" on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn't become scientists, she decided she would.
Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book's author, James Watson, told her was the most important biological advance since his co-discovery of the structure of DNA. She and her collaborators turned a curiosity of nature into an invention that will transform the human race: an easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Known as CRISPR, it opened a brave new world of medical miracles and moral questions.
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Read by students at: Bryn Mawr College
Drawing on his 25 years of groundbreaking research on moral psychology, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt shows how moral judgments arise not from reason but from gut feelings. He shows why liberals, conservatives, and libertarians have such different intuitions about right and wrong, and he shows why each side is actually right about many of its central concerns.
In this subtle yet accessible book, Haidt gives you the key to understanding the miracle of human cooperation, as well as the curse of our eternal divisions and conflicts. If you're ready to trade in anger for understanding, read "The Righteous Mind."
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Undocumented Americans" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Read by students at: The University of California, Berkeley
Writer Karla Cornejo Villavicencio was on DACA when she decided to write about being undocumented for the first time using her own name. It was right after the election of 2016, the day she realized the story she'd tried to steer clear of was the only one she wanted to tell.
So she wrote her immigration lawyer's phone number on her hand in Sharpie and embarked on a trip across the country to tell the stories of her fellow undocumented immigrants — and to find the hidden key to her own.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"Recipes for a Sacred Life: True Stories and a Few Miracles" by Rivvy Neshama
Read by students at: Columbia University
On a dark winter night with little to do, Rivvy Neshama took a "Find Your Highest Purpose" quiz. And the funny thing was, she found it: to live a sacred life. Problem was, she didn't know how.
But she set out to learn. And in the weeks and months that followed, she began to remember and encounter all the people and experiences featured in this book — from her father's jokes to her mother's prayers, from Billie in Harlem to a stranger in Salzburg, and from warm tortillas to the humble oatmeal. Each became a story, like a recipe passed down, beginning with her mother and her simple toast to life.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity" by Julia Cameron
Read by students at: Spelman College
Since its first publication, "The Artist's Way" phenomena has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron's novel approach guides readers in uncovering problems areas and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to free up any areas where they might be stuck, opening up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery.
The program begins with Cameron's most vital tools for creative recovery – The Morning Pages, a daily writing ritual of three pages of stream-of-conscious, and The Artist Date, a dedicated block of time to nurture your inner artist. From there, she shares hundreds of exercises, activities, and prompts to help readers thoroughly explore each chapter. She also offers guidance on starting a "Creative Cluster" of fellow artists who will support you in your creative endeavors.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Water Dancer" by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Read by students at: Bryn Mawr College
Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her — but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.
So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia's proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he's enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram's resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Feeling Economy: How Artificial Intelligence is Creating the Era of Empathy" by Roland T. Rust and Ming-Hui Huang
Read by students at: The University of Maryland
As machines are trained to "think," many tasks that previously required human intelligence are becoming automated through artificial intelligence. However, it is more difficult to automate emotional intelligence, and this is where the human worker's competitive advantage over machines currently lies.
The book argues that AI is rapidly assuming a larger share of thinking tasks, leaving human intelligence to focus on feeling. The result is the "Feeling Economy," in which both employees and consumers emphasize feeling to an unprecedented extent, with thinking tasks largely delegated to AI. The book shows both theoretical and empirical evidence that this shift is well underway. Further, it explores the effect of the Feeling Economy on our everyday lives in the areas such as shopping, politics, and education. Specifically, it argues that in this new economy, through empathy and people skills, women may gain an unprecedented degree of power and influence.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity" by Walter Scheidel
Read by students at: Northwestern University
The fall of the Roman Empire has long been considered one of the greatest disasters in history. But in this groundbreaking book, Walter Scheidel argues that Rome's dramatic collapse was actually the best thing that ever happened, clearing the path for Europe's economic rise and the creation of the modern age. Ranging across the entire premodern world, "Escape from Rome" offers new answers to some of the biggest questions in history: Why did the Roman Empire appear? Why did nothing like it ever return to Europe? And, above all, why did Europeans come to dominate the world?
In an absorbing narrative that begins with ancient Rome but stretches far beyond it, from Byzantium to China and from Genghis Khan to Napoleon, Scheidel shows how the demise of Rome and the enduring failure of empire-building on European soil launched an economic transformation that changed the continent and ultimately the world.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"The Book of Longings" by Sue Monk Kidd
Read by students at: Bryn Mawr College
In her mesmerizing fourth work of fiction, Sue Monk Kidd takes an audacious approach to history and brings her acclaimed narrative gifts to imagine the story of a young woman named Ana. Raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee, she is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. Ana is expected to marry an older widower, a prospect that horrifies her. An encounter with eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything.
Their marriage evolves with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, and their mother, Mary. Ana's pent-up longings intensify amid the turbulent resistance to Rome's occupation of Israel, partially led by her brother, Judas. When Ana commits a brazen act that puts her in peril, she flees to Alexandria, where startling revelations and greater dangers unfold, and she finds refuge in unexpected surroundings. Ana determines her fate during a stunning convergence of events considered among the most impactful in human history.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop"This I Believe: Life Lessons" edited by Dan Gediman, John Gregors, and Mary Jo Gediman
Read by students at: The University of Louisiana, Monroe
Based on the NPR series of the same name, "This I Believe" features eighty Americans ― from the famous to the unknown ― completing the thought that the book's title begins. Each piece compels readers to rethink not only how they have arrived at their own personal beliefs but also the extent to which they share them with others.
The result is a stirring and provocative trip inside the minds and hearts of a diverse group of people whose beliefs ― and the incredibly varied ways in which they choose to express them ― reveal the American spirit at its best.
Shop at Amazon Shop at Bookshop Julia Pugachevsky Senior Health Reporter Julia is a senior health reporter on the Insider Health team primarily covering skincare and relationships. Prior to that, she was the education and personal development editor on the Insider Reviews team and a sex and relationships editor at Cosmopolitan and BuzzFeed, respectively. You can say hi to Julia at jpugachevsky@businessinsider.com or shoot her a DM on Twitter or Instagram (she is @jaypugz on both) Read more Read lessncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufonyowcidnKxnnJqus7rIp55om5%2BhuaazxGaqrqWdmr9uvsSam6Kml2K5qr%2FTZpmop5uoenN8kWo%3D