2021 Book Selection Process Notes
The College Reads! committee reviewed books for 2021 The College Reads! program in the fall of 2020. The committee selected The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where To Go From Here, by Hope Jahren (2020).
2021 The College Reads! Book Nomination List
| Title of Book: | Author(s) of Book: |
| A Disability History of the United States | Kim Nielsen |
| A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet | Sarah Jaquette Ray |
| A History of Kindness | Linda Hogan |
| A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail | Bill Bryson |
| After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration | Holly Buck |
| All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis | Eds. Ayana Johnson and Katharine Wilkinson |
| Annihilation | Jeff VanderMeer |
| Becoming | Michelle Obama |
| Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own | Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. |
| Between the world and me | Ta-nehisi Coates |
| Black Klansman: Race, Hate, and the Undercover Investigation of a Lifetime | Ron Stallworth |
| Braiding Sweetgrass | Robin Wall Kimmerer |
| Candide | Voltaire |
| Charleston Syllabus | Chad Williams (Editor), Kidada E. Williams (Editor), Keisha N. Blain (Editor) |
| Citizen: An American Lyric | Claudia Rankine |
| Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress | Christopher Ryan |
| Decision Points | George W. Bush |
| Denmark Vesey's Garden | Ethan J. Kytle & Blain Roberts |
| Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century | Alice Wong (editor) |
| Disposable City: Miami's Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe | Mario Alejandro Ariza |
| Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist | Kate Raworth |
| Dry | Neal and Jarrod Shusterman |
| Educated | Tara Westover |
| Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy | Richard Hansen |
| Enlightenment Now | Steven Pinker |
| Everything I Never Told You | Celeste Ng |
| From Here To Eternity: Traveling The World To Find The Good Death | Caitlin Doughty |
| FutureGen, Lessons from a Small Country | Jane Davidson |
| Good Economics for Hard Times | Abhijit V. Banerjee and Ester Duflo |
| Homegoing | Yaa Gyasi |
| Homie: Poems | Danez Smith |
| Hope in the Time of Chemo | David Lee Nelson |
| House of the Scorpion | Nancy Farmer |
| How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them | Jason Stanley |
| How to Be an Antiracist | Ibram X. Kendi |
| How to Make a Slave and Other Essays (21st Century Essays) | Jerald Walker |
| In Darkest South Carolina | Brian Hicks |
| In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom | Yeonmi Park |
| Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have | Tatiana Schlossberg |
| Indigenous: poems | Jennifer Reeser |
| Into Thin Air | Jon Krakauer |
| Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked | Adam Alter |
| Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption | Bryan Stevenson |
| Just Us: An American Conversation | Claudia Rankine |
| Know My Name: A Memoir | Chanel Miller |
| Lead for the Planet: Five Practices for confronting climate change | Rae Andre |
| Leave the World Behind: A Novel | Rumaan Alam |
| Lies My Teacher Told Me | James W. Loewen |
| Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change | Nathaniel Rich |
| Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts | Nikky Finney |
| Migration | Charlotte McConaghy |
| One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy | Carol Anderson |
| Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us | David Neiwert |
| Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire | Rebecca Henderson |
| Revolutionary Suicide | Huey P Newton |
| RIDERS ON THE STORM: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being | Alastair McIntosh |
| Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore | Elizabeth Rush |
| Sea Level Rise: A Slow Tsunami on America's Shores | Orrin H. Pilkey and Keith C. Pilkey |
| Small Great Things | Jodi Picoult |
| Speak | Laurie Halse Anderson |
| Such a Fun Age | Kiley Reid |
| Sudden Spring: Stories of Adaptation in a Climate-Changed South | Rick Van Noy |
| The Archipelago of Hope: Wisdom and Resilience from the Edge of Climate Change | Gleb Raygorodetsky |
| The Bluest Eye | Toni Morrison |
| The Book Thief | Markus Zusak |
| The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die | Keith Payne |
| The Coddling of the American Mind | Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt |
| The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time | Mark Haddon |
| The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity | Nadine Burke Harris, M.D |
| The False Cause | Adam Domby |
| The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature | David Haskell |
| The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What's Possible in the Age of Warming | Eric Holthaus |
| The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis | Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac |
| The Invention of Wings | Sue Monk Kidd |
| The New Jim Crow | Michelle Alexander |
| The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness | Michelle Alexander |
| The Night Circus | Erin Morgenstern |
| The Seep | Chana Porter |
| The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors | David Haskell |
| The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here | Hope Jahren |
| The Tipping Point | Malcom Gladwell |
| The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming | David Wallace-Wells |
| The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It | Kelly McGonigal |
| This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate | Naomi Klein |
| This is where it ends | Marieke Nijkamp |
| This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth | Jedediah Purdy |
| Turtles All the Way Down | John Green |
| Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval | Saidiya Hartman |
| We all Fall Down: LIving with Addiction | Nic Sheff |
| We Need New Names | NoViolet Bulawayo |
| When the Sun Disappeared | Sabriyah Richardson |
| Where the Crawdads Sing | Delia Owens |
| White Fragility: Why it's so hard for White People to talk about racism | Robin Diangelo |
| Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race | Beverly Tatum |
| With the Fire On High | Elizabeth Acevedo |
| Women Don't Owe you Pretty | Florence Given |