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Residential Library

RECOMMENDED READING

Books about colleges and college admissions

  • Fiske Guide to Colleges (2024)

  • Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions (2020) by Jeffrey Selingo​

  • College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What it Means for Students (2023) by Jeffrey Selingo

  • Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania (2016) by Frank Bruni

  • Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About

  • Colleges (2021) by Loren Pope, Revised by Hilary Masell Oswald​

  • The Black Family’s Guide to College Admissions: A Conversation About Education, Parenting, and Race (2024) by Timothy L. Fields and Shereem Herndon-Brown.

  • Valedictorians at the Gate: Standing Out, Getting In, and Staying Sane Wile Applying to College (2022) by Becky Munsterer Sabky.

  • The Price You Pay for College: An Entireley New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make (2022) by Ron Lieber

Great books to read before starting college

Reading is one of the best ways to get in the right mindset when starting college. It can also help you become a better thinker, a stronger writer and able to view the world from different perspectives. Here is a long list of books that can open your mind and sharpen
your skills before heading to campus:

FICTION

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  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

  • The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger​

  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

  • Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

  • Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

  • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding

  • 1984 by George Orwell

  • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 

  • A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

  • All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

  • Beloved by Toni Morrison

  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

  • Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman

  • The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey

  • Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

  • Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

  • Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

  • Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

  • House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

  • The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

  • Selected Tales by Edgar Allen Poe

  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

  • The Color Purple by Alice Walker

  • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

  • Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

NON-FICTION

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  • Educated by Tara Westover, Ph.D.

  • Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman 

  • A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking

  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond

  • Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell

  • Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

  • Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

  • All We Can Save by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson

  • How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibrahim Kendi 

  • Caste by Isabel Wilkerson 

  • Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenriech

  • We Too Sing America: South Asian, Arab, Muslim, and Sikh Immigrants Shape Our Multiracial Future by Deepa Iyer

  • We Want to Do More than Survive by Bettina Love

  • Whistling Vivaldi And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us by Claude M. Steele 

  • We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib

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