What Should We Read Next?

The Campus Read Committee has narrowed the 2011 Campus Read selections down to two:

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

The Maltese Falcon is a 1930 "hard-boiled" detective novel featuring Sam Spade, a private eye in San Francisco. Spade and his partner have been hired by "Miss Wonderly" to follow a man who allegedly ran off with her sister. From there, the plot thickens and it's a game of intrigue and lies and money and trying to figure out who is really telling the truth. The story has been adapted for the cinema several times, but chances are you're most familiar with the film starring Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade, Mary Astor as Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo.


Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

Mudbound is Hillary Jordan's debut novel. Set on a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1940s, it depicts a world of racism, prejudice, poverty, and hardship through the eyes of six characters, who take turns narrating the story. It won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction in 2006. Barbara Kingsolver, the founder of the prize, said this of Hillary Jordan's book, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."

What should we read next? We welcome your comments!