The Round House Picked for Summer Reading

Posted on Feb. 14, 2014

The Round House by Louise Erdrich, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated author, will be the 2014 summer reading book for incoming students at Carolina.

A nine-member selection committee of students, faculty and staff selected the book from five finalists. The story, which takes place on a Native American reservation in North Dakota, won the 2012 National Book Award for fiction.

Minrose Gwin, Kenan Eminent Professor of English and chair of the committee, said that The Round House was selected because of its dual focus on a current issue facing Carolina and other campuses nationwide – sexual assault – and on a less familiar topic: the lingering effects of injustices embedded in Native American history.

“Louise Erdrich’s award-winning novel is a riveting encounter with a number of raw and resonant issues in American culture, particularly concerning rape — its ubiquity in our culture and its pernicious, long-term effects not only on victims, but on their families and communities,” Gwin said. “Erdrich further exposes a national amnesia around the history of Native peoples and raises compelling questions about our legal systems and their failures. The novel is written from a young person’s perspective, and Erdrich’s 13-year-old protagonist must confront the question of what to do when legal remedies fail, the question of justice versus retribution. In the end, this is a book that leaves us with questions, not answers, about the ethics of social justice.”

New students who will enroll this fall are expected and encouraged to read the book this summer and participate in small group discussions on the Monday before classes start. The program, now in its 16th year, aims to stimulate critical thinking outside the classroom and give new students intellectual common ground. An academic icebreaker, it encourages students to engage with the scholarly community and come to their own conclusions about the material.

The other four finalists were Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo; Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America by Jonathan Kozol; Firebird: A Memoir by Mark Doty; and Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade — and How We Can Fight It by David Batstone. The committee considered fiction and nonfiction.

---

More online…

• Sexual Assault and the Law: Cover story from the November/December 2013 Carolina Alumni Review
• Morrison Novel Home Picked for Summer Reading
  January 2013 news report
• Technology Is Focus of Summer Reading
  January 2012 news report
• Two Campuses, One Book: Reading Program Unites Rivals
  February 2011 news report
• Story of Unlikely Friendship Picked for Summer Reading
  January 2010 news report
• Class, Ethnic Conflict Subject of Summer Reading Selection
  February 2009 news report
• Death Penalty Debate at Heart of Summer Reading Selection
  January 2007 news report
• Summer Reading Program Panel Picks First Novel, The Namesake
  January 2006 news report
• Freshmen May Do the Reading, But Most Don’t Want to Discuss It
  October 2005 news report

---