Bringing NYU Community Together With One Book

Each year a committee of faculty, students, and staff choose the NYU Reads selection. Once the book is announced, students are encouraged to read it before arriving on campus for the fall semester. This way, when they arrive, they’re ready to dive right into the conversation.

In addition to Stay True, previous NYU Reads books include How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, Just Mercy by NYU Law professor Bryan Stevenson, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, and Educated by Tara Westover.

“It’s a collective conversation starter,” says Cam John, a senior majoring in Psychology at the College of Arts and Science. “I remember asking, ‘Did you read the book over the summer?’ I did my first year, and a couple of my friends did too. It was really nice to start off on the same page in that way. It’s a chance to build a community.”

Cam said she read Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer over the summer of 2021 before her first year at NYU. “I’m a reader. I read for fun all the time,” she adds. “With NYU Reads, it’s nice to find other people who read for pleasure. It’s nice to connect with people who enjoyed a book you enjoyed and share their thoughts.”

In addition to reading the book, students have the chance to hear directly from NYU Reads authors. Each year NYU invites the respective NYU Reads author on campus for a conversation, and students can ask their own questions.

“I was just astounded that NYU chose Stay True. The book is so similar to my life,” says Andrew Sun, a junior Photography and Imaging major at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Like Hua Hsu, Andrew is a second-generation Asian American. During this year’s event at the NYU Skirball Center for Performing Arts, Andrew asked Hsu a question. What’s more, he stayed for a reception afterward and continued his conversation with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author offstage.

“NYU Reads introduced me to such a great author,” adds Andrew, who, as a transfer student, said he used NYU Reads as a way to connect with his new classmates. “Because I am so passionate about Stay True, I ask everyone if they’ve done the summer reading. And with the people who have read it, it’s something we immediately connect over.”

From Welcome Week to Club Fest, there are a lot of strong traditions at NYU. And the NYU Reads tradition adds an entirely new, intellectual element to the mix.

“NYU Reads is like a welcome into intellectual life at NYU,” says NYU Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Mark Siegal. “There’s a lot to welcome you into the community in a social sense, and that’s really important, but that intellectual belonging is harder to cultivate. We don’t just want you to care about your academics; we want you to really enjoy the intellectual experience. When we all read the same book, we share that excitement of learning with you from the beginning.”

A conversation starter. A story to get lost in. Whatever you take from the NYU Reads book of the year, you can bet on one thing: when you arrive on campus, there will be plenty of people eager to talk about it.

“When we choose a book, we always ask, ‘What do we want from this book?’” closes Dr. Siegal. “The books are all so incredibly different, yet they’re all so similar because they hit on topics we can all relate to–belonging, resilience, memory, self, friendship.”