Book selections
George & Rue
One Campus One Book 2015
By all accounts, the bludgeoning murder in 1949 of a taxi driverby brothers George and Rufus Hamilton was a "slug-ugly" crime. George and Rue were hanged for it.
Repelled and intrigued by his ancestral cousins’ deeds, George Elliott Clarke uncovered a story of violence, poverty and shame—a story that led first to the Governor General’s Award–winning ExecutionPoems and culminated in Clarke’s brilliant and darkly comic debut novel.
Named an editor’s choice by The Bookseller in the UK, George & Rue is a book about death that brims with fierce vitality and the sensual, rhythmic beauty that so often defines Clarke's writing.
From the publisher’s website
Fahrenheit 451
One Campus One Book 2014
Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.
Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.
When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.
The Name of the Wind
One Campus One Book 2013
The Kingkiller Chronicles tells the story of Kvothe, a streetwise young man who hopes to one day hunt down the mysterious group that murdered his family.
The first book, The Name of the Wind, was published in spring 2007; the second, The Wise Man’s Fear, dropped in March 2011. Both hit No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list.