(Moscow, ID) This year’s University of Idaho Common Read kickoff event is 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 16, in the Bruce M. Pitman Center Vandal Ballroom.
The 2024-25 Common Read selection is “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” a collection of personal essays by John Green. English Professor Erin James will give the keynote address at the event, which is free and open to the public.
In the introduction to his book, Green writes that humans are “powerful enough to radically reshape the Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we shape them.” The essays in “The Anthropocene Reviewed” press on this contradiction and explore the ways Green’s “small life runs into the large forces of the Anthropocene” in an attempt to “fall in love with the world” in crisis.
“In this Common Read kickoff event, we’ll first explore the concept of the Anthropocene together, as well as the various ways that our own lives run into and participate in its large forces,” James said. “We will then work together, following Green’s model, to fall in love with the world by reviewing different facets of our human-centered planet.”
James studies how we access new worlds through literature to foster positive environmental change. Combining narratology and ecocriticism into a theory she calls econarratology, she believes this approach to literature can help solve tough environmental problems.
Her debut book, “The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives,” dives into the fusion of ecocriticism, postcolonialism and narrative theory, earning accolades like the International Society for the Study of Narrative’s Perkins Prize for Best Book in Narrative Studies. Her second book, “Narrative in the Anthropocene,” further explores storytelling’s role in the climate crisis.
In addition to “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” which was the Goodreads Choice winner for nonfiction in 2021 and an instant No. 1 bestseller, Green is the author of five novels, including the 2012 breakout success “The Fault in Our Stars,” which was adapted into a movie in 2014. His most recent novel, “Turtles All the Way Down,” was published in 2017.
Now in its 17th year, the Common Read is designed to engage the university and Moscow community in a unified intellectual activity. First-year students will be assigned to read the book as part of their studies.
Other recent Common Reads have included “Educated: A Memoir,” by Tara Westover, in 2018; “There There,” by Tommy Orange, in 2019; “The Book of Unknown Americans,” by Cristina Henriquez in 2020; “Grit: The Power and Passion of Perseverance,” by Angela Duckworth, in 2021; “So you Want to Talk About Race,” by Ijeoma Oluo, in 2022; and the “The Nature Fix,” by Florence Williams, in 2023.