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August 16, 2008
What to read during the library's closed week.

Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld

When Indiana teenage Lee Fiora wins a scholarship to the Ault School, a prestigious East Coast boarding school, she has no idea how much her life is about to change. As we follow Lee through boarding school, we witness firsthand the triumphs and tragedies that shape her coming-of-age.

I Am Charlotte Simmons
by Tom Wolfe

When Charlotte Simmons, a sheltered freshman from North Carolina, arrives at Dupont University, she believes her interactions with her fellow students will be filled with erudite conversation and intellectual stimulation. The campus life she finds revolves around sex, drugs and alcohol. Will she change or remain the same Charlotte Simmons?

Gentlemen and Players
by Joanne Harris

For generations, privileged young men have attended St. Oswald's Grammar School for Boys, groomed for success by the likes of Roy Straitley, the eccentric Classics teacher who has been a fixture there for more than thirty years. This year, however, the wind of unwelcome change is blowing, and Straitley is finally, reluctantly, contemplating retirement.

The Rule of Four
by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Tomason

This intriguing intellectual suspense novel stars four brainy roommates at Princeton, two of whom have links to a mysterious 15th-century manuscript, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. This rare text (a real book) contains embedded codes revealing the location of a buried Roman treasure

The Secret History
by Donna Tartt

Richard Papen comes from a lower-class family and a loveless California home to the "hermetic, overheated atmosphere" of Vermont's Hampden College. Almost too easily, he is accepted into a clique of five socially sophisticated students who study Classics with an idiosyncratic, morally fraudulent professor.