“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it,” wrote the playwright, novelist, essayist, humorist and poet Oscar Wilde.
Here’s our sixth annual feature in which a group of Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering faculty and staff recommends books that students probably won’t have to read in college, but should anyway.
They’ve been asked to select books that offer lessons for navigating one’s way through college and careers. Or, if not that exactly, then books that offer valuable insights into important and compelling subjects, or that simply provide edifying and entertaining diversion from the rigors of schoolwork.
Through the years, they’ve chosen fiction, fantasy, history and how-to guides — books that examine the past to illuminate the present or imagine the future to provide signposts for mapping one’s path in life. And sometimes, stuff that’s just for fun.
