Almost a century ago, feminist writer Virginia Woolf published "A Room of One's Own"—an extended meditation on the importance of space and material resources to the production of intellectual and creative work. The essay imagines a world in which Shakespeare had a sister who shared his literary gifts but was never given the opportunity to flourish. Woolf's arguments for the centrality of space to human flourishing continues to resonate for all of us. Over the coming years, UT Austin will provide each of you that space and the opportunity to develop your many talents. Our conversation will look at how Woolf lays out her argument in support of creative space; and then will turn to thinking about the different kinds of spaces that UT Austin provides and how best to take advantage of them to flourish academically and personally.
Crossing borders into new territory is not for the faint of heart. Whether into outer space, into another land, or into the unknown territory of a university experience, it requires the courage and self-confidence of self-knowledge that can withstand even the most unexpected challenges. Holding on to the inner space, while also allowing that space to expand, evolve, and survive, is the challenge that a new student at the University of Texas shares with Cormac McCarthy's young protagonists in his novel, All the Pretty Horses. I look forward to sharing your thoughts and view on their experience, as it relates to your own.
Want to learn how to make positively cosmic change in your life? Want to start your time at UT with simple hacks to build positive habits and break up with those that aren’t helpful? If this sounds far out, check out Atomic Habits by James Clear for simple yet powerful and practical advice you can implement now and in the future.
This self-help book explores how small, consistent changes can lead to remarkable results by providing a framework for improving a little bit every day. Learn practical strategies to form good habits, break bad habits, and develop small behaviors that will lead to habit transformation and positive outcomes.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants Robin Wall Kimmerer
This book discusses indigenous knowledge as an alternative or complement to scientific knowledge. Students interested in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Ethnobotany will enjoy reading and discussing Braiding Sweetgrass.
Calculating the Cosmos: How Mathematics Unveils the Universe Ian Stewart
Ian Stewart looks at mathematical models of our universe (from the solar system outward) both from the point of view of historical development of human understanding and the different perspectives we can take to explain our cosmos. And, it’s not only geometry and calculus; there is probability too (my favorite!) in the study of parallel universes and the likelihood of our being hit by an asteroid (which has notably changed since the book was written).
Changing Your Life Through Travel Jillian Robinson
Travel can and will have an impact on your life in a variety of ways. Life-changing travel does not require a passport and can occur anywhere and at any time. This nonfiction book sets a backdrop for making any type of travel more meaningful; out discussion of the ideas presented in this book will spark all of your journeys.
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child--neither powerful like her father nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power: the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
Civility — the ability to interact with fellow members of our society in a constructive and cordial manner, even when we disagree — is a crucial component of our shared culture. Stephen Carter compares it to a letter of introduction — a way that we signal that we are all part of the same community, despite our differences. In this way, civility functions to create space for one another, and to insist on holding that space open in the face of all the pressures on us to allow it to collapse. Holding space for civility in our public life is ultimate what makes us a public, a polity, and a single nation.
This classic of American fiction traces the turbulent lives and lifelong friendship of two college professors and their wives. The story is a riveting one that tugs on the heart strings and is perfect summer reading. It is the last and best loved novel by Wallace Stegner. Stegner headed the prestigious creative writing program at Stanford University for 25 years. Through his students, Stegner’s influence on contemporary American fiction continues to be profound.
Published in 1816, this is a classic romantic comedy about a small English village where a local teenage matchmaker, Emma Woodhouse, keeps getting things wrong as she plays cupid to her reluctant single friends. Simultaneously charming and sharp-witted, this may be Jane Austen's most perfect novel. After you read it, enjoy two very different interpretations for the screen: Emma (1996), starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and Clueless (1995), starring Alicia Silverstone.
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe unpacks the story of the Sackler family and the opioid crisis, revealing how power, profit, and institutions intersect in devastating ways. Discussion will focus on responsibility in science and business, how narratives are shaped and manipulated, and the ethics of legacy and philanthropy.
If there are extraterrestrial beings out there, how would we communicate with them? How do have people thought about communicating across radical differences? How could this relate to how we communicate with others here on Earth?
Emily Henrys’ newest summer romance, is about two people -- Daphne and Miles -- who move in together after their childhood-best-friend exes, Peter and Petra, decide to dump them and marry each other instead. This book has a lot of heart and it would be a nice summer read.
How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy Julian Baggini
This book encourages consumers to hold space for the tough ethical decisions we must all grapple with around our consumption patterns, which is especially crucial for new students who have total food autonomy (or the "space" to decide what, when, and how much to eat) for the very first time in their lives!
How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom Johanna Hedva
How do we learn to hold space for bodies and minds that do not always act how we want them to and rarely fit into society's norms? How do we forge ahead creatively, thoughtfully, and, most importantly, with humor? Hedva introduces a new paradigm of disability that can serve all of us, even those navigating college.
Benjamin argues that we have the power to use our imaginations to create a world in which everyone can thrive. The start of your undergraduate education is the exact moment to hold space for your imagination and stay open to new stories, ideas, and approaches. Imagination will allow you to tackle and solve problems that others have found impossible. In fact, it’s your imagination that enables you to push beyond the constraints of what you have been told are limitations to invent new ways to think and offer new ideas. This book reminds you that space to dream is space to envision the future you hope to create.
From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth Zoë Schlanger
Are plants intelligent? Do plants have consciousness? This book explores these questions and more and also takes a hard look at the current status of scientific endeavors to address these questions. Botanists have very different perspectives on how we should view plants and historically the topic of plant intelligence has been controversial. This book also challenges us to consider our relationship with life on our planet.
Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, cartoonist Ellen Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity and her livelihood, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passion and creativity. Searching to make sense of the popular concept of the crazy artist, she finds inspiration from the lives and work of other artists and writers who suffered from mood disorders, including Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, William Styron, and Sylvia Plath. Darkly funny, intensely personal, and visually dynamic, Forney’s graphic memoir provides a visceral glimpse into the effects of a mood disorder on the artist’s work. Her story seeks the answer to this question: if there's a correlation between creativity and mood disorders, is an artist's bipolar disorder a curse, or a gift?
Material World: The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization Ed Conway
Conway weaves an elaborate but easily comprehensible narrative of the impacts of six raw materials on the history of civilization. From historical roots to modern technological applications, he provides a sweeping overview of the importance of raw materials and the complications, politics, and economics of acquiring them and using them in the modern world. A surprising aspect of his work is the delicate balance that is required in sourcing materials globally and maintaining a functional supply chain in a global context that is now challenged in new ways – a special example for students to think about ‘holding space’ in a global sense.
Before Kamala Khan became a superhero, she was just a regular Jersey City teenager — navigating school, family expectations, fandom obsessions, and her own identity. But when a mysterious power grants her extraordinary abilities, Kamala must figure out what it truly means to be "normal" in a society that sees her as anything but. Join me to discuss a groundbreaking, humorous, relevant, and deeply relatable graphic novel about identity, heroism, and growing up Muslim American. Khan’s journey takes her from city streets to cosmic stakes — yes, she’s literally headed for space — but her greatest challenge might just be understanding who she is. Come ready to talk, laugh, and unpack what it means to stretch beyond limits—on Earth and beyond.
There’s an amazing quote that is part of this book that I have returned to many times: “Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses. That often demands a willingness to be critical, sometimes deeply so. How that is done matters, of course. Striking the right balance can be exceedingly hard.”
Dr. Gordon-Reed was the keynote speaker for UT’s first Juneteenth Summit hosted by the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in 2021. She is a native daughter of Texas, raised in Conroe, and eloquently situates herself in the complex history of our home state.
Dr Ransom, a Cambridge academic, is abducted and taken on a spaceship to the red planet of Malacandra, which he knows as Mars. His captors are plotting to plunder the planet's treasures and plan to offer Ransom as a sacrifice to the creatures who live there. Ransom discovers he has come from the 'silent planet' – Earth – whose tragic story is known throughout the universe...
Reclaim the Stars: 17 Tales Across Realms & Space Zoraida Cordova
Reclaim the Stars, by Zoraida Córdova, magnificently assembles Latin American autores as they make sense of the impossible. Through written themes of el espacio, and limitless possibilities they could represent, each individual testimonio takes place among the stars, physically and metaphorically. This anthology deeply connects to notions of “holding space” – as each voice, reflects countless underrepresented and collective experiences, spanning time and the cosmos. For students inspired by the vast unknown, this book launches into intergalactic luchas, astral cuentos, and deeply human narratives situated among cosmic scenarios. This collection invites students to explore metaphorical and potentially literal reaches of our universe.
Returning to Haifa is a novella that performs the act of "holding space" for both Jewish and Palestinian narratives. Two families, connected through a shared son, face important questions about birth, identity and belief, nature vs. nurture, historical violence, and recrimination.
Cast Away is a classic movie (came out in the year 2000) about a Fed-ex employee lost on a deserted island, with little hope of being rescued until he risks it all on a one-way voyage off of his island. After being rescued, he realizes he is lost again, and that is what I want to talk about when we get together. So, before we meet, you will need to watch the entire Cast Away movie. As essential background for the movie, you will also need to read a truly classic book, the original version of the same story of being lost and alone. It is called “Robinson Crusoe” written by Daniel Defoe and published way back in 1719. Despite being one of the first novels every written, the themes and characters in Robinson Crusoe still make a lot of sense today. And the story line of Robinson Crusoe is unmistakenly similar to the Cast Away movie.
Fun fact 1: Tom Hanks almost died filming this movie on location because he was injured and his leg became infected very similar to an incident in the movie.
Fun fact 2: Tom Hanks is my wife’s favorite actor.
Fun fact 3: The iconic last scene of Cast Away was filmed in Texas!
Fun fact 4: The novel Robinson Crusoe is actually based on a true story of a sailor named Alexander Selkirk who was left on an island by himself in the year 1704, so you could say it took almost 300 years to come up with the Cast Away movie script!
Just read as many of the 56 short stories and four novels as you wish. Sherlock Holmes established the prototype for many of the detectives in books, movies, and TV series up to and including the present day. Enjoy.
This is a memoir of a first-generation college student and her journey through primary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate school. Dr. Rease Miles worked with students for years, and it shows in her attention to humor and popular culture as well as education through the memoir.
In his short dialogue, the Symposium, the philosopher Plato offers one of the earliest discussions of love in the Western intellectual tradition. Travel back in time to classical Athens, where a group of friends in ancient Athens have a party where they compete to give the best speech in praise of Eros, the god of Love. What is love, anyway? What are the myths and stories we tell ourselves about love? How might the love of learning turn out to be similar to romantic love?
In Valeria Luiselli’s 2017 Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions, the author holds space for the unaccompanied minors from Central America who sought refuge in the U.S. in 2014 by documenting their dreams, hopes, and aspirations as refugees and asylum-seekers.
Travel into the unknown! This book is a tale of what was for Huck and Jim an adventure like blasting off in a rocket ship, heading for an unknown place, and traveling with someone you don’t know that well and will get to know much better during your prolonged trip together. You are entering The University of Texas at Austin; You are now more independent than ever before, and on our campus, you will live as individuals in a diverse community that nevertheless faces challenges, as it works to find ways to become the most effective possible "mixing bowl" of people from many different backgrounds. You might think of your UT years as a time of travel, of exploration of the unknown, and when you can experiment with ways of living that promote real harmony among diverse groups of people. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a catalyst for thinking about new experiences, new knowledge, a new understanding of racism, and maybe how to understand its pernicious roots in American culture.
Trinity is a gifted teenager about to start college on a piano scholarship at the University of Texas. She is also becoming a witch. Forced to join the CIA, she faces fanatical extremists aligned with Russian authorities and planning to bomb Queen Elizabeth's funeral. All of this happens while Trinity adapts to student life in Austin. When she's not dodging snipers, she discovers Texas and learns to appreciate its diverse population and landscape. Along the way, she encounters Nick, an engineering student and a wide receiver on the football team, further complicating her life.
Why are we so hard on ourselves when we don’t achieve perfection? How can we make space to define college success on our own terms. As a new student at a large, competitive university, the lessons found inside this insightful guide, which Forbes named one of “five books that will actually change your outlook on life,” is a great way to set you up on pathway towards the success you want and need. University researcher in human behavior and best-selling author Brené Brown shows us how to cultivate the courage and compassion to embrace your imperfections, overcome self-consciousness and fear, and live authentically. Come ready to play, to creatively reflect, and to set achievable goals for your college years at UT.
What's so impressive about The Great Gatsby? Does F. Scott Fitzgerald's book really fit the bill for "The Great American Novel"? Or is its reputation merely the result of a good choice of title? Our discussion will focus both on what happens (and doesn't happen) in The Great Gatsby, and also on its achievement: how great, finally, is this book? Parallels with our current era will enter into our conversation only if you wish them to.
From the Preamble by the author: “Here is the central question of this book: In this modern era of cosmology, evolution, and the human genome, is there still the possibility of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific worldviews? I answer with a resounding yes!...Science’s domain is to explore nature God’s domain is in the spiritual world, a realm not possible to explore with the tools and language of science. It must be examined with the heart, the mind, and the soul-and the mind must find a way to embrace both realms.”
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet Becky Chambers
Sometimes you're living and working on a starship with a multi-species alien crew, and sometimes those aliens become your really good friends. This is a science fiction book that focuses on relationships and character development much more than on technology and adventure. If you're wondering how you will find "your people" in college, this book gives some reassuring examples of friendship and community between very different individuals.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks
This book tells the tales of patients afflicted with different neurological disorders. The stories are deeply human and highlight in bizarre and at times very comical ways the importance of the brain for our ability to interpret the world around us.
T.S. Eliot called The Moonstone "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels." Its multi-narrator format allows us to assess the evidence piecemeal, almost like a jury hears testimony, in order to solve the mystery—and along the way to recognize the elements that Collins introduced that have come to define the detective story we know today.
The roots of this book were planted in a Reading Roundup discussion back around 2012. It would be great fun to discuss the resulting book with a new crop of students. I discuss AI and robots, but also genetics and climate change, the possible impacts of technology on economics and democracy, and an extensive chapter on the space program.
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York Robert Caro
The Power Broker, by Robert Caro, is a biography of Robert Moses, the unelected master builder who shaped New York City for decades. It details how Moses amassed and exercised extraordinary influence over the city's physical and political landscape – bulldozing parks, building highways, and displacing communities in service of his vision. Caro’s book explores the corrupting influence of power and asks who holds space, for whom, and at what cost?
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion Johnathan Haidt
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt provides a penetrating examination of the fundamental aspects of human intuition that influence how we think, how we feel, and how we behave. This insightful analysis of the spectrum of human values illuminates the challenges all of us face in our attempts to understand our fellow human beings.
Aduba is a Nigerian-American actor who writes about the positive influence and relationship with her mother. She explores her life as a Nigerian, first-generation American growing up in a middle-class suburb. Throughout her memoir, Aduba beautifully holds space for her unique story, thus sparking opportunities for others' narratives to be held.
The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism John Mackey
Whole Foods Market’s cofounder and CEO for 44 years, John Mackey, offers an intimate and provocative account of the rise of this iconic company and the personal and spiritual journey that inspired its remarkable impact.
Martin Luther King in his 8 -paragraph introduction says, “This is more than a fascinating book; it is an important book. … Three Lives for Mississippi reveals without mitigation the worst in American life with no effort to obscure realities because it speaks from the honest conscience of man.” Huie makes us feel what Jim Crow laws made white people of conscience and all black people feel in the freedom summer June 1964.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Gabrielle Zevin
This book tells the story of two men and a woman who become friends in their early 20s and remain friends for decades as they also work together developing video games and changing the culture around them. These friends navigate the need to hold space for each other and dealing with each other when they are unable (or unwilling) to hold space. This book is a fun summer read that also rewards thinking about afterward.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Gabrielle Zevin
At a small bookstore in Laguna Beach, CA I was chatting the owner up about wanting to pick out a summer book to share with incoming students at UT. My criteria: a fun novel that’s hard to put down, but with the depth to spur an interesting discussion. With no hesitation, she immediately pulled this book off the shelf and essentially forced me to buy it. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a novel about two childhood friends, one from Harvard and one from MIT, who become reacquainted in college and join forces as video game designers. They create a wildly popular game that brings them fame and fortune. But this book is not about gaming or computer science (two things I know nearly nothing about). From the book jacket, “it is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and, above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.” Also, it's a great story and a fun book to discuss with new college students.
If you've ever had a teacher that touched your life in a very positive way, this book is for you. Short, very readable, and yet, quite profound in its reflection, Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie describes rediscovery of that mentor and a rekindled relationship that goes beyond the classroom and brings us to lessons on how to live.
Striving is our nature. We all want to perform at our best, be happy, and overcome those times when we feel paralyzed by fear or insecurities. In the book, Magness argues that success and personal fulfillment are not mutually exclusive. He uses his experiences as an Olympic coach and performance expert to share a winning framework to help us focus on what really matters, achieve a fuller sense of self and purpose, and achieve success. A good read as you begin your journey on the forty acres!