Past Honors Reads
2021- Becoming Nicole (Amy Ellis Nutt)
2020 – Rising Out of Hatred (Eli Saslow)
2019 – Educated (Tara Westover)
2018 – Just Mercy (Bryan Stevenson)
2017 – The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Mohsin Hamid)
2016 – The Narrow Road To The Deep North (Richard Flanagan)
2015 – Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
2014 – Eaarth (Bill McKibben)
2013 – The Sparrow (Mary Doria Russell)
2012 – What is the What (Dave Eggers)
2011 – The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Michael Pollan)
2010 – Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)
2009 – The Lucifer Effect (Philip Zimbardo)
2008 – The Survival of the Bark Canoe (John McPhee)
2007 – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)
2006 – War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Christopher Hedges)
2005 – Waiting for the Barbarians (J.M. Coetzee)
2004 – Living Downstream (Sandra Steingraber)
2003 – Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond)
2002 – Honeymoon in Purdah (Alison Wearing)
The University of Maine Class Book
The success of the Honors Read is built on a ten-year tradition at The University of Maine, the Class Book. Between 1992 and 2002, the Faculty Senate, in consultation with the Department of English, chose a book to be read, both in English 101 and wherever it would inform the curriculum, by all first-year students. Serving as an intellectual focus for the campus, the Class Book was a great experiment. In many ways, the Honors Read was designed to reproduce the energy and excitement of the Class Book project.
2001-02 – Hearts in Atlantis (Stephen King)
2000-01 – The Color of Water (James McBride)
1999-00 – A Midwife’s Tale (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich)
1998-99 – Lies My Teacher Told Me (James Loewen)
1997-98 – The Ecology of Commerce (Paul Hawken)
1996-97 – I,Rigoberta Menchú (Rigoberta Menchú)
1995-96 – The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
1994-95 – The Disuniting of America (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.)
1993-94 – Lying (Sissela Bok)
1992-93 – Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (Stephen Jay Gould)