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Previous Readings

  1. Academics
  2. Common Reading Experience
  3. Common Reading Experience Previous Themes

2022-2023 Theme: Storytelling

Fall Semester

"You’re not going to believe this…!”

Stories, whether fiction or non-fiction, often raise questions: Could X really happen? Is Y believable? Where is the line between true and not true? Our first reading for the fall semester teeters somewhere in the balance. “Ghosts” was prompted by a story so difficult to tell that the writer, Vauhini Vara, asked for help… from an artificial intelligence program known as GPT-3.

The piece, therefore, is a collaboration: a combination of Vara’s words and those provided by AI.

The results, we think, may surprise you.

Vauhini Vara

Ghosts

Vauhini Vara

Vauhini Vara’s essay "Ghosts," published by The Believer and adapted for radio by This American Life, will be anthologized in Best American Essays 2022. Her debut novel, The Immortal King Rao, is a New York Times Editors’ Choice, described by the Times as a "monumental achievement." It has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and named a best book of the year by NPR and others.

More on Vauhini Vara

Vara has also written and edited journalism for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and other publications, for which she has been awarded honors from the International Journalists' Programmes and the Asian American Journalists Association, among others. She is a mentor at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop's Book Project and the secretary for Periplus, a mentorship collective serving emerging writers of color.

"I didn’t know how to write about my sister’s death — so I had AI do it for me..."

It had me thinking how fun it was that the creators managed to inject gender differences into the AI. For instance, the only story in which the protagonist was a male contained an action-based strategy of dealing with grief, whereas most other stories emphasized living with the feeling and memory, and sound stereotypically female.

Yumna Omar
Film

There is something to be said of an AI having all of its knowledge provided by humans, and then a human writer genuinely asking the AI for help in telling a story...

Salma Abdallah
Chemistry

The way AI links some effects with their causes makes me laugh. They are just not realistic…

Armia Samir
Electronics and Communications Engineering

Artificial Ethics: If Computers Can Write, Why Should We?

Spring Semester

Now, in spring, we are considering storytelling from a different perspective…  

Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men is set in Libya and is told from the point of view of a young man looking back on the world he knew as a nine-year-old boy. The novel’s first chapter is linked below. It offers us a glimpse of Suleiman’s family as well as the political realities of the Gaddafi era.

It also reminds us what it is like to be a child, when the adult world is intriguing and mysterious, and when our identity within it is sometimes beyond our grasp...

In the Country of Men

hisham matar

Excerpet

Hisham Mattar

In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize and The Guardian First Book Award. Matar’s memoir, The Return, was honored with the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and listed among the top ten books of the year by The New York Times. More information, including a full bio, reading list, and links to essays may be found on the author’s website, Hisham Matar. 

"I am recalling now that last summer before I was sent away. It was 1979, and the sun was everywhere..."

Reading is...

common-reading-experience-explore

A Way to Explore

To look at facts and at fantasy and to question: What makes a story true? Would your parents agree? Would the news media? And what about the elements of stories that make them seem impossible... new life forms! time travel! Could those reflect, in any way, our current reality?

common-reading-experience-inspire

A Way to be Inspired

And without the pressure of an assignment or a grade. Our readings will be for your time... They will be places for you to relax, to wander, and perhaps even to learn. Then, when you return to your studies, you will be refreshed and richer for your time away.

common-reading-experience-connect

A Way to Connect

To writers sharing their ideas and experiences; to your classmates and professors, who are reading and pondering along with you; and perhaps most importantly, to yourself, since reading puts us in touch with our own thoughts, feelings and perspectives.

common reading experience grow

A Way to Grow

And to develop the skills you want to call your own. Reading introduces you to the thoughts and habits of successful people. It helps you expand your horizons, allows you to learn across geographical and time boundaries, and offers a strong foundation for leadership at AUC and beyond.