Freshman Reading Project (required)

Each year the Honors Program selects a book to be read by all incoming first-year Honors students. The Freshman Reading Project promotes community through the common experience of reading and discussing a thought-provoking text. Please read the book before arriving at Baylor. Once on campus, you will engage in a discussion with other students about the themes and ideas gleaned from your reading. Completion of the Freshman Reading Project is required.

This year’s reading is Station Eleven, the bestselling novel written by Emily St. John Mandel. A National Book Award finalist and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award, Station Eleven opens in the final hours before a flu pandemic collapses the modern world. Emily St. John Mandel uses the aftermath not for spectacle but for a quiet, haunting exploration of what endures when the familiar structures fall away: art, memory, friendship, and the stubborn human desire to make meaning. Station Eleven is a novel that feels both unsettlingly close and surprisingly hopeful, inviting you to consider how culture is built, how it’s lost, and why people keep telling stories even when the world seems to be ending.

You can purchase Station Eleven at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and a variety of other book retailers.

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (Vintage, 2015) 

ISBN-13: ‎978-0804172448