Campus Reading Celebration

On Tuesday, November 14th, author T. C. Boyle will speak at CSUCI.  The event will take place at 6:30pm in Salon A. 

Click here to mark your calendar

Tickets for the event are FREE for the campus community, and are available through The Office of Student Life & the Anacapa Village office beginning Monday, October 30th.

NO ONE WILL BE ADMITTED TO THE EVENT WITHOUT A TICKET.  For more information, please contact Amber Weir, Events Coordinator at 437- 8548 or amber.weir@csuci.edu

The idea behind the Campus Reading Celebration is to invite all members of the campus community (students, faculty, staff and administrators) to read the same book and to talk with each other in both formal and informal venues about the book throughout the academic year. By having the entire campus community read the same book we will all have a common intellectual experience that can generate shared discussions of a book we've all read.

2006/2007 Book Announced!

The book for the third annual Campus Reading Celebration this fall will be The Tortilla Curtain , by T. Coraghessan Boyle . Men and women with brown faces and strong backs who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade the American Dream are the Okies of the 1990s. Two of them, Candido and America Rincon, have come to Southern California and are living in a makeshift camp deep in a ravine, fighting off starvation. At the top of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, the two couples and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding. (description from barnesandnoble.com)

This book was chosen by Campus Reading Celebration Task Force for its themes of immigration, economics, development vs. environmentalism, race, ethnicity, class conflict, globalization.

Students will be given the book at the end of this semester and asked to read it over the summer (new students will be given the book as part of their orientation packages during the summer). Faculty, staff, and community members are invited to buy and read the book, as well. During fall semester, the book will be incorporated into courses across disciplines, including the freshman composition courses, Faculty are encouraged to incorporate the book into their syllabi, and to encourage or require students to attend Boyles' presentations. Members of the campus community will discuss the book in informal reading groups, as well.

The centerpiece of the Campus Reading Celebration is the visit by the author T.C. Boyle's visit is the evening of Nov. 14

• Themes in "The Tortilla Curtain".
• Literary Allusions in "The Tortilla Curtain".
• Project Ideas for "The Tortilla Curtain".
• Discussion Questions for "The Tortilla Curtain".

For more information about Boyle , please visit his website at www.tcboyle.com .

For more information about the Campus Reading Celebration, please contact Dr. Renny Christopher via email at Renny.Christopher@csuci.edu or by phone at (805) 437-8994.

Past Reading Celebration Events:

• 2004 - Rain of Gold by Victor Villaseñor
• 2005 - The Open Space of Democracy by Terry Tempest Williams