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Many institutions across the country hold some kind event for freshmen where the students read a book over the summer and then have a chance to discuss it when they get on campus. Here at the University of South Carolina we have the First-Year Reading Experience, where students come together--all 4,000 or so of them--to hear a speaker and then break off into small groups to discuss the novel assigned for the summer. The purpose is to kick off the year with an "academic" experience, which sounds odd since it is a university after all but at most schools the first week or so is all about the "fun" aspects of college--and then the academic reality hits you in the face when you start going to class.This year the book was Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is about an "academy" where students are actually clones that are "cared for" so they can donate their organs, not entirely unlike the movie "The Island."
It's not an easy read, especially at first when you're not really sure what's going on. In fact, when I received the book clear back in May I made it through about 40 pages before putting it down, saying I would try again later. Unfortunately I didn't get to "trying again later" until the week before the First-Year Reading Experience event was to take place! See, even (or should I say especially?) professors procrastinate!
On Monday morning all 4,000 freshmen and 200+ discussion leaders gathered in the Coliseum on campus to hear a talk by Jeffrey Kahn, a bioethicist from the University of Minnesota. (Ishiguro declined an invitation to speak.) Kahn related the novel to current ethical concerns in science, including the use of stem cells. He used the example of Molly Nash, a girl with a rare disease who could be helped only with the cells of a sibling. So her parents had another baby (but tested the embryonic cells first to make sure they would match) who could help her.
Kahn's fascinating talk made the discussion with my group of 17 students much easier since many of them admitted to not finishing the book (something I empathized with greatly). His comments made it clear that some of the issues in the book, while a bit far-fetched (we don't have any organ harvesting academies that I'm aware of), are still not as much "science fiction" as they might seem at first. I asked them if they had read similar books and we related the book to other novels such as Fahrenheit 451, Anthem, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and some films as well. There were also some direct relationships of the themes of the book to the freshman experience--the sense of discovery and the nature friendship, to name a couple.
The idea of the First-Year Reading Experience is a good one, I think, and the issues raised in the book are excellent for discussion (especially with the expert insights of someone like Professor Kahn). However, the book was perhaps a bit too much for unguided summer reading for students with other things on their minds at the time.
