Summer Reading Program

The Freshmen Summer Reading Program is one more way in which Mars Hill College provides undergraduate students with opportunities for academic growth and conversation.

This Program provides incoming freshmen with a common experience as they begin their educational journey. All first-year students are asked to read the same book before they arrive on campus for the Fall semester.

Once on campus, students can use the book to initiate conversations and build community with their new classmates, roommates, and teachers.

These discussions introduce first-year students to the pleasures and rigors of academic dialogue and give them an important opportunity to form connections with faculty and staff as well as with peers.

2008 SRP Selection: Honky by Dalton Conley

“From an engaging and accessible new voice, an eloquent and honest look at what it means to be white in America.  As recalled in Honky, Dalton Conley’s childhood has all the classic elements of growing up in America.  But the fact that he was one of the few white boys in a mostly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side makes Dalton’s childhood unique.  Years after the privilege of being white and middle class allowed him to leave the projects, his entertaining memoir allows us to see how race and class impact us all.  Perfectly pitched and daringly original, Honky is that rare book that entertains even as it informs.”     --Books in Print

praise for Honky:

“An extraordinarily good read. . . . [W]ith precision and poetry . . . this small but absorbing volume [gives] readers . . . a rare opportunity for insight into the complexities of race in America.” --San Francisco Chronicle

“A thoughtful, often comic memoir—the story of a boy who not only lived to tell his tale but understood it as well.” --The Village Voice

“Lucid, readable . . . A must read for thinking adults.” --The Washington Post