Editor's Note

After a two-year upswing in the quality and tenor of summer reading, 2011 will mark a step backwards for Duke freshmen.

Next year’s new breed—and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s as well—will be reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. On its own, the work doesn’t sink to the dreadful quality of 2006 selection My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Piccoult, or the borderline-unreadable The Best of Enemies in my first summer, 2007. But its choosing is most egregious when seen in comparison to the opportunities provided by the other finalists, and by the selection committee’s demonstration of an astonishingly short institutional memory.

Eating Animals is most notable for how unimpressive and safe a choice it provides. Much like how Foer’s fiction apes and samples the techniques of more thoughtful and skilled writers, his first foray into nonfiction is a trivial and uncreative effort. Foer is not a bad writer, by any means, and I know a number of people who like him considerably, people whose opinions I respect. But I find him cloying and pedantic, and these traits, sometimes buried in the playful pastiche of his fiction, come screaming out in Eating Animals.

Still, this is the smaller issue regarding the selection. The bigger: Foer spoke at Duke last year in Griffith Theater. Hosted by Duke’s literary magazine The Archive, the event was given a great deal of play and his speaking engagement was packed full with students. The idea that he needs to make a return appearance so soon, even if it would be mainly for the benefit of new Duke and UNC students, speaks to a shallow intellectual curiosity at our school.

In comparison, two other finalists for the summer reading selection outclass Foer’s book in both quality and relevance, and though these writers have made appearances at Duke in the last couple years as well, theirs were far less publicized and attended. If the committee hoped to stay with nonfiction, then Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks would’ve been the better pick. Skloot’s book has been praised as a near-perfect example of reporting and longform journalism, and for a school so heavily centered on its medical and biomedical community, the story’s subject of stem cells and contemporary science is perfectly suited.

As for fiction, Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker deals with one of the most pressing human-rights issues of our time, and one that receives heavy focus in the Duke community: Haiti. Danticat is a tremendously skilled writer, and her work, including The Dew Breaker, provides a spotlight for an issue that isn’t going away any time soon. To select Danticat’s book would have demonstrated a pleasant and refreshing instance of the right hand knowing what the left hand is up to, but unfortunately, the cognitive dissonance that often seems to separate one part of this university from another prevailed again.

By no means is the plight of animals an unimportant subject. But at a school that can at times feel like a number of separate parts struggling to form a whole, these other two options would have afforded a thematic consistency that seems to be the purpose of a summer reading book in the first place. Again, there are plenty of worse choices out there then Eating Animals, but I was finally getting accustomed to the summer reading selection representing the better.