Coming up: 'Custodians of Wonder'
2025 Common Read celebration
ASU hosts journalist and BBC editor Eliot Stein, author of "Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping Them Alive," for a virtual visit on Oct. 1, 2025 at 6 p.m. ASU's Writing Programs has selected Stein's nonfiction book as its 2025-2026 common read and Stein will discuss the book and answer questions from faculty and students at this event.
About the common read
Each year, Writing Programs at ASU selects a book as a "common read." The chosen work may be adopted as an additional textbook by composition classes during that year. The goal of the program at ASU is to encourage first-year students to write about pressing social problems that are relevant to ASU’s mission as a public enterprise. By learning to write about such problems as a community, we increase the probability of finding solutions to them.
ASU Common Read is hosted by Writing Programs in the Department of English with support from The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU.
Past selections & events
2024-2025: "Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides" by Geoffrey Cohen
2023-2024: "Thinking 101: How to Reason Better to Live Better" by Woo-kyoung Ahn
2022-2023: "The Undocumented Americans" by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
2021-2022: "Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America" by Michael Eric Dyson
2020-2021: "We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast" by Jonathan Safran Foer