It’s the beginning of the semester and there’s a guy with a great smile in your econ class. Or maybe it’s a little red-haired girl who
stood next to you while you were waiting for the morning coffee fix. Awkwardness is a part of student life culture, and while complimenting someone on their smile might earn you points if you lived life in a sitcom, it usually just drives the guy further across the room.
Luckily there’s a pre-made pattern to these things (also taken, I’ll admit, from sitcoms). Girls who read are cute, guys who read are desirable. Nerd chic is in, and carrying around an actual book with a cover and pages and everything, while being a little old-school, is the easiest sure-fire way to strike up a conversation. I’ll even 100% guarantee a friendship, though they might exist only in the ink-and-paper way.
Photo by visual.dichotomy vis Flickr
So what book do you pick up? You don’t want to be wandering around with a revised version of 50 Shades of Grey under your arm and, let’s face it, this clever maneuver only really works if you actually read the tome you’re lugging around.
For the history major (or those who enjoy America, rugged individualism, or HBO shows): Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
How much did your fifth grade teacher really say about Lewis and Clark? If they were anything like mine they mentioned Sacagawea and a Louisiana Purchase. There’s a whole lot more to the story, which has everything from Indian battles to boat crashes to ten foot snow drifts, all wrapped around a Boy Scout-esque camping adventure.
Undaunted Courage has the advantage of teaching you something about your nation’s history while being thick enough to thoroughly impress the person you’re gushing to about Lewis’s latitude problem.
For the English major (or artists, hipsters, and those who really identify with that mountain retreat in Dirty Dancing): The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
Easily the best book to sit in your lap during poetry or when you’re at that theater kid’s apartment. This book tells the life story of Jules and her cabin-mates, lifelong friends that she makes at an art camp when she’s a teenager. Some became successful, others not so much, and Jules still can’t decide if a life on the periphery of fame is better than life with no contact with the stars at all. It also has a crazy cult, a European runaway, food allergies, and at least four characters that you can fall in love with if the Starbucks crush doesn’t work out.
For the philosophy major (or fans of The Hunger Games, war movies, and dystopian futures): The Long Walk by Stephen King
To be read on the quad on a day when the sun’s not shining. This Bachman/King novel is short, which is not to be confused with a quick read. Taking place in a dystopian America where a hundred boys volunteer yearly to walk themselves to death with the allure of a fabulous prize at the end, this is not a tale for the faint of heart. But there is a heart here, in those kids who commit voluntary suicide. If you’re looking for a fleshed-out Brave New World of scientific explanations and world building, you’re not going to find it here. You will start to think that being picked as tribute with a one in twenty-four chance of living isn’t bad odds at all.
You will bond with a very specific type of person if you talk about this book. Recommend that they read more Stephen King. You’ll look tough.
For the science major (or Steven Spielberg groupies, pseudo-science lovers, and people who never did grow out of dinosaurs): Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Hear me out before you completely reject my suggestion. Even I know that the ability to bring dinosaurs back from the dead probably doesn’t lie in mosquitoes (why did these mosquitoes happen to suck of the blood of all the coolest dinosaurs?!) but if you can look past that, there’s real science buried in here. And the book’s way better than the movie. Unless you were a real dino-nerd, you’ll be turning to Google to look up the different species as they come along. And that might lead to a History channel special, which might lead to learning. Everyone thinks they know the story of Jurassic Park; now’s your chance to shine.
For the math major (or those who like the Beatles, iPods, and airplanes that don’t crash): Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
If you like charts and statistics or want to get into books that has charts and statistics, this is the best way to ease yourself in. Did you know that one of the biggest things separating you from Wayne Gretzky is your birthday? Or that Asians being good at math can be traced back to their ancestors growing rice instead of corn? It’ll also tell you why manhole covers are round. So if you want to be good at Jeopardy! or just want to say something halfway intelligent to the cute student in macroeconomics, try picking this up. And again, inadvertent learning might not be a bad thing.
Sure, there’s other ways to meet your new crush, but when your friends ask you how you ran into each other, isn’t “bonding over Velociraptor deaths” a classier answer than “when we were both totally out of it at that party last week”? Not that there’s a problem with meeting people at parties, but college is all about trying out new things, right? At the worst, you’ll have read a good book. And don’t stop here; If these books inspire you to frequent the library more often, I hear other singles hang out there, too.