The Maroon Edition
The Maroon Edition project at Mississippi State University is an initiative to engage all freshmen and the MSU campus in reading the same book each summer and fall. It is intended to serve as a basis for intellectual and cultural discussion as students come to campus and enter into dialogue with other students and with the administration, faculty, and staff.
An ad hoc group of faculty and administrators proposed to the MSU administration the idea of initiating a common reading program for incoming first-year students during the Fall of 2009. For the 2009 inaugural program the ad hoc group recommended John Grisham's A Painted House. All future selections will be made through a university-wide selection committee. The book is to be required summer reading for all incoming freshmen prior to their arrival on campus in the fall.
The 2009 Maroon Edition Selection
The first book for the MSU Common Reading Project is one that was written by John Grisham, MSU graduate and New York Times bestselling author. In A Painted House Grisham vividly portrays the rural south as seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old son of a tenant cotton farming family in the Arkansas Delta in the 1950's. It involves the dynamics of race, class, and romance, and the "coming of age" of the youngest of the Chandler family, Luke. Luke suddenly realizes his own family's position in the social strata of the rural community when he discovers that the more well-to-do families have painted houses. Since his family's house is unpainted, he is determined that he and his family deserve better, a painted house.