First-year students enrolled in ASC 101: Introduction to University Life will share the common experience of reading Copenhagen by Michael Frayn.

The goal of this common reading program is to create a shared learning experience that fosters student engagement, retention, and personal development beyond the classroom.  In pursuing this initiative, CSU joins college campuses throughout the country that make this part of the freshman year experience.  Although directed primarily at freshmen, we hope to engage the entire campus in this reading experience through promoting the book in other courses and sponsoring campus-wide activities to highlight the reading and its intersection with different disciplines and issues.

This year's book, Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, is a Tony Award-winning play that dramatizes what might have happened on September 1941 when German physicist Werner Heisenberg visited his mentor Danish physicist Neils Bohr at Bohr's home in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. Nobody but the two men and Bohr's wife, Margrethe, knew what transpired that evening, but the two men's relationship was irrevocably broken. Frayn uses this framework to explore such themes as morality in a time of war, the power of science, friendship, and uncertainty.

Books chosen for the Common Reading Experience in previous years include:

• 2008-2009: Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi
• 2007-2008: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Hadden