Opening Day 2025 Community Read Announcement
In this guide, you will find links to the selected chapters for the Community Read book, as well as a links to related content accessible through The Library.
A note about this eBook - Only one person can be reading this copy at a time. In order for more patrons to have access to these eBooks, we recommend that users close out their browser window/tab when they are finished reading a portion of the book.
Berklee community members can access this eBook via their OnePass. If you encounter any issues, feel free to reach out to the library (askalibrarian@berklee.edu)
While participants are encouraged to read as much of the book as possible, we'll begin the discussion around the following "essayettes" (most are only 1-2 pages):
Weary Kingdom
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A Southern-born poet's journey of reflection and pilgrimage to the streets of Harlem In this new collection of poems, Weary Kingdom, DéLana R. A. Dameron maps a journey across emotional, spiritual, and geographic lines, from the familiarity of the honeysuckle South to a new world, or a new kingdom--Harlem. Her poems traverse the streets of this Black mecca with a careful eye cast toward the intimacies of the exterior. Still, as the poems move throughout the built environment, they navigate matters of death, love, love loss, and family against the backdrop of a city that has yet to become home. Indeed what looms over this weary kingdom is a longing for the certainties of a lover's touch, the summer's sun, and the comforts of a promised land up North. And as the poet longs, so do readers. Ultimately they grow aware of Utopia's fragility.
Call Us What We Carry
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Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.
Life on Mars
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Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize. With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.
Happiness
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In the midst of a successful business career, Doug Smith received life-altering news that set him on an entirely new journey to understand what leads to truly joyful, meaningful living-in other words, what leads to happiness. Through research and study, he began to understand that what the most joyful among us have in common is that they remember the past with peace, anticipate the future with confidence, and live in the present with joy and exuberance. Additionally, he discovered that what gives them this perspective is a set of skills that they consistently, even if subconsciously, practice. He also realized that he is not particularly good at several of these skills. In Happiness: The Art of Living With Peace, Confidence and Joy, the author recounts, with insight and humor, his journey to better understand and practice the skills of happiness with the goal of helping others on their own path to joyful, meaningful living.
Positive Psychology
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Happiness 101 (previously Published As When Likes Aren't Enough)
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Are you as authentically happy as your social media profiles make it seem? When a group of researchers asked young adults around the globe what their number one priority was in life, the top answer was "happiness." Not success, fame, money, looks, or love...but happiness. For a rising generation of young adults raised as digital natives in a fast-paced, ultra-connected world, authentic happiness still seems just out of reach. While social media often shows well-lit selfies and flawless digital personas, today's 16- to 25-year-olds are struggling to find real meaning, connection, and satisfaction right alongside their overburdened parents. An Introduction to Happiness tackles the ever-popular subject of happiness and well-being, but reframes it for a younger reader struggling with Instagram envy and high-stakes testing, college rejections and helicopter parents. Professor of positive psychology Dr. Tim Bono distills his most popular college course on the science of happiness into creative, often counterintuitive, strategies for young adults to lead happier, more fulfilling lives. Filled with exciting research, practical exercises, honest advice, and quotes and stories from young adults themselves, An Introduction to Happiness is a master class for a generation looking for science-based, real world ways to feel just a little bit happier every day.