Recommended reading lists haven't always had the best reputation. Harbingers in grade school of a swift truncation of late-summer afternoons (if your mother was at all like mine), book lists are now the brunt of undergrad complaints, arriving too late for students to find discounts on Amazon.com (at least before the drop/add deadline).

For those unaccustomed or reintroduced to reading hundreds of pages per night, the idea of shopping the textbook stores for pleasure may seem beyond unnecessary. But chances are, once you learn to "read" the right way for those scary humanities classes (we'll have a how-to column on the subject at some point, I'm sure), you'll have plenty of free time, not all of which need be filled with alcohol-fueled afternoons.

An easy way to find leisure reading that will fit your lofty LSA standards is to browse the reserve bookshelves at Shaman Drum, Ulrich's and Michigan Book and Supply. Professors include books in their curricula for obvious reasons, and it's not always the English and comparative-literature courses that suggest the best ones. Reading "Henry VI" and "The Tempest" for English 367 will teach you to read Shakespeare at different points of his career - and that "Othello" 's Iago is simply one of the most fantastic characters ever created. But reading "Less Than Zero" predominantly through the filter of disaffected suburbia, rather than post-modernism (it's a text required by Prof. Matthew Lassiter's History 364: History of American Suburbia course) forces you to think in different ways.

Deep, right?

"White Teeth" by Zadie Smith

Kali Israel's course on British history (History 221: Survey of British History, winter semester) has included among its required texts the Zadie Smith novel "White Teeth." The then-23-year-old writer's debut covers the intersection of race, class, sex and history through the lives of immigrant families in London.

"Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood

History 285/RC Social Science: Science, Technology and Medicine in Society (winter semester) will also work literature into its reading list. One recent inclusion was Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake," a science-fiction novel about a man named Snowman who may be the last man on a savaged future earth.

Cultural Anthropology 101 has a set of de rigeur textbooks, but each semester features one or two books that can be read as contemporary ethnographies - or just really good non-fiction. Try "Number Our Days" by Barbara Myerhoff. It's an ethnography of older Jews at a Californian recreation center in the 1970s. And "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down," Anne Fadiman's account of a Hmong family's fight with American health practitioners over its epileptic daughter, is a journalistic tour de force. It not only gives the reader a detailed overview of the Hmong diaspora and public health in Merced, Calif., in the 1980s but challenges Western standards of medicine.

"Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia" by Ahmed Rashid

"Jihad" possesses a weightiness beyond its 300-odd pages. Perhaps most famous for his account of the Taliban regime, Rashid introduces the history (and unbelievable corruption) of the five Central Asian states. Heavy stuff, but incredibly digestible. Prof. Douglas Northrop uses it as a text for his course on Central Asian history, Asian 289: From Genghis Khan to the Taliban: Modern Central Asia.

Go forth and browse, fellow student, and borrow. Maybe college isn't all about the ability to quote liberally from V.S. Naipaul's oeuvre, both his fiction and non-fiction, by the time four years are up. But adding "A Million Mutinies Now," as recommended for Prof. Ashutosh Varshney's Political Science 367: Government and Politics of India, to your brain bank can't hurt. (If you hurry, I've hidden a copy of it in the statistics section of Michigan Book and Supply. Don't tell.)

- Tell Chou what you're reading at kimberch@umich.edu.