The College Novel for the 2026-2027 academic year is Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Members of the College Community are invited to read the novel and participate in activities, discussions, and lectures related to the book. Many faculty members will use the novel in class to foster interdisciplinary discussion. The college novel aims to create a reading community and encourage reading for pleasure, critical thinking, global awareness, and multicultural understanding.
Workshops, colloquies, and lectures support this activity.
Using a College-wide Novel, we unite the Sussex community to encourage reading as a lifelong source of pleasure and learning. Faculty, students, and staff select a novel that will best suit each year.
Dr. Eleanor Carducci, a retired Professor of English at Sussex, began the College Novel tradition in 1993. The current College Novel coordinator, Dr. Mary Thompson, annually asks the faculty and staff at Sussex to nominate novels and then holds a meeting for people to advocate for their nominations. At the end of the meeting, the group narrows the field to two options and a student vote determines which novel will become the College Novel for the new academic year.
Many colleges have a shared reading program, but non-fiction is often on the reading list at other institutions. This raises questions, such as: What is the value of fiction? Why do we ask students, faculty, staff, and community members to engage with a new story every year that is, by definition, made up? Isn鈥檛 this just a way to kill time, something we should be doing on the beach and not in a college classroom?
These questions are fair, especially as colleges and universities are centering Return on Investment (ROI) numbers in their recruiting materials and the cost of education rises each year. Statistics show that fewer Americans are reading long-form fiction than ever before, and, in college, making time to engage with long works can be viewed as a waste of time for students other than English majors. Sure, we like hearing stories as children, but we learn the difference between real and make-believe early on. Make-believe is fun, and since it鈥檚 enjoyable, it鈥檚 rarely viewed as important.
The truth of the matter is that fiction serves incredibly valuable, if occasionally somewhat amorphous, purposes. Reading fictional works has been shown to have wide-ranging benefits, including building empathy and understanding; providing an opportunity for deep focus, relaxation, and stress relief; enhancing vocabulary; lengthening attention spans; reducing the risk of dementia in later years; improving social skills; and promoting better organization of thoughts. These benefits, in turn, can support the research, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills needed in all aspects of life. In other words, reading fiction may not present as a task with an immediately quantifiable skill set, but when we read fiction, the benefits translate into every aspect of our lives. It has the power to make us stronger learners, more effective employees, and more thoughtful people. Moving beyond private reading and talking about the works we enjoy helps us see them in new ways, especially when we hear from classmates or professors with different backgrounds, experiences, and interests. These conversations deepen our understanding of literature while helping us build a community of learners (and hopefully have some fun along the way).
At SCCC, we鈥檙e committed to making sure our students don鈥檛 only graduate with the skills they need to do a job; when they leave our campus, they should also have some idea of how they want to live and who they want to be, and they should likewise know that this perspective will continue to evolve as they grow. In short, we hope to shape curious and empathetic lifelong learners, and the annual College Novel is one vital tool we use in this quest.
The articles below present the many benefits of fiction, and be sure to pick up your copy of this year鈥檚 College Novel in the SCCC Library.
Happy reading!