Quiet Reading Assignment I

It's that time of the year, can't you just smell the packs of fresh pencils, paper, and OMG, crayons?  Man, I miss those days.  Well, let's be honest, I'm OCD and I just love the opportunity to organize and prepare for a new year.  But here on campus the next few weeks mean the beginning of a fall semester and all the fun that brings.  This also means a new assignment for those of you out there who like to read along.  This fall my faculty and staff book group chose the book the book Quiet by Susan Cain.  


The overview from Barnes and Noble goes a little like this: "At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.  In Quiet, Susan Cain argues that we dramatically undervalue introverts and shows how much we lose in doing so. She charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal throughout the twentieth century and explores how deeply it has come to permeate our culture. She also introduces us to successful introverts—from a witty, high-octane public speaker who recharges in solitude after his talks, to a record-breaking salesman who quietly taps into the power of questions. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet has the power to permanently change how we see introverts and, equally important, how they see themselves."

Now let's be honest I don't think of myself as an introvert at all.  But after a brief discussion with some graduate assistants in our office this week, I realized something....I keep hiring them!  Now, this could be because I supervise our graphic designer and our marketing guru's, and I've joked about them being my "team" all week.  So I'm super excited to take the time to read a book about how their minds work and how as their supervisor I can better help them.  Plus a few folks in my book group are for sure introverts, they think I don't know it, but I can just see them looking at me like, please don't ask me to talk, I'm just here to listen to everyone else.

Below are the dates of our meetings and the pages we'll be discussing.

September 10th - pages ix - 33
September 24th - pages 34 - 96
October 8th - pages 97 - 129
October 22nd - pages 130 - 180
November 5th - pages 181 - 223
November 19th - pages 224 - 272
 Grab your copy of the book and get ready for an interesting semester.
Magpie