I started reading Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Guillermo Martínez’s The Oxford Murders with math and science students, because both feature mathematician detectives. But it turns out that everyone, even alleged non-readers, likes these two books.
Students are also more-or-less guaranteed to read three times more brilliantly after breaking the following spines: Great Expectations (Dickens; a masterpiece of irony, laugh and it won’t seem long), Dracula (Stoker; gory, racy, intellectual), One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Marquez; starts slow and maddening, becomes brilliant and obscene, may take ages to read, which is fine), and Kafka on the Shore (Murakami)–or anything else by Murakami (who is going to win the Nobel Prize) or for that matter by any of these authors.
