Before arriving on campus next fall, incoming Cornellians will read Romain Gary’s The Life Before Us, a novel about an illiterate Arab boy and the former prostitute and Holocaust survivor who raises him in the immigrant slums of Paris, according to Laura Brown, vice provost of undergraduate education.

Out of 50 shortlisted titles that members of the Cornell community suggested, Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep emerged as the selection for the New Student Reading Project of 2010.