2011 Freshman Common Reading

What is the Freshman Common Reading?

The Freshman Common Reading is designed to introduce students to the rich intellectual life of Abilene Christian University. This common reading experience provides a beginning point for campus conversations which consider important topics, and introduces new students to what it means to be part of a university. The reading is required for the CORE 110 which asks the question of truth: “How do I know?”

The book chosen for the 2011 Freshman Common reading is Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America.

The book offers readers an intimate look at the immigrant experience through the lens of an exceptional–and exceptionally funny–Iranian family. Author Firoozeh Dumas teases out the everyday uniqueness of life in the United States as she recounts her family’s experiences as transplants from oil-rich Abadan, Iran, to the epicenter of the American pursuit of the perfect tan: Newport Beach, California. With her wry take on everything from television commercials to Disneyland to mixed marriage, Dumas uncovers what makes America so unique and so utterly puzzling to those unacquainted with its larger-than-life customs. Her poignant descriptions of what it feels like to be a stranger in a strange land will resonate with anyone who has ever experienced social alienation at any stage of life. In her unflinching examination into the essence of the Iranian immigrant experience, Dumas exposes America as it has never before been seen.

About This Book

Funny in Farsi grew out of Firoozeh Dumas’ experience of moving to Southern California in 1972 at the age of seven. She originally intended her collection of essays as a gift to her children–to show them that our commonalities far outweigh our differences–and she wrote the book almost entirely in the hours before they woke for school.

Arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father’s glowing memories of his graduate school years here, Firoozeh learned to adapt to her new surroundings with a special eye to the more absurd elements of American culture. Funny in Farsi chronicles the American journey of Dumas’ wonderfully engaging family: her engineer father, a sweetly quixotic dreamer; her elegant mother, who never fully mastered English; her uncle, who combated the effects of American fast food with an array of miraculous American weight-loss gadgets; and Firoozeh herself, who as a girl changed her name to Julie, and encountered a second wave of culture shock when she met and married a Frenchman.

About This Author

Firoozeh Dumas was born in Abadan, Iran, and moved to California at the age of seven. After a two-year stay, she and her family moved back to Iran and resided in Ahvaz and Tehran. Two years later, Dumas returned to California, where she later attended the University of California at Berkeley. Funny in Farsi is her first book.

The book was a finalist for both the PEN/USA Award in 2004 and the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and has been adopted in junior high, high school and college curricula throughout the nation. It has been selected for common reading programs at several universities including: California State Bakersfield, California State University at Sacramento, Fairmont State University in West Virginia, Gallaudet University, Salisbury University, University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Dumas is also the author of Laughing Without an Accent, a collection of autobiographical essays published in May 2008. She currently lives with her husband and their three children in Northern California.

The ACU faculty is excited about joining in this conversation with our new students.