On Saturday, September 9th, all incoming first-year students had the opportunity to discuss Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Blind Assassin. The First-Year Student Workshop has been a Provost’s Office event for over eleven years. Since 2002, Lauinger Library has reserved a month in its Kerbs Exhibit Area’s schedule to recognize the workshop and to highlight the library’s specialized and general collections as they relate to the novels of choice.

This year’s exhibit, “The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood: First-Year Academic Workshop,” presents examples of themes threaded through the novel, notably early science fiction, labor issues, and war. Examples of books from the Library’s general collections show science fiction illustrations from the 1930s, similar to those that The Blind Assassin’s main character, Iris Chase Griffen, may have viewed while perusing newsstands. The Library’s Special Collections offers political pamphlets from the Maurice Jackson Collection that relate specifically to labor and war; this type of printed ephemera could have influenced a character like Alex Thomas. The exhibit also displays newspaper clippings from the J. Graham Parsons Papers, highlighting Canada’s role in World War II. Each year, library staff members strive to relate library collections to the workshop’s novel, highlighting not only the numerous ways that the Library can assist with research, but also how the Library’s collections can enhance overall the scholar’s reading experience.