The year is 2012. We drive hybrid cars, watch 3D movies and communicate via text message and Twitter. We dread sitting down for five minutes to type an email, much less taking the time to compose an actual hand-written letter. Longhand correspondence is a thing of the past-typically reserved for graduation thank you cards and wedding invitations. But sometimes, when text messages feel too informal or a phone call is out of the question, when what we need to say is just too important, we sit down at the kitchen table, take out a piece of notebook paper and let the words flow across the page, hoping someone will listen to what we have to say. For a handful of Americans each day, that someone is the President of the United States.

This year, the committee for UNCW’s Synergy common reading experience has selected Washington Post writer, Eli Saslow’s “Ten Letters: The Stories Americans Tell Their President.” With the United States still deep in the throes of recession and a presidential election approaching fast, there is little reason to wonder why the committee selected this book.

“Ten Letters” focuses on President Obama’s daily practice of reading ten letters a day in order to escape his “presidential bubble” and stay connected to the American people. The novel goes beyond the ten letters it includes by providing the histories of the letter writers, Obama’s responses, and a look at the political climate during the time each letter was received. In a way, each letter pertains to a major issue the president has faced during his term in office. Ranging from bankruptcy to healthcare to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the letters Saslow includes depict an accurate snapshot of the sorrow, happiness, anger and faith Americans feel about the state of our nation.

“I lost my job, my health benefits and my self-worth in a matter of five days,” wrote Jennifer Cline of Monroe, Michigan. This bleak chapter one heading sets the tone for the book as a whole-it’s honest.

“The battle for health-care reform had generated a historic barrage of mail for Obama,” Salsow wrote. “During the week in which Thomas sent his e-mail, the White House Office of Correspondence had received 200,000 e-mails, 100,000 letters, and 12,000 faxes addressed to the president.”

Saslow incorporates countless figures like the ones above to bring the impact of Obama’s policies to life. At times the flood of numbers takes away from the natural flow of the narrative, yet they provide a good way for readers to judge the scale of Obama’s practices and the lives of the Americans writing to him.

With the 2012 presidential election on the horizon, many students probably feel they have heard enough about the recession, the candidates and all of the issues. However, this book is not about the president as much as it is a story of America and our people. It is an honest portrayal of love, loss, hope, strife and determination-in short everything that makes us proud to call ourselves Americans.

So if you are a freshman and you are thinking of blowing off this year’s common read, give it a second thought-you might end up learning something about the president or a fellow American that you had never thought of before. Or, better yet, you might learn something about yourself and start off at UNCW with the same feeling all of these letter writers started out with, a feeling that what you have to say is just too important to go unsaid.