A few months ago, some teenagers spraypainted swastikas and various other offensive things onto a historic black schoolhouse in Virginia. When they were sentenced, the judge said they were going to have to read a book each month for the next 12 months and write a report on each one.

Here’s the list of books they could choose from:

1. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
2. Native Son, by Richard Wright
3. Exodus, by Leon Uris
4. Mila 18, by Leon Uris
5. Trinity, by Leon Uris
6. My Name Is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok
7. The Chosen, by Chaim Potok
8. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
9. Night, by Elie Wiesel
10. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller
11. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
12. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
13. Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe
14. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
15. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
16. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
17. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
18. Caleb’s Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks
19. Tortilla Curtain, by T.C. Boyle
20. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
21. A Hope in the Unseen, by Ron Suskind
22. Down These Mean Streets, by Piri Thomas
23. Black Boy, by Richard Wright
24. The Beautiful Struggle, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
25. The Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt
26. The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead
27. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
28. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang
29. Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
30. The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson
31. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
32. Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton
33. Too Late the Phalarope, by Alan Paton
34. A Dry White Season, by André Brink
35. Ghost Soldiers, by Hampton Sides

Certainly several of these books would be considered standard assignments in any basic college course that dealt with multicultural or tolerance issues (Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Alan Paton, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Harper Lee).

But others selections are more interesting, such as Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (a North Korean defector struggles to adapt to life outside the dictatorship) or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (dystopian fiction about a theocratic America in which women are merely vessels for reproduction). It sounds like the judge is looking at a broader idea of educating here that involves not just tolerance but empathy–which is, after all, one of the greatest lessons that fiction can provide.