Welcome/2018 Summer Reading List

Welcome to my blog! I’m very glad you’re here, and I can’t wait to share my first post with you!

To kick things off, I’ll start with the thing I probably spend most of my time doing: reading!

Well, that’s not entirely true. I did’t get to read very much over the school year (save for my chemistry textbook), and when May rolled around, I realized I had only read one pleasure book since the New Year. ONE! Considering the fact that I’m a fairly fast reader, this depressed me immensely.

But it’s summer now, right? I can just pick up where I left off? Nope! I left off in the middle of a giant fantasy series (The Wheel of Time Series by Robert Jordan, in case you were wondering), and when I picked it up again, I had almost no recollection of the previous events.

Frustrated and upset, I turned to the internet for a reading challenge of some sort, but nothing there seemed to hold any promise.

Then it hit me. I’ll just ask by friends and family what their favorite books are, and that will be my summer reading list!

I didn’t realize what I had gotten myself into, but no matter. The books on the list are:

• Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
• The Last Jihad by Joel C. Rosenberg
• The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
• In a Dark, Dark Wood by Ruth Ware
• Heartless by Marissa Meyer
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

It will probably end up growing as the summer continues, but I figured this was a good starting point. I dove headfirst into Code Name Verity, which is historical fiction written in a diary-like format. I used to read diary-like historical fiction a lot, so I really enjoyed it! I read The Last Jihad next, which is a wildly different story, with terrorists and wall-street savvy main characters. And yet, I loved that one just as much!

You may realize where this is going, but I really hadn’t thought about it until now. Every book on this list is completely different. We have young adult, action adventure, historical fiction, children’s fantasy, and a beloved classic. As someone who mostly reads adult fantasy these days, I was pleasantly surprised by how differently written and interesting these have been so far.

These books are all loved and treasured by people I love and treasure, and knowing that makes me appreciate them even more. And in my eyes, it only goes to show how powerful writing is. That different styles and different emphasis can touch different people in so many different ways. (I bet before today you didn’t believe it was possible to use different 4 times in a sentence but you were WRONG).

The fact that one person is enamored by an action-packed political drama, but another is touched by the story of a boy who finds out he’s a demigod, is unbelievably cool, and one of the many reasons I love reading!

If there is any moral to this story, it’s that I should step out of my comfort zone more often. Fantasy is my LIFE, but a lot of these other genres are really awesome and totally worth checking out! If you need something to read this summer, try something totally different, or something you know your best friend loves. You just might end up loving it too!

Until next time, Namárië!