5/2014 – Hi there! This post has gotten an outrageous amount of traffic in the last two months…via pinterest! I would love for you GUYS to tell me what YOU TOO are reading this summer for this years list…coming soon! Happy Reading!
I LOVE reading, but like many things I adore and swear I will do more of…, the habit of reading has fallen to the wayside…This summer I am making a concerted effort to get back on the reading wagon. I have chosen a number of John Green books because Phoebe is also reading them which gives us an opportunity to share what we have liked…not liked…read together….Phoebe , a HUGE John Green fan from his History Study Guides, has already read “LOOKING FOR ALASKA” and loved it…so without further ado… MY LIST SOMEDAY, SOMEDAY MAYBE – BY LAUREN GRAHAM I am and was a HUGE Gilmore Girls fan, and so when I heard that Lauren Graham had written a debut novel, I ordered it right away! I am about half way through and I LOVE IT. It is bringing back so many memories of my NYC days, pounding the pavement, auditions, directors, agents, answering services…all of it…the story and relationships are wonderfully written…I highly recommend!
Someday, Someday, Maybe: A Novel
The remaining books on my list I have not cracked yet, so I will give you a brief, AMAZON>COM synopsis…please chime in if you have read any of these, but no spoilers please!!!! LOOKING FOR ALASKA – BY JOHN GREEN “Sixteen-year-old Miles Halter’s adolescence has been one long nonevent – no challenge, no girls, no mischief, and no real friends. Seeking what Rabelais called the “Great Perhaps,” he leaves Florida for a boarding school in Birmingham, AL. His roommate, Chip, is a dirt-poor genius scholarship student with a Napoleon complex who lives to one-up the school’s rich preppies. Chip’s best friend is Alaska Young, with whom Miles and every other male in her orbit falls instantly in love.” amazon.com
THE FAULT IN OUR STARS – BY JOHN GREEN TIME Magazine’s #1 Fiction Book of 2012! “The Fault in Our Stars is a love story, one of the most genuine and moving ones in recent American fiction, but it’s also an existential tragedy of tremendous intelligence and courage and sadness.” —Lev Grossman, TIME Magazine
addendum – One of the most beautiful stories I have ever read. Honest. Real. Real like Cancer. Not fluffed up and sentimentalized…but achy and heart breaking and true. …and ….Timely, if you follow my blog and know the loss our family has endured this year. Especially the loss of my beloved sister in law, Maura…who died this year at the age of 37…from cancer. Mauras life, though cut short and her absence leaving such a HUGE hole in our family…but Her LIFE was no less a FULL life than one that lasts for 85 years…and THIS I believe was the most touching takeaway message from TFIOS…Okay? Okay.
PAPER TOWNS – BY JOHN GREEN “Quentin Jacobsen, 17, has been in love with his next-door neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman, for his entire life. A leader at their Central Florida high school, she has carefully cultivated her badass image. Quentin is one of the smart kids. His parents are therapists and he is, above all things, “goddamned well adjusted.” He takes a rare risk when Margo appears at his window in the middle of the night.” amazon.com
AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES – BY JOHN GREEN “When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact. On a road trip miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy–loving best friend riding shotgun—but no Katherines” AMAZON.COM
THE INTERESTINGS BY MEG WOLITZER
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2013: This knowing, generous and slyly sly new novel follows a group of teenagers who meet at a summer camp for artsy teens in 1974 and survive as friends through the competitions and realities of growing up. At its heart is Jules (nee Julie, she changes it that first summer to seem more sophisticated) Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress who comes to realize she’s got more creative temperament than talent; her almost boyfriend Ethan Figman, the true genius in the bunch (he’s a cartoonist); musician Jonah Bay, son of a famous Baez-ish folksinger; and the Wolf siblings, Ash and Goodman, attractive and mysterious. How these five circle each other, come together and break apart, makes for plenty of hilarious scenes and plenty of heartbreaking ones, too. A compelling coming of age story about five privileged kids, this is also a pitch-perfect tale about a particular generation and the era that spawned it. –Sara Nelson –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
NO ONE COULD HAVE GUESSED THE WEATHER – BY ANNE-MARIE CASEY “When Lucy Lovett’s husband loses his job, she is forced to give up her posh life in London and move their family to a tiny apartment in Manhattan, where her husband has managed to secure a lowly position. Lucy finds herself living in the center of cool and hip. Across from their apartment is a trendy bar called PDT—whenever Lucy passes by, she thinks, Please Don’t Tell anyone I’m a middle-aged woman. Homesick and resentful at first, Lucy soon embarks on the love affair of her life—no, not with her husband (though they’re both immensely relieved to discover they do love each other for richer or poorer), but with New York City and the three women who befriend her.” amazon.com
THE SILVER STAR – BY JEANETTE WALLS “It is 1970 in a small town in California. “Bean” Holladay is twelve and her sister, Liz, is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, a woman who “found something wrong with every place she ever lived,” takes off to find herself, leaving her girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that’s been in Charlotte’s family for generations.” amazon.com
THE ENGAGEMENTS – BY J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN “Evelyn has been married to her husband for forty years—forty years since he slipped off her first wedding ring and put his own in its place. Delphine has seen both sides of love—the ecstatic, glorious highs of seduction, and the bitter, spiteful fury that descends when it’s over. James, a paramedic who works the night shift, knows his wife’s family thinks she could have done better; while Kate, partnered with Dan for a decade, has seen every kind of wedding—beach weddings, backyard weddings, castle weddings—and has vowed never, ever, to have one of her own.” amazon.com
************************************************************************************************************************* So there you have my summer reading list. I will be happy if I read even a few of these wonderful novels but hope I can achieve my goal of all of them by the time the kids go back to school…I feel like I am embarking on a voyage…through time and space…into all of these lives and experiences…I cannot wait to get back to my book!!! Do You have a summer reading list? Perhaps we should keep a running list on this blog of our favorite books, books that we can read and our kids can read too…and books that are just for us…like the “Shades of Gray” series….Happy Reading!!!!
I’m getting ready to read The House I Loved by Tatiana de Rosnay. I already read Sarah’s Key by the same and it was so good!
Love it! I will add those to my list!
I just read Fault in Our Stars… it was beautiful. The Engagements and Someday Someday Maybe are both on my list too!
I want to read Jeanette Wall’s new book – thanks for the synopsis. I loved The Glass Castle. I also want to read Gone Girl. And I am sad to admit that I haven’t done much summer reading. I finished Killing Kennedy by Bill O’Reilly. I would like to learn more about Jackie Kennedy after reading it.
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