Summer Reading
By Isabella Sayyah ‘16
As a kid, all I did was read and read and read, but somehow around high school, when books started being assigned for class and my schedule started filling up, I sort of stopped. Nowadays, I’ve realized that though it might take some effort to turn off a mindless TV show and pick up a book, it’s always worth it.
During the semester, I usually have enough on my plate with assigned readings, but during summer and winter breaks, I try to catch up on some books. Last summer, I was pretty good about it. I burned through everything from the entire Game of Thrones series to Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake to the newest teen classic The Fault in Our Stars, among many others.
Even over the much shorter winter break, I read a few books, including And the Mountains Echoed, Where’d You Go Bernadette?, and The Paris Wife (all of which I highly recommend), and a few others.
This summer, though, I’ve gotten kind of a slow start. The first few weeks I was traveling, then I was busy adjusting to having a full-time job, and I really only started reading regularly about two weeks ago. So far, I’ve managed to finish one whole book (don’t laugh, it was a long one!), The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Everyone kept calling it “the must read of 2013,” and though I might be a tad behind, I’m really glad I finally got around to it. It was an amazing novel; I highly recommend it for anyone with the time to get through all 750 pages of it.
Now I’ve just started reading Hillary Clinton’s new book, Hard Choices. Somehow I always end up picking the long ones. Though I’m still pretty early in it, I’m really not sure how I feel about it. It reads like a very sugarcoated, PC, pre-campaign manifesto, and I’ve often found myself wondering how she truly felt about a lot of the things she discusses. I guess I’ll just have to wait a couple more decades until her political career is over and she writes a real memoir to learn the truth.
After I finish Clinton’s book — which at this point I’m not sure will ever happen — I have a lengthy list of others I want to get to.
One difficulty of my job is that I face temptation all day. I always seem to be either making a gallery of food pictures to go along with Jonathan Gold’s latest review of a delicious Los Angeles restaurant or producing stories for the Books section that I realize I really want to read. I know I won’t be able to even read what’s already on my list this summer – especially now that break seems to be rapidly coming to a close – but I guess it’s something to aspire to?
The other books on my list are: Beautiful Ruins, a historical novel about a made-up movie star; Capital in the Twenty-First Century, about economics and inequality in the global economy; #Girlboss,the founder of Nastygal’s memoir; Unbroken: A World War II Airman’s Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, about everyone’s favorite Trojan, Louis Zamperini; China Dolls, a novel about three young women in San Francisco in the 1930s; The Silkworm, J.K. Rowling’s newest book, and Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution, about the Supreme Court (the Supreme Court is my favorite branch of government; I’m kind of a nerd about it). Fingers crossed I get through at least two of them before school starts. Looking ahead at the book lists for my classes, it doesn’t seem like I’ll have much time for any extra reading.
Have any better book recommendations? Post a comment, or Tweet me: @isabellasayyah
