It’s officially summertime and with it comes summer reading programs. I was the kind of kid that loved getting the libraries summer reading program and checking off how many books I read. Now, I live through my kids and make them do it.
Read All Day: June
1. The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman ????????
People were… exhausting. They made her anxious. Leaving her apartment every morning was the turning over of a giant hourglass, the mental energy she’d stored up overnight eroding grain by grain. She refueled during the day by grabbing moments of solitude and sometimes felt her life was a long-distance swim between islands of silence.
2. Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano ????????
Humans need community, for our emotional health. We need connection, a sense of belonging. We are not built to thrive in isolation
3. My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite ??????
I know better than to take life directions from someone without a moral compass.
4. The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin ????????
It’s peculiar how no-words can be better than words. Silence can say more than noise, in the same way that a person’s absence can occupy even more space than their presence did.
5. The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson ????
The speech set a pattern that he would follow throughout the war, offering a sober appraisal of facts, tempered with reason for optimism. “It would be foolish to disguise the gravity of the hour,” he said. “It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage.
6. Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montimore ????????
Stop micromanaging your life and just live it; joy and meaning will follow. Find the happy medium between being daring and responsible. Cultivate that balance. Do your best. Be good to yourself, even when—especially when—life isn’t being good to you.
7. Finding Chika: A Little Girl, An Earthquake, and the Making of a Family by Mitch Albom ??????????
The most precious thing you can give someone is your time, Chika, because you can never get it back. When you don’t think about getting it back, you’ve given it in love.
8. The Whisper Man by Alex North ??????
If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear the whispers spoken.
If you play outside alone, soon you won’t be going home.
If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.
If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.
9. The Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler ??????
A big surprise that was no surprise at all. If you are a black person in the United States, you live each day with the knowledge that this scene or one very much like it may be in your future. You needn’t have done anything illegal or have broken any rule.
10. Vampires in the Temple by Mette Ivie Harrison ??
There had been vampires her in the salt lake valley when Brigham Young and the pioneers first arrived, but they’d been corralled onto the island after the the Vampire War. They’re not humans who have died and come back to life. They’re homo vampirus, related to us on the same family tree as Neanderthals, a relic of evolution that had died out around other inland salt lakes centuries ago according to the archeologists. The ones here survived for reasons still being studied.
11. The Jetsetters by Amanda Eyre Ward ??????
Did all siblings revert to their childhood selves when they were together, or was there a way to transition to functional adulthood even while being in one another’s lives?
12. Less by Andrew Sean Greer ??????
Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material.
13. Paris for One and Other Stories by Jojo Moyes ????????
…tell me…the best thing that has ever happened to you.’
‘The best? Oh, I’m kind of hoping it hasn’t happened yet.
14. An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks ??????
People are motivated to break their moral compasses for a variety of primal reasons: survival, hate, love, envy, passion. And money.
Now, Go. See. Do.
~meemish