Choose your own adventure for summer reading
The summer, that much-needed three-month stretch of time between spring and fall semester, can be spent in many ways. If you’d like to brush up on your reading skills to stay prepared for your upcoming classes but don’t know where to start, consider the following five books and series, sorted based on summer plans for your convenience.
Beach: “Murder at Gulls Nest”
“Murder at Gulls Nest” is a historical fiction mystery novel, following former nun Nora on her search for her pen pal and the series of murders she stumbles on in the small seaside town she calls her new home. The atmosphere is a little creepy, but mostly “cozy and mysterious as Nora learns about her new neighbors and the secrets they’re hiding as she tries to hide her own. The book clocks in at just over 300 pages — long enough to fill an afternoon sitting on the sand.
Internship: “The Wind’s Twelve Quarters”
Ursula K. Le Guin was one of the greatest American authors of the 20th century, most notable for her speculative fiction. “The Wind’s Twelve Quarters” is a collection of her short stories published in 1975, including the famous “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as well as the first introduction to the expansive Earthsea universe, “The Word of Unbinding.” The individual stories are short enough to be finished on a subway commute, and you’ll be able to impress your teammates with your literary prowess and bump up your performance review.
Travel: “The Lunar Chronicles” series
“The Lunar Chronicles” takes the familiar story beats of classic fairy tales and transposes them into a sci-fi future, where Cinderella is a cyborg mechanic in Beijing and the Big Bad Wolf is a genetically modified super soldier from a lunar colony. This four-book series of “twisted fairy tales” travel over several locales, from the countryside of France to towns in the Sahara to the glittering cities of the moon kingdom of Luna. While your travels probably won’t breach the stratosphere, the series is a great choice if you’re looking for a relatively shortbut still engaging series.
None of the Above: “Warrior Cats” series
No summer plans this year? That leaves you with plenty of time to catch up on the over one hundred books (including novellas, super editions and graphic novels in addition to the mainline entries) in the “Warriors,” or Warrior Cats series. Were you a fan in elementary or middle school? See what Erin Hunter has been up to in the years since. Did you miss out on the craze? Now’s the perfect time to read up and see what the hype was — and still is — all about!
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