Summer Reading List (Completed)

Since I can't muster up enough brain power to string together words into an amalgamation of coherent and/or witty sentences, I give you my summer reading list. A list of the books my nose has been buried in while walking up and down campus this summer, making you nervous for my safety, if you saw me, wondering when I was going to finally trip, fall down, possible break something and most assuredly embarrass myself. (And by "summer" I'm counting all the books I've read since May, since that will make me feel more accomplished even though it is essentially cheating.)

• The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas.
• NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, by Po Bronson.
• Wintersmith, by Terry Pratchett.
• The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.
• Islands in the Stream: A Novel, by Ernest Hemingway. My first time reading Hemingway. Loved his style and will be adding more of his works to my list.
• The Lucky One, by Nicholas Sparks. You probably shouldn't follow up a Hemingway novel with something like this - it makes you feel like a literary snob. (No offense intended toward Mr. Sparks. I certainly couldn't write a novel. And anyway, I read it while on vacation at the beach, which it was perfectly suited for.)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.
• Fantastic Mr. Fox, by Roald Dahl.
• Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt.
  
• Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier.
• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
• Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. This book has been on my to-read list for a while. I really didn't expect to like it and meant to slog my way through it so I could finally just check the darn thing off my list. I was surprised that I was continually drawn to it and found myself sneaking away time to read it. I found the following passage absurdly beautiful:

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.