Books on the Beach: My Favorite Summer Reading Picks

by Komal Thakkar – George Washington University

Ever since I was in eighth grade, the Board of Education felt it absolutely necessary to mandate a summer reading list comprised of the most boring books on the face of the earth. Every June after final exams, our English teachers would present us with the dreaded list. We would peruse the summaries of these arcane novels and attempt to pick the ones that seemed as though they would inflict the least amount of pain.

It would literally take me the entire summer to get through just three books. As a self-proclaimed nerd, I absolutely love reading and generally complete about fifteen to twenty novels throughout the summer. However, I found that after three pages of these selections, I would always manage to realize how sleepy I was. Although I feel it is impossible to enjoy every book that you read, you initially choose to read them because they have some relevance to you or your interests. I don’t think the Board grasped that concept very well.

For those students who did not even open a book during the school year, I’m sure it was effective to mandate reading. For students like me, it was simply a burden to have to decipher a book I could not understand for the life of me knowing that I would be tested on it as soon as I returned to school.

This is the first summer that I have not had to adhere to a summer reading list, and it is a very liberating feeling. There is something about bringing a book to the beach that relaxes me. I love spending my day curled up on a towel with my favorite book, some warm sand between my toes, the sun shining brightly above, and the sound of the waves in the background.

While I am not generally a creature of habit, there are four books that I feel compelled to read every summer that I highly suggest to anyone looking to do some pleasure reading this summer.

• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini is a story of friendship, and it manages to make me cry every single time I read it.
• The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver captures a girl’s abrupt journey into motherhood and illustrates the bond between a mother and a child perfectly.
• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd is even better than the film. It traces a young girl’s search for a connection to her mother.
• Lastly, Writing On My Forehead by Nafisa Haji is the story of a Muslim-American girl of Indo-Pakistani descent striving to become a journalist.

Hopefully my list is a little bit better than the Board of Education’s list ever was!