Summer Reading

Last year, my summer reading assignment was The Life Before Us. It was the lowlight of all the books I read during the entire summer, which is to say, it was terrible. From what I can remember, the book is about a fat woman who takes care of prostitutes’ children, one of whom is Momo, who spends most of the book running around the street unattended and/or crying. I’m sure that’s pretty accurate.

This summer, I have been freed from mandatory summer reading for the first time in five years. I don't have anything against the concept of summer reading, but I have read some pretty bad summer reading books, including The Bell Jar, The Natural, Feed, and of course, The Life Before Us. The Natural could have been a decent book, but Roy Hobbes was, quite frankly, a jerk. As for Feed, I understand what the author was trying to do and why he wrote the book the way he did, but it was like, meg null, unit.

What I have been reading generally falls into one of three categories: science fiction, young adult fiction, and nonfiction. Yes, I still read books from the young adult section because at the moment, I’m not interested in reading anything titled First Love at Midnight on a Moon-Speckled Beach in Summer or A Man Sits in a Boat Trying to Catch a Fish for Five Hundred Pages, uh, I mean, The Old Man and the Sea.

To prove that I don’t think all books are awful, I will now rave about the wonders of Twilight.

Just kidding. I haven’t read Twilight.

I did, however, read the Hunger Games trilogy, which I enjoyed. In my opinion, The Hunger Games had the best story, though Catching Fire was the most well written (in terms of character development, plot twists, etc.). Mockingjay was still good, but the ending left some loose ends, was kind of abrupt, and had more than a few unnecessary events. Also, there were about four too many variations of “I (Katniss) left my house and then I passed out, and when I woke up there were lots of tubes in my arm, which I yanked out so I passed out again.”

I also got through Rama II, which is the second of four books about giant alien spaceships passing through the solar system. This is probably one of those science fiction books that you have to be a science fiction fan in order to read, because along with the questions about alien life and sentience, there are the mandatory pages and pages describing scientific protocols, crew dynamics, and the alien spaceship itself. Let’s just say I’m a science fiction fan.

And in the nonfiction category, among other books, I read October Sky, which was originally called Rocket Boys until the movie came out. In summary, in the book, Homer Hickham writes about how he and his friends built and tested rockets around the Cold War era, inspired by the launch of Sputnik. As always, the book had a lot more detail than the movie, and it was interesting to read about life in their small town in between rocket successes and failures. Apparently you can get towed behind cars by grabbing on to their back bumpers while on a sled (in the snow). . . . Don’t worry; Cornell only encourages sledding at the Plantations. And no, I’m not currently building any rockets.