Now that summer has officially come to a close, I am back to being surrounded by textbooks. Being in school means I have less time to read for pleasure, but it’s my goal to read a fun book at least three times during the week. Just because we’re in school doesn’t mean we have to stop doing what makes us happy!
This summer I made a master “need to read” list and was able to read about twenty books from it. Some books were on the more serious side, but others were total YA corny romance books. So, I put together this short list of reads that helped to make my summer one for the books.
Here are my top five favorite books of the summer (listed in no particular order):
“Lena's voice grew cold. 'I don't understand you. I don't understand people like you, who always choose to blame the woman. If there's two people doing something wrong and one of them's a girl, it's got to be her fault, right?'”
“Watching someone in the throes of raw grief is a terrible thing; the act of watching feels violent, intrusive, a violation. Yet we do it, we have to do it, all the time; you just have to learn to cope with it whatever way you can.”
“As you grow old, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It's growth. It's more than the negative that you're going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it."
“So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."
"The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it."
“If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?”
“I don’t believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of the living. We are never so wise as when we live in the moment.”
“You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving."
“Why was ‘plain’ a euphemism for ‘ugly’, when the very hallmark of human beauty was its plainness, the symmetry, and simplicity that always seemed so young and innocent. it was impossible not to think that her beauty was one of the most important things about her—something having to do with who she really was.”
“Whenever I’m worried about anything, I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely care about what you think is so important.”