While searching for some new reads to enjoy this summer, I came across this suggested list from the folks at UC Berkley and I just can’t wait to dive in! I decided to pass these along to you as well, so grab one and head outdoors to relax and enjoy some literary adventures. Enjoy!
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
This novel is an exploration of defining moments and whether there is such a thing as a “right” or “wrong” choice. The main character is a woman who at the start of the book is lamenting the defining moments of her life and how they have led her to a life she is not happy with, leading her to attempt to take her own life. At that point, she is swept into the Midnight Library, where she is transported into other versions of her life to explore what would have happened had she made different choices. Each life has good and bad sides, and the overarching theme of the book is that there is no one “correct” decision to make in these pivotal moments. I found it to be profoundly beautiful and comforting in its message that no choice is mistaken — they all lead you down a path that is beautiful in its own way. It ends with a strong message of hope.
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
A young servant flees the Jamestown colony into the darkness of the surrounding wilderness. The moment she crosses from within the walls of the colonial settlement into the unknown marks a crucial divide — between the known and unknown, between society and isolation, between civilization (no matter how compromised and desperate) and a natural place whose laws and ways she does not comprehend. In extreme need — she cannot stay in the colonial settlement any longer — she has engineered this defining moment for herself. She must rely on her wits, her will, her faith, and luck to survive. An absolute page-turner, this novel is also a meditation on the ways that human culture both nurtures and fails us, the impacts of colonialism, and the limits of individual will.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The Bee Sting is a beautiful work of fiction that follows the four members of a family in rural modern-day Ireland as they navigate friendships and familial relationships within the larger context of an economic crash, shifting culture, and the rising threat of climate change. Throughout the book, the characters experience or reflect on pivotal moments during which the trajectories of their individual lives change.
Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan needs no introduction and clearly no definition (a word he has often referred to as “the death of creativity”). The legendary songwriter/Nobel Laureate has been part of so many defining moments in history that to pigeonhole him in one era would be a great disservice.
To first-time readers, let it be known that this is not an autobiography. It is focused primarily on three periods in his life: first, his arrival in New York City’s Greenwich Village in 1961 as an ambitious 19-year-old troubadour hoping to meet his idol, Woody Guthrie, and play in the thriving folk music coffee houses of that era; second, his reclusiveness in the late ’60s and early ’70s as he withdrew to Woodstock, New York, trying to escape world fame and start a normal family life; and third, the production of his album Oh Mercy in New Orleans in the late 1980s, with attempts at reviving his flagging career and touring with Tom Petty.
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett
If you are Queen Elizabeth II and your corgi runs away, you have no choice but to follow it. And if it runs up to the bookmobile behind Buckingham Palace, you are duty-bound to go in and, once inside, choose a book. In this imaginative — and hilarious — novella, the queen’s choosing of a book, in order to actually read it for pleasure (unheard of!), is her defining moment. She returns the first book and chooses another — and becomes entranced with reading and literature. Instead of making light conversation on her walkabouts, she’s now asking what people are reading! Book by book, her life changes, along with the lives of everyone around her. Beautifully written, and called “audacious,” “deliciously funny,” and “superbly observed” by reviewers, this is a light read. (You can devour it in an evening.) It will make you laugh out loud but also make you think — and perhaps even seek out the nearest library!
To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
In a future where time travel is used primarily for academic research, Ned Henry is sent back to Victorian England to correct an incongruity that may endanger time itself. Ned and his colleagues covertly hunt for the defining moment when things went awry while attempting to pass as true Victorians, but they face a series of comic misadventures involving seances, missing pets, an ill-fated boating trip down the River Thames, and a mysterious objet d’art called “the bishop’s bird stump.”