It’s hard to believe that my summer is almost over (though I still have about 2 weeks left). However, since I spent as much time as possible reading as many books as I could, I thought I’d do a summer/pleasure reading wrap-up for the months of May, June, and July. Also, since I love quotes, I thought I’d include quotes from the books that I could find quotes from on Goodreads. 🙂
May
- The Life All Around Me by Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons: “I believe that anything is possible if you have the combination of love for what you’re doing and the will to sit down and not get up until it’s done.”
- The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver: “In a world as wrong as this one, all we can do is make things as right as we can.”
- Saving Max by Antoinette van Heugten
- Pigs In Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver: “No matter what kind of night you’re having, morning always wins.”
- The Choice by Nicholas Sparks: “Stories are as unique as the people who tell them, and the best stories are in which the ending is a surprise.”
- Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver: “I thought I wouldn’t live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.”
- How To Be Lost by Amanda Eyre Ward: “When you are small, if you reach out, and nobody takes your hand, you stop reaching out, and reach inside, instead.”
- Beyond The Waves by Miranda Marek
- A Soft Place To Land by Susan Rebecca White
- The Fault In Our Stars by John Green: “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
June
- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson: “That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
- Fifty Shades Of Grey by EL James: “Laters, baby.”
- The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh: “Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.”
- If You Want To Write by Brenda Ueland: “I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: “See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!” And of course, no one can. ”
- On Writing by Stephen King: “Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
- The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank: “Sometimes you’re loved because of your weaknesses. What you can’t do is sometimes more compelling than what you can.”
- Fifty Shades Darker by EL James: “You’re the only person I’d fly three thousand miles to see.”
July
- Love Walked In by Marisa De Los Santos: “But sometimes, a boat needs to rock; a boat needs to head straight for the heart of a storm and come out on the other side, weather beaten but with flags flying.”
- Fifty Shades Freed by EL James: “I want your world to begin and end with me.”
- Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger: “Listen, sometimes when you finally find out, you realize that you were much better off not knowing.”
- Sam’s Letters To Jennifer by James Patterson: “What are we but our stories?”
- The Map Of Love by Ahdaf Soueif
- The Tenderness Of Wolves by Stef Penney: “It just goes to show you can’t leave anything behind. You bring it all with you, whether you want to or not.”
- Harvesting The Heart by Jodi Picoult: “Perhaps he d always known that the truth of a person lies in the heart.”
- Belong To Me by Marisa De Los Santos: “You know what he said? He said that being away from me is less like being away from a person than being away from other people is. I don’t know anyone else who would say something like that. And he was right. When we were apart, I missed him all the time, but he didn’t feel faraway. He felt closer than the kids at school.”…Certain people are like that, I guess. They’re together no matter where they are. They just belong to each other.”
Total: 25 books. Not too shabby, especially considering I was studying abroad for 5 weeks and going to my internship for 5 days a week. 🙂
What have you read this summer that you’ve really enjoyed?