Welcome back to the blog! As August draws near, we suspect that many of our younger friends might be digging into their assigned summer reading for the upcoming school year (we’ve seen quite a few copies of Fahrenheit 451 leave the shelves recently…). As you remember, “All reading is good reading",” according to our friend Katlyn Bennett, but when it comes to assigned summer reading, the selected titles can be a bit hit or miss, even for avid readers. We asked our team to embrace the #ThrowbackThursday of it all and reflect on some of their (in some cases surprise) favorites from their days of summer reading.

Abby:

To no one's surprise, I was the kid who took as many AP classes as was allowed in high school (tell me you now have an anxiety disorder without TELLING me you now have an anxiety disorder). To accommodate myself and other overachievers, my high school decided it would be a GREAT idea to create a hybrid class that mixed AP US History and AP English and Language Composition; thus AP Civilization (that's what we called it anyway) was born and we were it's sad little guinea pigs, facing the usual stress of our junior year of high school, an untried curriculum, and two teachers who were oil and water to each other.

Our summer reading assignment that year was to read Isabel Wilkinson's The Warmth of Other Suns, a 600+ page monster of a book. I honestly don't remember the assignment that went along with reading it, other than that the instructions were vague and the teachers disagreed on the eventual outcome (noticing a theme here?). But I do remember slogging through the text, annoyed that I was being forced to read something so intensely nonfictional when my summer days should have been spent reading my usual Young Adult fare.

The Warmth of Other Suns is truly a book I came to enjoy retroactively, only realizing its merits and Wilkinson's talent years after having donated my highlighted and underlined copy from high school. I still remember how she interwove historical facts along with first hand accounts of familial strife and upheaval, as she depicted the Great Migration with empathy and accuracy.

I still can't say I enjoyed it on the first read around, as my own life was filled with such upheaval at that point. But it was only later, as books became an even more integral part of my life that I realized my luck in having had the opportunity to read such a well-written book at such a young age.

Emma:

When my grandfather passed away he gifted most of his book collection to me, because even as a kid it was very obvious where my interests lay. The summer before senior year of high school, I was assigned to read Jane Eyre and decided to read the copy that my grandfather had left me. The book was amazingly written (of course) but I think the thing I loved most about it was that it was my grandfathers, so it felt like I was connected to him somehow. I still love this book, even with all of its funny quirks, and I got a 100% on my summer reading report, which made it feel very worthwhile. Still have and love to read the book today!

Jen Miller:

My favorite summer reading book for school was in 11th grade. I read Enchantment by Orson Scott Card. It is a modern day take on Sleeping Beauty with Russian folklore and romance. It was such a fun fantasy read. I pick up the book again every so often and reread it and still find myself lost in the story for a bit.

Angie:

So I'm kind of cheating here, since this isn't my assigned summer reading, but my little brother, who is going into his senior year of high school, was assigned to read The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead over the summer. I loved this book so much and am so excited that his English class is reading it. Based on the true-story of a reform school for "troubled" boys that was open for over 100 years (!!!), Whitehead takes us into the hell that was the Nickel Academy. A poignant but important story that's definitely meant to be discussed with others.

Shannon:

As a life-long procrastinator, I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with assigned summer reading in middle and high school. With this in mind, it was always a pleasant surprised when the last two weeks of August were filled with a thrilling and engaging story rather than something I found very dry and difficult to get through (looking at you, Thomas Hardy). One assigned book that continues to stand out in my memory is Avi’s True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle. A young girl is left unexpectedly alone on an Atlantic sea crossing, falling in with the likes of stern captain and his mutinous crew. Will she wither like a flower or rise like a fierce ocean wave? Guess you’ll have to pick up a copy to find out…

Blog and photo contributions by Team OTB.
Edited by Shannon McCarthy.