Summer Reading

Remember when it was mandatory to do summer reading? I'm not talking about just in high school, my school always had a minimum number of pages you had to read in the summer even in elementary school. That was actually better than high school because you could read whatever you wanted. In high school the reading was mandated to you. I still am bitter that I had to read Jane Eyre going into 10th grade. The other book was Lord of Flies which remains one of my favorite books, but it was a whole lot shorter than slogging through 500 odd pages of a Gothic novel. The girls won that year. For the record Wuthering Heights was better than Jane Eyre. Whichever Bronte sister that was wins.

Then in college there was blissfully no summer homework at all. It was a time to try and read for pleasure and finish books started for classes during the year. Usually for me this meant starting a good 3-4 books at a time and only finishing at most 2 of them. I think it didn't help that my brain was worn out from the year and I usually tried to attack academic works. But this summer I've had at least some success mostly due to more time on my hands. Here are some I read in the last few months.

Completed:
1. Fahrenheit 451-Ray Bradbury
-Great dystopian book set apart from others by its writing style.
2. Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians Aren't Being Told About Israel and Palestine-Gary Burge
-Very enlightening read for Christians, especially American evangelicals who all too often support Israel for the wrong reasons.
3. Lone Survivor-Marcus Luttrell
-True story of a Navy SEAL in Afghanistan and his ordeal of avoiding capture in 2005.
4. Epic of Gilgamesh
-Mesopotamian story about man's mortality. Contains an interesting Flood account.
5. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War-James McPherson
-Amazing book using primary sources to tell their combat motivations.
6. The Sound and the Fury-William Faulkner
-Troubling novel set in the South during the early 1900's. Not sure I liked it.

Almost completed (hopefully by the end of the week):
7. Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Church-NT Wright
-At times reassuring, at other times mind opening, Wright seeks to restablish an Orthodox belief in Heaven and the Resurrection since all too often Western mindsets are Platonic and rational (from the effects of the Enlightenment).
8. All Quiet on the Western Front-Erich Maria Remarque
-A novel of WWI by a German veteran of that war, this hard hitting book puts a human face to war on the German side, but which could easily be any side of any war. It is very touching and reflective. Apparently it was banned in Nazi Germany.