Gregory K. Moffatt, Ph.D.
Summer often brings us
hours at home with children, time for sitting beside the pool, or leisurely
spending time on a beach, on a cruise, in airports, or in a summer
cabin. Several times over the years I resolved on New Year's Day to
read a book a week. I’ve never regretted it when I’ve done that.
Students come into my
office, which is lined with bookshelves, and ask if I’ve read all of those
books. Yes, I have, but what they don’t know is that those books are only
the ones I’ve kept and also don’t include the books on my Kindle.
You don’t have to read a
book a week, but even one or two books over the summer will be a choice you
won’t regret. Here are some categories that include some of my
favorite books.
For children, these
books can’t miss. When my son was young, I read aloud to him all of
C.S. Lewis’ seven-volume set The Chronicles of Narnia. Both
of us enjoyed this experience. For very young children, The
Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams, The Lorax and Green
Eggs and Ham by Dr. Suess can easily be read at bedtime. The
Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien and The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn by Mark Twain can be read a chapter at a time.
For teens and adults,
these books are amazing and everyone should read them at some point in
life. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The
Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, A Lesson Before Dying by
Ernest J. Gaines, andAngela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt are so
good it will be hard to put them down.
These biographies are
unbelievable - The Diary of Ann Frank, Man’s Search for
Meaning by Victor Frankl, Night by Elie Wiesel, and
the story of John Adams as told by the best historian ever,
David McCullough.
Good humor can be found
in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days and WLT: A
Radio Romance as well as in Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story.
Malcom Gladwell’s books Blink and Outliers are
unbeatable. Why are All the Black Kids Sitting in the Cafeteria
Together? is a wonderful read on culture and race written by Atlanta’s
own Beverly Tatum. You also won’t want to skip the classics Frankenstein by
Mary Shelly and The Animal Farm by George Orwell.
For the more adventurous
adult reader, I recommend A Brief History of Time by Stephen
Hawking, Plato’sRepublic (sometimes called The Polity), The
Plague by Camus, The Trial and The
Metamorphosis by Kafka, and any short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Jack
London, Mark Twain, or Stephen King.
From classic literature,
my list includes Homer’s Iliad, Beowulf from
English classic literature, and The Inferno by Dante.
If you venture into these classics, you might want to select an annotated
translation. Cliff’s Notes or some other reading aid might also make
these books more enjoyable to read.
You probably have
noticed that many of these books have been made into movies. There is a good
reason for that. They are fantastic books. But don’t skip the book
for the movie. Movie makers only have about ninety minutes to
present a story and often much of the best parts of these books are lost
in translation. As the old pompous cliché goes, the book is almost always
better than the movie.
Plus, you won’t cheat
yourself out of the pleasure of holding a book in your hand while your
imagination plays the story out in your mind. I enjoy watching movies
that are based on books I’ve read because it gives me a chance to see how the
movie makers translated the imagination of the author into film. Often,
the images that were in my head as I read these books were craftily
transitioned to the big screen when the book made it to film just as I’d imagined.