Personally, I love to read, and when I'm assigned a book to read in school, I feel like I'm a part of an exclusive book club! Think about it: reading great literature for homework! What can be better than that? However, with an assignment inevitably comes a due date by which the reading must be completed, and then the essay that follows it. The pressures of both the due date and the daunting essay plagues us with pressures that cause our joy for reading to decline. So, I have decided to put together a brief summer reading list for you all so you can catch up on what you may have missed! Maybe you've read some these before or maybe you began a book but other school work interfered, but whatever the case may be, I want to inspire you to rediscover your love for reading, It can happen with this list of great literature!

"The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway

"Lord of the Flies" by William Golding

“Maybe there is a beast…maybe it's only us.”

"The Road" by Cormac McCarthy

“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.”

"Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston

“If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don't keer if you die at dusk. It's so many people never seen de light at all.”

"Tender is the Night" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Think how you love me," she whispered. "I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

"The Awakening" by Kate Chopin

“Who can tell what metals the gods use in forging the subtle bond which we call sympathy, which we might as well call love.”

"Nightwood" by Djuna Barnes

“Matthew," she said, "have you ever loved someone and it became yourself? [...] I have been loved, by something strange, and it has forgotten me.”

"Kindred" by Octavia Butler

“...I realized that I knew less about loneliness than I had thought -- and much less than I would know when he went away.”

"The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

“And the air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. Big Things lurk unsaid inside.”

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”

"The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

As I said earlier, many of these books are classics which are assigned in school, but maybe while you were in school you didn't dedicate much time or devote your interest in these books because they were assignments. Take advantage of this summer to read on your own terms! As important as exploring topics expressed in literature in essays are, don't worry about it this summer! It's time for you to relax and read!