Summer Reading

One thing I learned this past year is that pleasure reading in college? Yeah, it doesn't happen much. Sure, you might have a little bit of time in which you pick up a book for fun, but it's rare. I managed to finish a couple of books this past semester-- Frank Peretti's Piercing the Darkness and C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity are the ones I remember-- but the only other books I've finished really just happened over breaks. Why the sudden dropoff in reading? I'm really not sure. I think it has something to do with the fact that so much time is absorbed in readings for classes that once that is done most people just want to watch a TV show or a movie or go do something else that doesn't involve books.
So, anyway, this summer I consider myself to have 3 jobs: the barn, Barnes & Noble, and reading. Barnes and Noble is, as you might expect, highly conducive to reading. If you walk into the break room at B&N, chances are high that you'll find all the employees that are on break sitting around the table with their noses stuck in their books. And if you think I'm kidding, think again.
I'm going to try to work my way through the stack of books that is presently sitting beside my bed, get as far as I possibly can. These books are:

1. God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by Jim Wallis
2. What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard Nelson Bolles
3. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality by Donald Miller
4. The Source by James A. Michener
5. The Gift of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels by Thomas Cahill
6. Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus by Thomas Cahill
7. March by Geraldine Brooks
8. Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins
9. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

If I make it through five of those I'll consider myself to have done well, but I'm going to try to finish all of them. Four months in which to do it...GO!