Shalom NoVA - Women

Summer Reading List – Suggestions?

My kids will finish school this week and I can feel myself switching into summer mode. This is an automatic, instinctive reaction to the rising temperatures and not at all a reflection of reality. Remember when summer meant carefree days, Italian ices at the beach and hours spent running all over the neighborhood with friends? Summer meant time off from school, homework, deadlines, and projects. It’s been a long time since I had a summer off like my body and mind instinctively want to have each and every year. The reality is that the grown-up world means deadlines and projects don’t really care that it’s summer! But I have decided that I will not give up on a piece of the carefree summer I once knew.

I grew up on the eastern end of Long Island and that meant that I was at the beach all the time. To this day, nothing sounds more relaxing to me than sitting in a chair on the sand, listening to the waves, while reading a really good book. While I have to mostly give up on the beach chair part now, I will never let go of a great summer reading list.

I have some ideas for my list that I want to share with you. Women’s League for Conservative Judaism (WLCJ) maintains a list of suggested book club books for Sisterhoods and I have fallen behind on reading many of them. So, my list for this summer includes People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, The Faith Club by Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver and Priscilla Warner, and Disobedience by Naomi Alderman. You can check out the whole list of WLCJ suggested books at www.wlcj.org.

I also noticed on Maggie Anton’s website that Book III Rachel is coming on August 4! Here is the description posted on www.rashisdaughters.com: Rachel is Salomon’s favorite and adored by her husband, Eliezer. But everything she holds dear is threatened as the marauders of the First Crusade massacre the Jews of Germany and her father suffers a stroke. Eliezer wants them to move to the safety of Spain, but Rachel is determined to stay in France and help her family save the Troyes yeshiva, the only remnant of the great Talmud academies.

I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy. If you have not yet read the first two books in the series, I highly recommend them and if you start now, you will be all caught up in time for Book III.

What else should go on my summer reading list? What titles can you recommend to all of us? Please share the book titles that you or your book club really enjoyed so that we will all be able to settle in with a good story and a big glass of lemonade, and for a small portion of the day, we can recapture that feeling of the summer break we all used to enjoy.