The Summer break is opportunity for, yes: days on the beach, extra work hours, pajama days, and midnight debauchery; but also, believe it or not, for reading. Recent studies, both from the University of Toronto and the New School for Social Research in New York, suggest that reading literary fiction can help us better empathize with others, and help us think more critically.
The question then is, what to read? As my novelist neighbor Ms. Morales once said to me on a cold afternoon in April when I was thirteen, “The best. We read only the best.”
And so, with Ms. Morales advice in mind, we here at Cypress Chronicle have devised a Summer Reading List for Cypress College Students. We tried to get a good mix of classics and celebrated contemporary novels. We also reached for novels that have something (however marginal) to do with summer or the sea or vacations. We challenge our readers to read five of the fifty or so novels laid out in the reading list.
Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler
Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Kate Christensen’s The Epicure’s Lament
Stephen Greenblat’s The Swerve
Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to an End
Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
Anne Patchet’s Bell Canto
Chekov’s short stories and plays
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad
Scott Fitzgerald’s Tycoon and Great Gatsby
Gabriel Marquez’s Memories of my Melancholy Whores, Love in the Time of Cholera, 100 years of Solitude
Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Hardboiled Wonderland, Norwegian Wood
Cormac Mccarthy’s Blood Meridian
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
Harold Bloom’s The Anatomy of Influence
David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again
Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
Foucault’s Madness and Civilization or The Birth of the Clinic
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater & Breakfast of Champions
Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus and Stranger
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling
Milton’s Paradise Lost
Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Notes from the Underground
Homer’s The Iliad
James Joyce’s Ulysses
Cervantes’s Don Quixote
Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf or Narcissus and Goldmund
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
Borges’ Labyrinths
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Sound and the Fury
Salinger reread Zooey
Heller’s Catch 22
Tool’s Confederacy of Dunces
Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Old Man and the Sea, Garden of Eden, In Our Time.
John Bart’s Lost in the Funhouse
Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea
photo courtesy of www.imgsoup.com