summer off

     So, after reading my last post, I think you can understand why I have decided to take the summer off from school. I was going back and forth about it for awhile, but in the end I think I made the right decision. My graduation date will be postponed for 10 weeks, but in the long run, what's 10 weeks?  Most importantly, this will help my mental sanity to have a nice break (I am half way through my program! yay!) and I am now able to partake in so many fun plans for the summer. I have also convinced myself I will work extra shifts so I can make more money... we'll see how that goes.

     One of the most exciting plans I have made for the summer is a trip to Hawaii!! My family has not traveled outside of this country in a couple years, which has been unfortunate since we used to go on big trips every year. It has been a struggle with both myself and my brother being in college, because our schedules were so hectic. Now that he has just graduated college and with me taking the summer off from grad school... HAWAII here we come!

     More upcoming excitements: My brother's graduation party. Cabin trips with friends. 311 and Sublime show in Chicago. Renting a house on Lake Michigan with 8 of my favorite ladies. Summerfest in Milwaukee. Going to the beach. Late nights in the city with my best friends. 

    One of the other things I am extremely happy to be able to bring back into my life (at least until the fall quarter starts) is reading for FUN.  Ever since I started grad school, I have picked up and put down at least 5 novels that I thought I was dying to read.  I do not blame the authors for their lack of story telling, it is just difficult for me to make it through a book when I know that I should be spending my time reading texts books.  I will pick up a book, read 100 pages in, then be busy for three weeks solid with paper writing and studying for tests, then never pick the book back up again.  

I already have a stack of summer reads:

 ... a book that I picked up and put down after page 25. This time it gets a real chance.

Summary: Geek Love is the story of a carnival family, the Binewskis, who save their traveling "Carnival Fabulon" from bankruptcy by giving birth to fabulous freaks - the children born to Lil Binewski after she ingests drugs, insecticides, arsenic, radioisotopes, anything to make her babies more "special". The result is a world readers have never entered before, a place of horror and humor, where vengeance and love are realized in unimaginable ways. And where some unforgettable "Ripley's Believe It or Not" characters are both exotically unique - and hauntingly, chillingly, just like us.

... recommended to me by my lovely, Laura. 

Apparently it is being turned into a movie now.

Summary: Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, raising her seventeenth white child.  She's always taken orders quietly, but lately it leaves her with a bitterness she can no longer bite back.  Her friend Minny has certainly never held her tongue, or hold on to a job for very long, but now she's working for a newcomer with secrets that leave her speechless.  And white socialite Skeeter has just returned from college with ambition and a degree but, to her mother's lament, no husband. Normally Skeeter would find solace in Constantine, the beloved maid who raised her, but Constantine has inexplicably disappeared.

Together, these seemingly different women join to work on a project that could forever alter their destinies and the life of a small town - to write, in secret, a tell-all book about what it's really like to work as a black maid in the white homes of the South.  Despite the terrible risks they will have to take, and the sometimes humorous boundaries they will have to cross, these three women unite with one intention: hope for a better day.

... found this at a book store a year or two ago and have not had the chance to give it a try.  I have heard good things.

Summary: This is the story of two women. Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice, the kind of choice we hope you never have to face. Two years later, they meet again - the story starts there... 

The publishers of Chris Cleave's novel "don't want to spoil" the story by revealing too much about it, and there's good reason not to tell too much about the plot's pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple--journalists trying to repair their strained marriage with a free holiday--who should have stayed behind their resort's walls. The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn't explain to the girls from her village because they'd have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day--with the right papers--and "no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2." Where you have to give up the safety you'd assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state.

... I picked it up in a box of free books. So many women read Danielle Steel, so I will give it a try. Don't laugh.

Summary: A violent crime brings together four lives in Danielle Steel’s sixtieth bestselling novel, the story of a mother’s courage, a family’s terror, and a triumph of human strength and dignity in the face of overwhelming odds.

Outside the gates of a California prison, Peter Morgan is released after four long years and vows to redeem himself in the eyes of the young daughters he left behind. Simultaneously, Carl Waters, a convicted murderer, is set on the path of freedom with him. That night, three hundred miles south in San Francisco, police detective Ted Lee comes home to a silent house; for twenty-nine years, he has been living for his job—and slowly falling out of love with his wife. Across town, in an exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood, a mother tries to shield her three children from the panic rising within her. Four months after her husband’s death, Fernanda Barnes faces a mountain of debt she cannot repay, a world destroyed, and a marriage lost.

Within weeks, the lives of these four people will collide in ways none of them could have foreseen. For Fernanda, whose life had once been graced by beautiful homes, security, success, and stunning wealth, the death of her brilliant, brooding husband was already too much to bear. She simply couldn’t imagine a greater loss, until a devastating crime rocks her family to its core—and brings Detective Ted Lee into her life.
A man of unshakable integrity, Lee will soon become the one person who tries to save Fernanda’s family from a terrifying fate. Fernanda must draw on a strength she never knew she had. Racing against time in the underbelly of the criminal world, buffeted by the dark side of power, and unmoored by loss and betrayal, no one can predict where this tragedy will take them.

... no idea how this book showed up on my shelf, but excited to read it.

Summary: Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents who can barely cope with their child's quirks. He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers.

Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor's poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves--against the objection of his father and neighbors--to discover just who has murdered Wellington. He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result--quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number--is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.