Summer reading

What's in your stack? Plus TONS of recommendations

Three quick notes before we get into books:

First—LA friends! I’m heading your way next week for 2 events. Please join us if you can!

• July 11 at Road Runner Sports, 1338 4th St, Santa Monica, CA: I’m joining Natalie and Jerold Mitchell for a LIVE recording of the Suite Run podcast! Come at 6:30pm to mingle and shop. Show starts at 7pm. Registration required.

• July 12, 7pm at Run With Us, 235 N. Lake Ave, Pasadena, CA: I’ll be in conversation with Jinghuan Liu Tervalon. We’ll talk about how women runners/athletes can improve performance as they navigate all stages of life, from adolescence to adulthood, through pregnancy, menopause and beyond.

Second—The newsletter is going on vacation and I am too! You’ll receive an issue next week (week of July 10) and then the newsletter will be on a break until late August / early September.

Third—If you’ve read and liked my book Up to Speed, would you consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads? It helps other people find the book. I would really appreciate it!

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Photo by Radu Marcusu on Unsplash

When my youngest son was in elementary school, he hated reading. I had to bribe him to read. For every book he finished, he’d earn credits towards a LEGO. Only then did he begrudgingly start to drag his eyes across the page and read.

Then he discovered Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and he couldn’t read fast enough. He read several of Riordan’s other series before moving on to other series in the genre. I couldn’t get him new books from the library fast enough. I had to stop awarding him credits for LEGOs.

I adored his new found love for reading and books. I wanted him to lose himself in words and characters. But he was resistant to reading anything outside of the Greek-Roman-mythology-fantasty world. Sometimes he’d detour into the world of dystopian books before quickly returning to the worlds he was comfortable with.

Until his teacher challenged him to read books in other genres. Historical fiction. Nonfiction. Graphic novels. Biographies. My son assumed that these books would be boring because of the genre and how they were categorized. But he’s competitive (shocking, if you know me) so he accepted the challenge.

If Percy Jackson cracked open the door to reading, this challenge kicked the door wide open. It reinvigorated my son’s reading habit and has made him more open to trying new things.

Some very good books that left me with feelings and lots of thoughts.

I think I might need to employ this strategy.

Lately, reading has felt stale. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve read some great books—great books!—but many have left me feeling kind of meh, kind of flat, whereas I want to feel. Big emotions. Something that will leave me with a book hangover.

I realized that maybe I need to expand my horizons. Maybe I’ve become overly comfortable reading in one or two genres. Maybe by reading something unexpected and in a genre that I don’t know all the tropes and conventions, the synapses in my brain fire will in new ways. Maybe I need to luxuriate in beautiful, literary worlds and sentences. Or maybe I need to be seduced by a relentless, forward-moving plot. Maybe I needed mystery. Maybe I needed to be thrilled and scared.

But that still didn’t solve the problem of figuring out what to read.

So, I turned to social media and wow, people delivered on the recommendations. People suggested books across many different genres. Some books were new. Some books were old. Some I'd never heard of and some that have made a permanent home on the bestseller lists.

I’m sharing the recommendations here in case you too are looking for a good book? (Titles with a + indicate books that were recommended by more than one person.)

It’s been a long time I’ve taken a real, proper vacation. As a freelancer, there’s always the temptation to work, even when you’re supposed to take time off. It’s the scarcity mindset and feast-or-famine nature of the work.

Plus, I like working. I have a hard time sitting still and not feeling like I’m being productive. (That’s a relationship I’ve working hard to untangle, especially after reading Rainesford Stauffer’s book All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive. Highly recommend!)

With my upcoming vacation, I will have no choice but to unplug for two weeks and I’m kind of looking forward to it? Plus, it means that I can read.

Incredibly excited for this summer book stack. Not sure I’ll get through all of these but going to try!

When I put together my summer book stack, I deliberately chose: 1) books that I already own, 2) some books in a new genre, 3) some books in a favorite genre, and 4) one book set where I’ll be on vacation.

I’m curious, what are you reading this summer? Have you read any of these books before?

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What I’m Reading

Aside from the books shown above, I wanted to share two longform pieces I recently read and loved.

• Bitter rivals. Beloved friends. Survivors. (Washington Post): I grew up watching Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova battle it out on the tennis court. I loved watching them play. They seemed like complete opposites in personality, playing style, and appearance. I rooted for Chris largely because we shared a first name and that made me feel special. (The little girl inside me was giddy when I finally got her autograph in 2017.) This piece written by Sally Jenkins is a beautiful tribute to their rivalry and deep friendship.

• I struggled with my Korean-American name. Now I realize it was a gift. (Boston Globe Magazine): This was a piece I didn’t know I needed to read. It’s about names, how they connect us to the past and present, how we struggle with them and the ways they do and don’t reflect our identity, and how we grow into them.

Thanks for being here. More soon.

Christine