September Reading List

While I'm thankful that I no longer have to write essays and read 50 page academic papers on a regular basis anymore, there are definitely some things I miss about university, and being forced to read novels is one of them. When left to my own devices, my reading matter tends to gravitate towards lighter fare (ie. my 10 favourite magazines), but there is something so rewarding about reading an actual book. I was a voracious reader growing up, so reading has never exactly felt like a chore to me, but it's definitely something I'd like to make a bit more time for. 

I've made it my goal to aim for reading two books a month: one "modern" (and by that I mean something that's been written in the past decade or two), and one classic novel. Here are the books I've been reading/plan on reading this month; I'll let you know how I enjoyed them in October!

If you've got any great recommendations you'd like to share, please comment away! I'm always looking for new books to add to my reading bucket list.

Modern Pick: 
A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett

I'd read an article about Amanda, a Canadian, in a magazine a while back, and was intrigued by her story of being held hostage in Somalia for 15 months. This book, her memoir of that time in captivity (co-written with a journalist), has been on my must-read list for a while, and I'm so glad to have finally gotten round to reading it. I'm about halfway through and really enjoying it: it's well-written and a total page turner. I'll give a more in-depth review of it next month once I've finished it, but I think this will definitely be a book I'd recommend...  










Classic Pick: 
A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

This book was a recommendation from my dad, and I can't wait to start reading it. I read one of Forster's other great novels, A Passage to India, in a class on 20th century British fiction a few years ago, and it really stuck with me. It's a pretty weird book, and kind of hard to explain (superficially, it's about an Indian doctor being accused of assaulting an Englishwoman in colonial India, but there's so much else going on), but I loved Forster's understated yet deftly observant writing style. I figure that because I enjoyed A Passage to India despite its overall sombreness simply because of Forster's brilliant narrative style, I'll really love a novel where he's writing about happier themes set against the backdrop of Italy.