Summer Reading List 2018

Let’s go on a summer brain break.

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Issue 22 | June 21, 2018 | Summer Reading List 2018

School is out, and not a thing to do until fall!

Too bad that only applies to the 6-year-olds among us. For those of us in the working world, the season of summer vacation sometimes feels a bit…objectionable. Where’s our big break? Why don’t we get to recharge? We’re hot and tired and burned out too!

Work may carry on as usual, but we still have to carve out a little piece of summer break for ourselves, and I don’t mean just the vacations that include their own work and logistics. That’s why I’m a big believer in taking on personal campaigns – something to focus on just for yourself. Why should being a working adult mean that every week comes with the same old, same old?

To me, summer reading lists are one of the best ways to carve out the kind of time that truly restores, de-stresses, and nurtures the inherent creative side that is particular to the folks who took a marketing path in the working world. If you’re building out a reading list of your own, here are a few items to consider:

• A blockbuster-to-be: The Sisters Brothers. This light-hearted novel, a “Western dark comedy,” is the story of two renegade cowboys in Gold Rush days who do the assassin work of a gangster type. They’re slogging through criminal assignments, living hard on horseback, and getting dental care without proper anesthesia. But they’re also just two brothers with a typical sibling relationship – close and irksome all at once. Read it now, before the movie (starring John Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix and Jake Gyllenhaal) comes out.
• A literary option: Days Without End. Also a cowboy novel –and no, I have no idea how I ended up with back-to-back cowboy novels. VERY different from The Sisters Brothers, but also one of the most distinctive novels I’ve read in ages. It’s a story of a young Irish immigrant in pre-Civil War America, a kid with nothing who is able to eke out a living as a soldier. It’s a first-person account of life on the frontier, but in the most gentle and thoughtful voice. The writing has really stuck with me for its unique tone. Check out the NYTimes review here.
• Why Americans are reading less: Why We Don’t Read, Revisited. This timely article from The New Yorker analyzes our national reading trends. I was all set to blame smartphones, but the culprit is actually (spoiler alert) TV – an effect that is half a century in the making but, alarmingly, still getting worse.
• Work-related: What the big names are saying about the DOL rule. This is a blog post I recently wrote for financial services agency Kurtosys. I looked at how some of the biggest financial brands have talked about the ever-unresolved DOL rule in their published content. As the upcoming SEC rule looms, these examples could give you some food for thought on how you address regulatory changes.

Looking for more suggestions? I also asked the three most prolific readers in my life to recommend their recent favorites, and here’s what I got:

• Beartown, a novel about a struggling small town that pins all its hopes on a hockey championship.
• A Gentleman in Moscow, which I also loved, a long but worthwhile character portrait of a politically disgraced aristocrat living out his days under house arrest in a grand hotel.

What’s on your summer reading list? I’m always looking for suggestions – please send yours my way!

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