After a long year of homework, tests and quizzes, I finally settle down for the summer, and at last the endless flow of work is no more. But there is one exception: the classic summer reading list.
The other day, I was thinking about the list my school has assigned (not reading, just procrastinating), and I had an idea. Like any other day, I was thinking about politics – our country, our state and even our world.
Now, we all know where this is going, so I will just cut to the chase. I thought: If you could have our president read any book, what would that book be? The idea of summer reading is to keep learning, and to be able to take away parts of these books and have them stick with you. So, if you could have the president read a book that you believe he could learn something from, what would that something be?
Naturally, I told my dad (Monitor “College Guy” columnist Brennan Barnard) this idea, and he took to social media with it, sparking a whole wave of funny, witty and thoughtful books for the reading list. In addition to sarcastic suggestions like Twitter For Dummies and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the U.S. Constitution, some bordered on inappropriate (like Bobby and Mandee’s Good Touch/Bad Touch: Children’s Safety Book) so we edited them out.
This was a fun exercise that hopefully everyone can relate to, and in the present world we live in, it’s always good to both joke around with friends and stay informed.
Here is the list:
The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity, by Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy
The Berenstain Bears: How To Get Along With Your Fellow Bear, by Jan Berenstain and Stan Berenstain
1984, by George Orwell
An Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis of Global Warming, by Al Gore
Animal farm: A Fairy Story, by George Orwell
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle
Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum
Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, by Simon Sinek
The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama, by Roland Merullo
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer
Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave / My Bondage and My Freedom / Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
A Nation of Immigrants by John F. Kennedy
What Does It Mean To Be White? Developing White Racial Literacy, by Robin DiAngelo
Diplomacy, by Henry Kissinger
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich
Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation, by Sanaya Roman
“Real World” Ethics: Frameworks for Educators and Human Service Professionals, by Robert J. Nash
All the President’s Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
First You Have to Row a Little Boat: Reflections on Life & Living, by Richard Bode
John Adams, by David McCullough
The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben
A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn
Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
(Sam Barnard, 13, lives in Hopkinton.)