Summer Reading

This summer will be my first summer since 2006 that I will not be enrolled in classes.  For me this is a very exciting thing.  Normally my summers are the most hectic part of my year.  Every summer I work at the local fair and have done since 2005.  This means that while most people are soaking up the sun and enjoying the weather, summer is the only time I actually have to juggle work and school at the same time.  However, this year I decided to take the summer off from classes since I only have a couple left until graduation and I figured I'd just finish them off all together in the fall.

With all this free time on my hands I decided to pick up a few books for some summer reading.  A couple weeks ago I went to Value Village and scoured the shelves for some summer picks.  I walked out with the five following books:

The first book that I got was The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.  My younger brother had to read this in high school a few years ago and he is not a reader.  However, even his half hearted description of the book at the time had me intrigued.  Based on what I could remember of the summary I got from my brother it is a little sci-fi and a little apocalyptic.  I couldn't really remember much beyond that but it did sound interesting and I remembered really wanting to read it at the time my brother was studying it.

The next book I got was Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.  My mom read this book a few months ago as a part of a book club she is a part of and suggested it to me.  This books is about Greg Mortenson and how he helped to built 55 schools in Pakistan.  This book has also won a few awards and sounds like one of those very inspirational stories.

The third book I got was Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett.  This book is a part of the discworld series which I got into a few years back.  The discworld series is a fantasy series but it has a lot of humour and satire.  After reading the first four or five discworld books in order I've just been reading whatever I can get my hands on.  Every time I'm in Value Village or Salvation Army I hunt the shelves for another discworld book and with over 30 books in the series I can usually pick up one or two.

The fourth book I got was The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.  This was actually the last book I pulled off the shelf as I was going through all the books.  I was mostly just looking for a fifth book since when you buy four the fifth is free.  I remember watching the film adaptation of this book a couple years back and that was about all I was going on when I picked it out.

The last book I got was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.  I'm sure everyone has heard of this book by now and the films that have been made of the books.  I'm actually coming to the end of the book now and a lot of the mysteries have been solved.  I'm really looking forward to finishing this book so that I can see how it is carried over into two more.  I'll have to be on the look out for the other two books in the series.

Has anyone else read any of these books?  Do you have any other suggestions for books or series?  I'll probably be doing a few book reviews as I finish each one.