Falcon Four: Four quick reads for back-to-school season
By: Hannah Johnson
Happy August Falcons! Back to school is right around the corner, and, with the summer coming to an end, maybe you’re looking for a few more quick reads to finish out your summer reading. Here are four quick reads to knock out those reading goals.
The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald
If you’re interested in reading a classic to finish off the summer, The Great Gatsby is a wonderful pick, not too difficult and shorter (under two hundred pages depending on edition). A classic American tale, The Great Gatsby follows a cast of characters including mainly Nick Carroway, the novel’s protagonist, Jay Gatsby, and Daisy Buchanan. The novel follows Gatsby’s and Daisy’s tumultuous feelings and relationships and asks complicated and painful questions about the passage of time and how one addresses the past. Emotional, heartbreaking, complex, and sinister, The Great Gatsby is a wonderfully powerful American classic, perfect for a literary summer read.
Antigone- Jean Anouilh
Continuing on the topic of short summer reads, plays provide a great opportunity for getting those shorter reads in. Less than one-hundred pages, depending on edition, and more approachable than other playwrights like Shakespeare, Antigone is a compact but powerful play about government, power, and what one will do for their family members, and for the right thing. A complex and utterly raw and human tale, Antigone shows the inner workings of the powerful, twists ideas of justice and perception, and twists against humanity.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde- Robert Louis Stevenson
If you’re a fan of gothic or Victorian literature, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a great shorter read, for those who enjoy some more sinister summer reading. A battle between two sides of humanity makes up the premise of this eerie tale, making readers examine humanity in a new light, with its danger and vastness, the good and the evil as Goodreads puts it. Wonderfully complex, detailing the impossible multifaceted nature of human beings, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is able to use its pages powerfully to speak for the complex different corners of humanity.
Girl, Interrupted- Susanna Kaysen
A powerful story on mental health, Girl, Interrupted provides a non-fiction account from inside the hospital, detailing what mental health in the institution looks like in this time frame, beginning in 1967 as Goodreads states. Even for readers who may not normally indulge in non-fiction, Kaysen’s writing is brilliant, powerful and human, a big and perhaps overwhelming concept like mental health and its perception and treatments all handled from a real perspective, emotional, raw and real. If you’re interested in branching out into non-fiction, or looking for a shorter but meaningful non-fiction read, Girl, Interrupted tells of a different world, in a different era, within the walls of the institution.
Just because back-to-school season is coming doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice getting all those reading goals and pages in this August. Happy reading.
