Summer is here and we are all thinking about our time away in the sunshine and taking a break from the hectic schedule of everyday life. Choosing a destination can sometimes be difficult and then there is the arduous task of packing everything ready for your time away in the sun. This is the bit of the holiday I dislike the most, packing everything, then unpacking when you arrive and then repeating the process with the added annoyance of having to wash everything when you get back.
One thing I do enjoy in the pre holiday ritual is deciding which books to take with me. Deciding whether I feel like reading a novel or a motivational book takes a while and even if I do manage to decide between these two genres inevitably there is then the decision as to which book should I take, am I feeling particularly drawn to an individual author or to a series of books. What always ends up happening is that I take far too many books for the week away and sometimes I don’t even manage to pick one of them up. Last year I did manage to read a period piece that was set in a beautiful ballroom with antique crystal chandeliers in my imagination probably looking much like those you can find in a Disney movie. So this year I thought I would do my research and see what the top recommended books are for this season and I thought I would share my top two choices with you. There are numerous websites that have downloadable documents of the best books for the year and I like to use a PDF to Excel converter to turn these lists into a spreadsheet that I can then fill in with details about each book as I go, as I like to review them and blog about them later.
- The Art of Gathering: How we meet and why it matters – written by Priya Parker. This book is best by a conflict resolution specialist who is an alumnae of both MIT and Harvard Kennedy School. She looks at the elements of a positive meeting and positive relationships and the chemistry that is evident between people. She draws all her research together from customs all over the world and create insights into how we can improve the basic human need for relating to others in a meaningful way.
- The Pisces by Melissa Broder was of particular interest to me being that I myself am a Pisces. This book centres around Lucy who has been trying to complete her university dissertation and it has taken her nine years. She is having a similar issue with a long term relationship that seems to have gone sour. She tries to recover from this inevitable breakup by working through a selection of tinder dates which are all fraught with their own individual bits of disaster. Lucy then meets Theo who is a merman – one quote from a recent publication on book titles noted that ‘But The Pisces, with its merman and all, reflects what it’s like to wish for love that transports us from our reality and swallows us up whole. It reminds us that no matter how far we fall for another person, we can never fully escape ourselves.’
So these are the two books that I will be taking with me on holiday this year. What are your choices?
