Reading is a delightful part of my life. I think that reading can be super accessible if you read things that interest you. Here are the books that are on my TBR for the summer:

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I truly believe this book is an absolute masterpiece. It explores the various interpretations of love from Dr. Juvenal Urbino, Fermina Daza, and Florentino Ariza's love triangle, which is complicated by numerous factors.

The narrative jumps between the past and the present as we explore how much can change from Daza and Ariza's adolescence to their adulthood. Love finds itself being a word that is defined differently by the characters themselves over time. Honestly, reality is a heavy-hitter in this novel because there are considerations of the historical contexts and other features necessary to the masterful world-building typical of Marquez.

Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature; furthermore, his style of writing is poetic and reminiscent of poetry. Truly, the flow of the words finds itself from being intelligible to having words which are uncommon in our modern day; for example, Marquez uses some archaic words, and words you would probably find in an essay on Shakespeare, like "rancor".

I would recommend this book for people who like reading larger, more challenging novels; however, anyone with a passion for writing should read Marquez, as he demonstrates how to write as if you control the prose.

I am about to finish this book, but I rate it a 9.5/10 because of how masterful it is. I would not give this a perfect rating as I find that the beginning felt a little disconnected from the majority of the book (plus it was required summer reading for my college).

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Night Sky with Exit Wounds (and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous) by Ocean Vuong

I read Night Sky with Exit Wounds to rewind and prepare before the summer; therefore, I think it is a strong read for people who want to open their wounds and cry.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds was a poetry collection published by Ocean Vuong, who is a Vietnamese American poet. Imagine a sunny day, by the beach, and sitting on a bench. Now imagine reading even a single poem whilst relaxing by said beach. Vuong's poetry allows you to cry and to have a glimpse into Vuong's struggles with addiction, identity, and the concept of self.

I started reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous for a bit. Then I stopped. I stopped reading this epistolary novel as I felt that the autobiographical side of this novel was so real. Perhaps I will pick this up after I stop reading Love in the Time of Cholera.

To digress, I found that Vuong's abstractions in poetry carried on in his novel, which makes sense because Vuong is writing in the epistolary form, which highlights the personal tone he writes with, remember: letters are often a correspondence, but Vuong could not create a correspondence as his mother, the person he is writing to, has died. Vuong's grief flows across pages, overflowing beyond the book, which is why it is such an unsettling read.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Image Credit: RKO Radio Pictures Inc. from Wikimedia Commons

This book is on my Summer TBR list, as it is a short book to read, like The Stranger/The Outsider by Albert Camus, since it is about a fisherman, and because it is set, presumably, in Sunny California.

Steinbeck is a literary giant, as he also won a Nobel Prize like Marquez, and he is renowned for his writing, which blends the realities of life with the beauty of prose fiction; furthermore, I adore short books. Condensing a novel into a little novella is... genius!

I think my favourite way to test if a writer's work is worth reading is by seeing if they can write smaller and larger things equally well, because the author's ability to keep our interest should be able to work across different sizes of books.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I suggest that you take this with a grain of salt. I am no expert on literature. I'm 16... not 60. So if you want to read anything else, then do it!