Great Summer Reads 2015

“No more pencils, no more books…” No wait, not “no more books!” Summer is a wonderful time for books. Lazy days at the lake, long evenings when it’s light until 10:00pm, road trips and plane trips. Paperbacks, e-books, audio editions (paperbacks for the lake, e- books for the plane, audio for the car).

As it is snowing and raining and sunny in Montana and students are taking exams and looking forward to graduation, it’s time for the fourth installment of the annual Great Summer Reads. Once again, the list is a compilation of books that are fiction and nonfiction, law-related and not, new and old. In addition to recommendations gathered from law school faculty and staff, this year we have included titles suggested by students.

There is a little bit of everything on this list. I’m not sure where I’m going to start, but as I was receiving recommendations and adding them to the list, it became clear that I am going to have to take the summer off just to read the ones that have captured my attention.

Fiction

• The Children Act by Ian McEwan
• Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
• Outlander (series) by Diana Gabaldon
• Century trilogy (Fall of Giants, Winter of the World, Edge of Eternity) by Ken Follet
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd
• Under the Wide and Starry Sky by Nancy Horan
• Loving Frank by Nancy Horan
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
• Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
• Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
• The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
• Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan
• Ape House by Sara Gruen
• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
• Ware tetralogy (Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware) by Rudy Rucker
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens
• Hard Times by Charles Dickens
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Home Place by Carrie La Seur
• Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• Oil! by Upton Sinclair
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
• Euphoria by Lily King
• Old Filth trilogy by Jane Gardam
• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
• Enon by Paul Harding
• Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls

Non-Fiction

• An Air that Kills by Andrew Schneider & David McCumber
• Missoula by Jon Krakauer (2 recommendations)
• Lawrence in Arabia by Scott Anderson
• Battle for the Big Sky: Representation and the Politics of Place in the Race for the US Senate by David C.W. Parker
• Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams by Richard Michael Fischl & Jeremy Paul
• I Lost My Love in Baghdad by Michael Hastings
• The Law and Harry Potter by Jeffrey E. Thomas
• The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
• An Alien Place: The Fort Missoula, Montana, Detention Camp 1941-44  by Carol Van Valkenburg
• How Soccer Explains the World by Franklin Foer
• How to  Argue and Win Every Time by Gerry Spence
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson
• Believer: My 40 Years in Politics by David Axelrod
• The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime by Harold Bloom
• All the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

And when you’ve made your way through this list, you can turn to the Jameson Law Library’s New and Recommended Books research guide which we update throughout the year as we receive new books.

Have a good summer!