Uncategorized | August 03, 2016

By Libby Peterson

As with every summer, I have a long reading list waiting which I will never even make a dent in.  It is full of unread classics like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Garcia-Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as science fiction must-reads like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  I know I’ll read less than half of them before the summer is done, but I pile up my list just the same, adding more and more novels as I visit bookstores and hear titles from friends throughout the summer.

Currently, I am reading a book that wasn’t even on my list originally—The Passage by Justin Cronin.  It is a science fiction story of Stephen-King proportions recommended to me by my father, who has already devoured both sequels.  With vampires who share a lot in common with zombies, a corrupt government manipulating the monsters, and a six-year-old girl caught up in it all, the novel is a thrilling read.

I have also started reading Alexander Chee’s novel Queen of the Night, about an opera singer with a complicated past.  I was lucky enough to attend Chee’s master class at Northwestern University, where he discussed writing techniques and his first (and wonderful) novel Edinburgh.

After these, I plan to pick up another of my father’s recommendations, Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way, the first in a long series of detective novels.  These take place in the American Southwest and explore the culture of the area, something I am immensely fascinated by.

Libby Peterson interned at the Missouri Review this summer and is a student at Northwestern University majoring in Anthropology.  She also plans to apply for the Creative Writing major.