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Summer-league
soccer, lemonade stands, sleepaway camp, those after-dinner neighborhood
kickball games that take advantage of the late-setting sun: these are
the things summers are made of, when you’re a kid. But as a geek girl
growing up in the suburbs, I have to confess: one of my favorite summer
rituals was the pre-vacation book stock-up, where my parents would take
my brothers and me into Harvard Square just before the requisite annual
family trip, and let us loose in the stacks at the Coop. I’d leave
with a heavy plastic bag full of books meant to tide me over the course
of whatever impending vacation my parents had planned out for us –
only to tear into them as soon as I got home, before the suitcases were
even packed. Summer is still the time of
year I find myself devouring books at a rate that my wallet finds most
alarming. Graduations, weddings, and other trips away from home mean I
spend way too much of my time sitting on planes and stuck in airports
– which truth be told, isn’t so bad, since it provides me with the
perfect excuse to spend hours and hours on end with my nose buried deep
in a book. While you’re battling the
crowds trying to get your hands on a copy of the brand-spanking new Harry
Potter this weekend, stock up on some other summer reads as
well. Here’s a sampling of what you’ll find me reading on long, lazy
weekends this summer …
Every kid knows the story: how Dorothy tornadoed into the land of Oz, then set upon a journey down the Yellow Brick Road, meeting up with the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion along the way, all four of them finally scoring a meeting with the Wizard, who sends them off on a mission to kill the Wicked Witch of the West. Good conquers evil: ding dong, the nasty Witch is dead, and sweet Dorothy gets to go home with a click of her fancy shoes. But as every adult knows, there’s generally more than one side to every story, and in Wicked, Gregory Maguire tells the tale from the perspective of the Witch of the West herself. Born Elphaba, a mysterious little green girl who’s the product of a nymphomaniac mother and a neglectful, religious zealot of a preacher father, the Witch of Maguire’s story isn’t so terribly wicked at all. What she is instead is a bright, rebellious, agitator of the status quo, who grows up to be an animal rights crusader, a political activist/terrorist, a nun, a reluctant mother, a misunderstood loner.
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