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Fall Break Book Recs

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Notre Dame chapter.

Fall Break is just a few days away, and that means you’re about to have some time to read (finally!). Here are a list of the best, most meaningful books I read so far this year. 

  1. Headstrong: 52 Women who Changed Science – and the World by Rachel Swaby

Because not everyone is writing a thesis on Women in STEM and the Nobel Prize, you may not know that eleven men won the Nobel Prize this year, and no women won.  The world is terrible, but this book makes it better.  It is 52 mini-biographies of some of the most amazing women doing work with things like DNA, fossils, and astrophysics!  

  1. Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero

Cantero wrote a grown-up Scooby-Doo book, where all the kids are young adults and really messed up.  Their final case as kid detectives was more mystical than they can bear to admit and they head back to the Zoinks River Valley to find out one thing:  Whodunnit?

  1. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

This book is dark.  A dark story of the suffering of two women in Afghanistan over decades, trying to live and raise their children as best they can.  Content-wise, it is not an easy book to get through, but the skills of Hosseini as a writer made me unable to put it down

  1. The Girl with the Red Balloon by Katherine Locke

Locke writes a fantastical tale about magic-assisted escapees from Soviet occupied East Berlin, inspired by the very real people who risked everything to help others to safety. Katherine’s perspective as a Jewish person writing about events so important to them really shines through in their passionate storytelling, and their desire to show characters willing to give up everything for a greater, just cause.

  1. Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?: And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House by Alyssa Mastromonaco

Mastromonaco served as a deputy chief of staff to President Obama, and considers installing a tampon dispenser in the women’s bathroom her greatest achievement in the White House.  She writes an entire book of cool stories, while not being simply a list of the Obama Administration’s achievements (which also would be awesome), but her personal tales.  Much like watching The West Wing, this book is a great escape into the lives of passionate people working hard to do good for our country.

 

This is purely a list of books I intend to read over fall break in my travel time, so I have no clue how they will be.  But I trust these authors to have written some awesome works, mainly based on their publishing history or their epic Twitter presence.

  1. Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

  2. All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater

  3. I Hate Everyone But You by Gaby Dunn and Allison Raskin

  4. The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee

     5. They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera

 

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Julia Erdlen

Notre Dame

I'm a junior living in Ryan Hall. Majoring in English and minoring in Science, Technology, and Values, and Computing and Digital Technologies. I'm from just outside of Philadelphia, and people tend to call out my accent. In the free time I barely have, I'm consuming as much superhero media and as many YA novels as pssible.