Summer is the time, especially for students, when you have extra time that you didn’t have during the school year to do whatever you would like to do. It’s also the time when students-- yes, even college students-- somehow forget how to do school. With that, here are 7 books that you can read in your spare time that will help keep your brain engaged and thinking until the school year starts again. As an added bonus, all are written by and feature women in their pages.

1. How to Be a Woman, by Caitlin Moran

A very poignant addition to the conversation about what it means to be a woman in this day and age. She talks about everything from getting her first period to giving birth for the first time and everything that comes with growing up a girl. Women will easily relate to Caitlin Moran and bring into question what womanhood is and how that notion has changed over time.

2. Eat, Pray, Love,by Elizabeth Gilbert

This is a great book for the world traveler who can’t afford to travel at this time. After a messy divorce, Liz Gilbert jets off first to Italy, then to India, then to Indonesia in search of missing parts of her life. Over the course of this book, Liz learns self-love, self-discipline, learns what it means to just be, spiritually, and what it means to love another person. This read is lighter than a lot of others on this list making this a good summer read.

3. I Am Malala, by Malala Yousafzai

I think that after a semester is finished and we’re tired, fed up with school, and feeling more than ever that you’re ready to be done with school, it’s time to remind ourselves that in other parts of the world, and not even in remote places, people are fighting to go to school. Especially girls. Malala knows that education at any level is so important and to know that she almost lost her life fighting to keep girls in school as well as herself… that’s humbling.

4. The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman

I learned a lot about Hmong culture and about how bad our medical system is at working with people who don’t speak English. Or at least, that our medical system is really bad at working with Hmong people. This is a true story about a Hmong family in California whose daughter is born with epilepsy. This account details their experience dealing with all sorts of systems that the government put in place from medical social workers to the foster care system and beyond. It’s a really eye-opening book, but it’s also quite frustrating. If you’re looking for a book that presents a difficult dilemma with no clear solution, then this book is for you.

5. Cinderella Ate My Daughter, by Peggy Orenstein

This is an interesting discussion about how we raise our daughters from the day they are born to when they become teenagers. It was interesting reading this book as a woman and thinking about my own childhood and how my parents raised me, their oldest daughter. This book is all encompassing because it doesn’t just talk about Barbie and pink things, but it talks about Disney princesses and cyber-bullying-- things that affect the modern girl. It also talks about the effects of these things on boys and how they grow up. Treating daughters differently doesn’t just have an effect on their perception of themselves, but it has an impact on the boys around them as well.

6. The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness, by Brianna Karp

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be homeless or if you’ve ever wondered how someone might become homeless, this book is a good way to start getting an idea about the answers to these questions. After reading this book, my perspective on homelessness totally changed. I stopped seeing the homeless as people just looking for handouts and being a burden on the government and started thinking more about what got the people I see on the sides of the road in that situation. I started thinking about what drove them to stand with a cardboard sign and ask for anything that helps. It’s really meaningful to see people as more nuanced and not shoving them into a categorical box.

7. Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

This book takes places during the 1970s revolution in Iran. This is a graphic novel and is about the author’s childhood in Iran and growing up in an ever-changing environment. She thinks a little bit about religion and thinks a lot about revolution and revolt. It’s always interesting and eye-opening to read about growing up in a place that is not familiar to you. The author is very honest about what is happening around her and about how she and her family responded to their situation. It's scary, but because the story is written from the perspective of a child as well as an adult looking back on her childhood, this is a fairly easy read, though the content can be challenging.