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Summer Must Reads

Jul 23, 2014

This has been the first summer in a long time that I have had enough time to read books. It's been a beautiful thing

I've read three books since I've been in Paris: "The Paris Wife" by Paula McLain; "Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness" by Susannah Cahalan; "The Perfume Collector" by Kathleen Tessaro. I've brought along "The Great Gatsby" to re-read on the seven-hour plane ride back home. It's my all time fave.

I took a Buzzfeed quiz not too long ago regarding something I don't remember. But my result was that I would've been a French aristocrat who hung out with Marie Antoinette in a past life. I love all things French, so reading "The Paris Wife" and "The Perfume Collector" have been right up my alley.

"The Paris Wife" by Paula McLain is a mainly fictitious novel based on the life of Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson.

Based in the 1920s, Hadley meets Hemingway when she was 28 years old--Hemingway was only 20. The novel follows the couple through their travels, ups and downs, birth of their child and the end of their relationship. I learned a lot of Hemingway's life as well as how crazy F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, reportedly were and accounts of other authors awaiting their fame in the late 20s. I thoroughly enjoyed the read!

"The Perfume Collector" by Kathleen Tessaro is a fiction novel that follows Grace Munroe, an Englishwoman who's come into a great fortune from Eva D'orsey, a woman she's never met or even heard of. This has been a great book to read while in Paris because some of the quarters and streets mentioned I've dwelled in!

My mom suggested I read "Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness" by Susannah Cahalan. I figured, why not?

In 2009, Cahalan, a writer for the New York Post, suffered from bizarre mood swings, hallucinations, paranoia, memory loss and a number of other conditions. She recounts the six months of her life struggling with a rare autoimmune disease in her New York Times best-selling autobiography.

It was a quick and easy read while traveling on a charter bus throughout the northwest of France. The ending dragged a little, I skipped a couple of pages, but well worth the read.

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.

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