Summer 2017 Reading List

Get swept up in great stories, tear-inducing memoirs, troubling fiction books, and the occasional professional improvement book.

There’s not much I like more than curling up with a good book and being swept away into a story or deep into a new set of ideas.

Part of this year’s goal is to read more widely, and pay attention to reading books by women, people of color, and new authors. (You can see everything I’ve read in 2017 in my public reading list). Here are a few highlights and recommendations from what I’ve read so far.

Memoir Recommendations

  • Between The World And Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. A series of letters from a father to his young son. Simply outstanding. Read if: you wonder about the American Dream and whether it’s a myth.

Fiction + Fun Recommendations

  • The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Now turned into a television series inspired by the book, I had to read the book first. A creepy, dystopian novel where birth rates plummet and women are forced out of work, and then into service in a strange, big-brother-is-watching-you world. It left a pit in my stomach, and I’m still thinking about it (as well as Station 11, another fiction book that won’t leave my mind). Read if: dystopian futures open up new imaginations for you.

Connected Community + Living a Great Life Recommendations

  • The New Better Off, by Courtney Martin. What does it mean to live a good life? And why are we still all blindly chasing after “The American Dream”? In her examination of what really matters to most of us, she uncovers how ritual, community, and meaning can be formed in ways both unexpected and everyday. This book puts words to so much that I too have been thinking about. Read if: you need ideas about how to change your life pattern to live with more depth.

Playing Big, Leveling Up Recommendations

  • Playing Big, by Tara Sophia Mohr. This month is all about re-reading a few classics, for me. The books that you buy on kindle and on paperback, and sometimes buy an additional paper copy of because you highlight it and use it so frequently. Every time I level up in my business and my work, and expand into the edges of my comfort zones, I re-read Tara’s notes on the different ways we feel fear, and remind myself that “playing big” comes with it a special, delicious, different kind of fear. The good one. Read if: you want to forgive yourself in order to go bigger.

Originally published at Sarah K Peck.


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Sarah Kathleen Peck

Written by

Escape from Alcatraz swimmer. NCAA All-American. Director of Startup Pregnant: http:/startuppregnant.com

Mission.org

A network of business & tech podcasts designed to accelerate learning. Selected as “Best of 2018” by Apple. Mission.org

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