What I Want to Read: Fall 2017

It's officially fall (and has been for a while), and I actually read nearly every book on my summer to-read list, so it's time for another list! I still have a lot of free time since I'm not in school anymore and don't have a job yet, so I want to read as much as I can. I've already read about half of the books in this post but didn't get around to figuring out all of the books I wanted to include in this post until now.

What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen by Kate Fagan

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I first heard of Madison Holleran when her suicide made national news and Kate Fagan wrote about it for ESPNW. As a supporter of the mental health non-profit To Write Love on Her Arms and just a general mental health advocate, I knew I wanted to read this book when I first heard it would be happening. Fagan's ESPNW piece the book began with was such a powerful and well-written piece that told such a heartbreakingly real story.



The book was released this past summer, but I didn't get to read it until the end of August because my sister, who ordered the book so we could read it, was in New York for the summer. I expected the book to be just like the original ESPNW piece, just expanding and going more in-depth about Holleran's story, but it was more than that. In What Made Maddy Run, Fagan writes about her own mental health issues as a former NCAA student-athlete (like Holleran was) and discusses how she related to Holleran. I wasn't expecting Fagan to include her own story in the book at all, but it does remind us all that no one is alone. 

It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini

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I've wanted to read this for a few years now but never got around to getting it until this past summer when I saw the Kindle book was on sale. I have a few friends who've read it, watched the movie, and enjoyed both. It's one of those books I've put off watching the movie because I have yet to read it.

This is another mental health related book, but to be honest, I didn't really know what the story was exactly until I began reading it. It's about a boy who has depression and is suicidal. The book details his stay at a short-term mental ward in a Brooklyn hospital. I finished it earlier this fall and enjoyed it. It helped me understand mental health and depression more, but I would still like to know how the book's title came to be. The cover design, though, is awesome and really cool once you read the book.

This is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

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I think I found out about this book from my high school yearbook adviser, whom I visited in September. She's now a middle school librarian, so we were talking about books at one point during our visit. I also saw it on a list of books newly-crowned women's artistic gymnastics World Champion Morgan Hurd wants to see made into movies.

If you couldn't already tell by reading the sentence on the front of the cover, it's about a school shooting (more specifically, a high school shooting). With acts of violence like this occurring far too often, it can definitely hit home and be a timely story. Overall, I thought it was a pretty good read. There are several main characters whose points-of-view we read, but it wasn't overwhelming or hard to keep track of. A few things were possibly unrealistic in terms of the context of the story, and I did feel like the author tried a bit too hard to make her characters diverse, but overall, it's an entertaining story. It shows how connected people are and can be, how people have an impact on others whether one knows it.

Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

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All of John Green's books are on my to-read list, but his newest novel is up next. I'm curious and can wait to read it because it's not a love story like most of his other books. Rather, it's about mental health and sheds light on those issues. My best friend recently finished it and enjoyed it, so I'm ready to read it!

Wildly Into the Dark: Typewriter Poems and Rattlings of a Curious Mind by Tyler Knott Gregson

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This is another book that came out over the summer that I had to wait to read because my sister had it with her in New York. It's a poetry book, so it's a shorter read than everything else on this list, but it's also visually appealing. Gregson is a poet and a photographer, so the combination of those two art forms are present in the book. I have one of his other books, All the Words Are Yours, and I loved that one.

The Heir and The Crown by Kiera Cass

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I started reading The Selection series over the summer and then stopped after reading the first three because that's where the main character, America Singer's story kind of ended. These last two books are kind of a new story, the final chapters, in The Selection series. I actually got The Heir during the summer but just didn't read it because I wanted a break from that series and didn't want to run out of books to read.


What have you read/do you want to read this fall?