Join our fun summer reading program hosted by New Brunswick Libraries and Summer Session.
Summer Tales Book Club is back––in a brand new, more sustainable and even less stressful format! Follow our fun summer reading recommendations sponsored by New Brunswick Libraries and Summer Session starting today, May 31, 2022 with this post through the entire summer.
Wondering how it works? Curious about the readings? Have doubts why you should read over the summer? Please keep reading or check out our public guide, which explains, among other things, the benefits of reading for your job interviews too!
Invited by the Rutgers Summer Session, we at Books We Read first launched the Summer Tales Reading Club in the summer of 2020. Delivered in Canvas, the main goal was to respond to new needs in the online learning environment as it evolved during the pandemic. The program turned out to be successful and created virtual communities for students taking classes remotely during the entire summer.
In 2022, instead of weekly forum discussions, this summer we will simply recommend books to read––but a lot more of them, both in quantity and variety. We hope everyone will find something to read in the next three months from the diverse offerings of Summer Tales.
1. How We Read series: One would assume, correctly, that anyone who works in a library likes to read. We decided to go the extra mile: in addition to asking around about reading preferences, we also interviewed our colleagues (librarians, library staff, and students working in the libraries) about the setup, the environment, time of the day, and more. After finding out how we read, there’s no excuse to procrastinate developing your own reading habit (which can be a pleasant form of procrastination in its own right)!
2. So you want to go to grad school? Another assumption, based on previous summers, is that students taking summer classes are highly driven and dedicated. Moreover, many of them told us that they were considering grad school. Books We Read members, still in grad school or just graduated, provide a glimpse of what it takes to start and finish grad school. We hope these first-hand accounts will help you assess your options and inspire you in whatever course you take after college.
3. Summer Tales 2022 Reading Guide: The guide with curated resources collected in one place was a staple of our programs in the past years. In 2022 we feature four authors who were popular in 2020 and 2021, but with a significantly expanded scope of their works. The guide offers links to texts and videos, primary resources and background information, among them our own experiences with three guest authors at the Summer Tales Author Talks that we had shared in various blog posts.
4. Author Talks: A surprise guest author will visit Summer Tales virtually in July for a discussion on their work and related subjects. Available for the public upon registration, the one-hour event will be moderated by Nick Allred, an experienced Summer Tales moderator of Author Talks events. Questions to the author can be submitted along with the registration. Read more about the featured author.
5. The Recreational Reading Collection at Rutgers-New Brunswick: Since fall 2021, Books We Read has been in charge of selecting popular titles for a unique print collection of 1,200 books physically located in the Carr Library on Livingston Campus. In our reviews we have featured many titles under the tag Staff Picks that can be found in this collection. We also posted useful information under RecRead related to the collection––for example, on how to find books which can be delivered to your favorite library or home address.
6. Research help from Rutgers Libraries: The idea, of course, is not brand new; library assistance has been available forever. But again, in our experience, fast-paced and demanding summer courses need a different approach from full-semester studies, hence the brand new Summer Session Research Guide with quick links, best practices, and fun videos.
7. New Brunswick, as we see it: Last but not least, for those studying online and unable to visit the beautiful New Brunswick campus, our in-house artist and Books We Read author, art librarian Megan Lotts has been “urban sketching” around for two years. Her artwork grasps the essence of “town & gown,” i.e., our diverse campus and the town surrounding it. You can enjoy her sketches in the Books We Read Gallery, along with other galleries (yes, cute puppies and cats too!), as well as illustrating Summer Session blog posts here.
