Summertime Challenge: School Summer Reading List Books I Loved

This is a summer challenge hosted by Parajunkee. It runs through the month of June and has weekly link-ups.

School Summer Reading List Books I Loved

I’ve talked about my required reading experiences before, and even gave a listing of as many books as I could recall.

It is hard for me to recall the summer reading books and those we read for the class throughout the year, but here are three I distinctly remember as summer reading books that I loved very much. In fact, these two were my first Agatha Christie books I ever read, and they remain my most favorite…and I fell in love with her writing style.

Summer of My German Soldier 

This was a required summer reading for 8th grade. I had a freak-out moment on my mom about getting the books. I ultimately checked them out from the library and did the assignments.

This was a very powerful story for me at the age of a young teen. It held a lot of words I myself needed to hear about liking myself. It also made me think about the difference between right and wrong, and how sometimes that is in contrast to what society believes is right and wrong.

Patty Bergen knew something exciting was going to happen. But she never could have imagined that her summer would be so memorable. German prisoners of war have arrived to make their new home in the prison camp in Jenkinsville. To the rest of her town, these prisoners are only Nazis. But to Patty, a young Jewish girl with a turbulent home life, one boy in particular becomes an unlikely friend. Anton relates to Patty in ways that her mother and father never can. But when their forbidden relationship is discovered, will Patty risk her family and town for the understanding and love of one boy?

And Then There Were None 

This was a very interesting read for me as an incoming high school freshman. This was my introduction to Agatha Christie, and I quickly discovered that I liked her writing style and her writing in general. She could turn a story in such an interesting way, and I was excitedly surprised each time when the real murderer was revealed.

Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island mansion off the Devon coast by a mysterious “U.N. Owen.”

At dinner a recorded message accuses each of them in turn of having a guilty secret, and by the end of the night one of the guests is dead.

Stranded by a violent storm, and haunted by a nursery rhyme counting down one by one . . . one by one they begin to die.

Who among them is the killer and will any of them survive?

Murder on the Orient Express

The next year as a 10th grader we had to read Murder on the Orient Express and I absolutely LOVED the setting and the characters.

Just after midnight, the famous Orient Express is stopped in its tracks by a snowdrift. By morning, the millionaire Samuel Edward Ratchett lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. One of his fellow passengers must be the murderer.

Isolated by the storm, detective Hercule Poirot must find the killer among a dozen of the dead man’s enemies, before the murderer decides to strike again . . .