For many students, summer is the perfect time to catch up on their reading without the pressure of school work, and Winthrop students spent last summer diving into fascinating literature. Students are sharing books that made an impact on them during their time away from campus, and the things they especially enjoyed about these works.
As always, incoming freshmen are required to read the Winthrop common book, which for this year was “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson, an influential American lawyer who has spent decades fighting injustice and racial bias in the American criminal justice system.
Although this was required reading, some students such as freshman theatre education major Joah Smith genuinely enjoyed the book. “I thought it was going to be boring, but it was actually the most captivating thing I’ve read in a while. It was so deeply personal to me as a black woman, and it made me really reflect on how fickle life is, and how anything can happen by chance.
“You can be in the wrong place at the wrong time or someone has a judgement about you, and you end up convicted of murder based off of prejudice. It also exposed how far people will go just to be right, both in the author’s pursuit of his cases and the opposing side, like the police. It just really exposed a lot about human nature,” Smith said.
Senior musical theatre and music composition major Neifert Cornejo-Ordonez read “The Last Temptation” by Nikos Kazantzakis, a controversial novel from the 1950s that focuses on the temptations, struggles, and emotions of Jesus Christ.
“I finished reading ‘The Last Temptation’, which is an alternative telling of the Jesus story, about the human part of Jesus. The language that the author used is very expressive and heavy on imagery and metaphor, which makes it fun to read for me,” said Cornejo-Ordonez. “Also, the fact that it’s an exploration of the humanity of Jesus, the doubts, fears, pains he goes through which isn’t usually talked about.”
Josh Macias, a junior English major, read “Hell’s Angels” by Hunter S. Thomson, which is based on the author’s experiences researching the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang and living among them.
“I really enjoyed the balanced approach to the white working class. Where we normally get Conservative praise and Liberal admonishment, Thomson approaches both the internal reasoning, as in they feel left behind by a rapidly industrializing economy, as well as condemning their worse traits such as blaming non-white people and fetishizing fascism. The even approach is something I wasn’t expecting in a book from the ‘60s, but I appreciate what it does for the modern day,” said Macias.
Victoria Howard, junior IMC major read “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” by Taylor Jenkins Reid. It follows the life of fictional old Hollywood actress Evelyn Hugo who, as the title suggests, had seven husbands in her lifetime. “She’s telling a reporter her story, and this reporter is going to kind of expose her life. So, she tells everything in complete and total detail and it’s entirely raw the way she tells it. It’s fiction, but it still felt that way.”
Howard’s favorite thing about the story was its bisexual representation. “It turns out that the main character is bisexual, and it’s cool because she’s living this Hollywood glamour life, but she’s also living this other life behind the scenes. It was also beautifully written and compelling. It took place over several decades, and every decade felt unique in its own way.”
Sophomore mass communication major Savannah Scott read excerpts from the book “Utopia” by Thomas Moore. “It’s a great collection of reading because it’s part of what paved the way for America’s ideals. Not necessarily his writing, but he was a humanist, and many of the founding fathers were humanists.”
