Admittedly, all of these records sound good at any time of year but they always remind me of the summer time 🙂
1) Weezer: The Blue Album (1994)
Teenage boy angst at its glorious best. Garage rock is synonymous with summertime in my mind. I played this record to death when I was fourteen when I wanted Rivers Cuomo to marry me (actually, I still do). I could easily have chosen ‘The Green Album’ for this list as well but the Blue Album is more consistent and has definitely stood the test of time eighteen years after it was first released. Geeks of the world, unite.
2) Best Coast: Crazy For You (2010)
Teenage girl angst at its glorious best. Everything about Best Coast from the band’s name, the cover of their debut album and all twelve tracks ooze California sun. Nostalgic, lazy and sunny, there aren’t exactly any major variations between each 2 minute song but why fix something when it ain’t broke?
Having got my craving for chick lit out of my system for another year, I have been reading ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ by Barry Hines, one of the grittiest books I’ve read in a while. Set in South Yorkshire in 1968 over the course of a single day, fifteen year old Billy Casper finds Kes, a kestrel hawk, who he learns to take care of and confide in. It’s an accurate and poignant portrait of life in northern England at that time (so my mother tells me) and although the book has a very specific setting, it has timeless qualities and themes that would still resonate with disaffected youth today. 
Last summer, I set myself the slightly insane task of reading two novels a week purely for pleasure, in other words, not related to my degree course. Originally, this ‘project’ was only meant to last for my sixteen week summer break and had been something I had been looking forward to for a long time as I had had only limited access to English language books when I was studying in Paris for a year (the time when I really should have started writing a blog). I expected that I wouldn’t be able to continue the pace during term time. However, nearly ten months later, possibly at the expense of getting a decent result in my degree, I am still managing to read two novels a week, having possibly borrowed more fiction from the university than the non-fiction I am supposed to be reading for my course. Some people ruin their degrees by drinking too many Jagerbombs at toga parties. I, however, may ruin my degree by spending too much of my time reading 653 page novels by Jonathan Franzen instead of journal articles about political analysis. And if my blogging word count starts getting higher than my project word count…well, that’s when I’ll know I have a bit of a problem. 
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