By: Thomas Coulter Gibson

The raging debate of whether Kindle or iPad, hardback or paperback, obscures what’s really important … that regardless of “platform”, our summer reading choices reflect our mood and passions.  While I can’t say that I’ve yet had the opportunity this summer to enjoy a “toes in the sand, great book at hand, umbrella drink at the ready” moment, I’ve mentally prepared on my frequent trips to New York City during fiercely protected “Acela time” by reading (or re-reading) books that I can strongly recommend.  Three in particular are absolutely worth your time …

1. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
   Put simply, the best piece of financial journalism I’ve ever read.  It’s assiduously-reported, deeply compelling reading that explains to this thick-headed undergraduate English major the root causes of the cascading financial crisis.  Lewis “de-mystifies” an economic sector that has been unnecessarily (and inappropriately, I think) mystical; an otherworld that leverages OPM (other people’s money) to generate outsized returns for a select few.  It helps to underscore not just the imperfections, but the outright fraud in a financial system where ridiculously disproportionate rewards cause people and institutions to abandon their moral compass.  The Big Short exposes too many self-proclaimed “Masters of the Universe” to be little more than ethereally bright, societally-stunted horses asses.    
2. The Great Bridge: The Epic Tale of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough
   Written in 1972 before McCullough was embraced as our nation’s greatest narrative historian, The Great Bridge is the story of what was at that time (and perhaps even through today) American’s most remarkable engineering achievement.  More than that, it’s the story of the singular focus and determination of the extraordinary people most centrally behind that vision, John Augustus Roebling, his son Colonel Washington Roebling and wife Emily Roebling.  As Montgomery Schuyler wrote about the Brooklyn Bridge in Harpers Weekly in 1883, “It just so happens that the work that is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is not a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”  Reading this book reinforces my faith in the heights that people and societies can scale and the imperative we all work to build such bridges, literal and metaphorical, with our lives. 
3. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
   On July 11, we celebrated as a nation the 50^th anniversary of the publication of this seminal novel of social injustice as seen through a child’s eyes.  I read this book at least annually and it never fails to move me in ways deep and lasting.  The book was further popularized by the movie of the same name, my favorite on every level.  More important than a “must read”, To Kill a Mockingbird is a “must re-read.”    

Oh and just so you don’t think I’m completely boring, I’ve also caught up on past issues of Vanity Fair, People and Us magazine.  I mean, what good are toes in the sand if we can’t laugh together at the goofiness of our celebrity-obsessed culture?  Soooo … what are you reading this summer?