KSM’s Summer Reading List 2023

Summer is upon us and whether you are beachside or stuck in board rooms, it never hurts to have a good read nearby. Here are a few recommendations from the KSM Team.

Kevin’s Recommendations

Atomic Habits (James Clear): This book sounds like a bunch of life hacks, but instead, it’s a thoughtful approach to how to construct your life, in the vein of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Infinite Jest: David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus. A wild intersection of a dozen or so stories, the principal of which is centered around a competitive tennis academy. The nicknames, antics, and quirks of the various players take me back to my wrestling days, where you’d spend 2 hours beating up on each other and then go hang out.

P. Danielle’s Recommendation

Switch (Chip Heath and Dan Heath): Change can sometimes seem impossible, particularly when faced with seemingly insurmountable or deeply entrenched obstacles. However, Switch is an excellent guidebook to navigate change at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels.

This book is particularly enlightening for the KSM Team as we work with clients to shift organizational culture and implement policies in order to meet their articulated goals.

Wesley’s Recommendation

The Late Americans (Brandon Taylor): In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. I love this author. This is his third book and I found it as rich and fulfilling as the rest. If you like books that explore the complex joys and tragedies inherent in human relationships, then you will love this book!

JP’s Recommendation

I Who Have Never Known Men (Jacqueline Harpman): Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollections of their lives before. Narrated by the youngest of the group, the book tracks her coming of age in a world where essential human emotions of longing, loving, learning, companionship, and dying are heavily restricted.

It is a fascinating, if dated, piece of insight into the ways we are molded and shaped by the constructs of the society we keep. Often bleak and endlessly frustrating, this book is not for anyone seeking answers about the world in which the novel takes place. Instead, readers are confronted head-on with the age-old questions of whether we, as individuals, are part of a larger story, and whether our lives have purposes beyond our biological capabilities.