Holy moly! I completely forgot how much college textbooks cost. I was checking out some of the online courses I’ll be taking for my master’s and saw that one class has six books. Six! I priced them at the Mizzou bookstore at about $250. I hadn’t factored in that extra expense. Maybe I should’ve waited on that new laptop….

I was complaining to my friend Christa, who recently got her master’s in nursing, and she put me on to bigwords.com. The site searches all the stores for you and gives you a list of the cheapest place to buy all of them as a group and another list that gives you the best price for each individual book. The six books I needed for my class cost only $119 — less than half what they are at the university’s bookstore.

Know any other big ways for college students to save money?
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The book club I’m in decided to take a hiatus from required reading this summer so all of us could knock out some of the books on our To Be Read shelves. I’m not sure how you define “summer reading” — I don’t really read a certain type of book in the summer, I just read a lot more of them.

Here are my favorites (so far): “The Kite Runner” — I read it again because I couldn’t get Amir and Hassan out of my head. “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” — a wonderful story of friendship and misunderstanding in the foot-binding days of old China. “To Kill a Mockingbird” — I read it in high school, but didn’t really appreciate it. Even without the lessons on racism and tolerance, it’s a great book — a wonderful character study. Scout, Jem and Atticus will stay with me for awhile. As will Owen Meany. John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany” is often mentioned as a reader favorite. It’s long, and I wasn’t sure what it was about until more than a third of the way into it, but I’m so glad I stayed with it.
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