But there is no list that generates more excitement in me than SUMMER READING LISTS! I love them. I'll read any summer reading list I see. I check NPR's reading list at least once a week. In this article by Alan Cheuse, he compares books to eating, which I find incredibly appropriate:
Whether you approach summer reading as a picnic, barbecue, smorgasbord, buffet or sit-down dinner, these books will leave you hungry for more — in the best sense of the words.I think I approach reading in all types of manners of eating, especially summer reading. Do you give in and guiltily read the chick lit and beach reads that you can breeze through in two days? Or do you mentally prepare yourself for a gargantuan novel that needs to slowly digest? Are you determined to read only classics, or do you vow to only read new contemporary writers? Maybe you work your way through newer books that have made various awards lists (I still haven't read Swamplandia! or A Visit From the Goon Squad, yikes!).
Here's my list:
Picnic: Picnics are fun, carefree, light. I think I might have already read my picnic read, which would've been DEAD RECKONING by Charlaine Harris. It's a Sookie Stackhouse book, the series which HBO's True Blood is based on. (And I love me some True Blood.) I breezed through it in two days.
Barbecue: Barbecues are where you drink beers and eat things like burgers, grilled corn on the cob, and potato salad. The dudes gather around the grill like mosquitos to my blood. There's nothing fancy at barbecues, no frills. For me, it's THE SISTERS BROTHERS by Patrick DeWitt. It's a 'revisionist western' which might satiate my recent obsession with westerns. This description is straight from Publisher's Weekly: "When a frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm, the brothers journey from Oregon to San Francisco, and eventually to Warm's claim in the Sierra foothills, running into a witch, a bear, a dead Indian, a parlor of drunken floozies, and a gang of murderous fur trappers." Witches, bears, and murderers? Sign me up. Plus, I love the cover.
Smorgasbord: Smorgasbord. Oftentimes our dinner is like a smorgasbord because we have no food and don't feel like cooking, so we'll just put everything together and snack on whatever's in the house--cheese and crackers, hummus, popcorn, pasta, peanut butter in a tortilla -- sounds...appetizing. But the point is, you like lots of little things. I have lots of little straggler books that don't really fit in anywhere but that I want to read ASAP. One being THE WILDER LIFE: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie by Wendy McClure. Because I will read anything about Laura Ingalls. Also: LOVE IS A MIXTAPE by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield, a memoir about love and loss through the various mixtapes he made for his wife, who tragically passed away soon after their marriage. Why do I want to read this? Because I'm reading TALKING TO GIRLS ABOUT DURAN DURAN by him right now and it's effing hilarious, and about 80s music, which I love, even though I only got to experience the 80s for a few years.
Another smorgasbord snack: TREASURE ISLAND by Robert Louis Stevenson. What's better in the summer than pirates and buried treasure? Plus I feel ashamed that I've never read it before, and I think it's one of those books where you read and suddenly understand so many more societal references.
Finally, SWAMPLANDIA! by Karen Russell, because I need to read it.
Music, love, Laura Ingalls, 19th century classics, and swampy amusement parks. Sounds like a smorgasbord to me. (Can I just say that I have loved the word 'smorgasbord' ever since I first heard it as a kid watching Charlotte's Web? It's true. And the rat is drunk. I always wondered why he acted so funny when he was singing that at the carnival.)
Buffet: Buffets. So many choices, but your stomach isn't big enough to eat everything at once, so you need to fill your plate, eat what you got, and then go back for more if you're hungry. For me, this represents a book series. I started re-reading one of my childhood favorites, Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maude Montgomery. It was available for free on Kindle, so I downloaded it on a whim, thinking I would read it, enjoy it, and put it away. But no. Then I had to read Anne of Avonlea, and I even paid for a Kindle version that was better quality! I had to stop there, though, because I have all the books at my parents' house and just need to pick them up this weekend when I'm home. Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't believe I've read the entire 8-book series, because when I was younger I only cared about Anne when she was my age -- as in, 12. Then she got older and didn't interest me as much. But this summer I'll revisit Anne in Prince Edward Island and remember the days when I was as obsessed with the Victorian era/early 1900s as Anne was with puffed sleeves.
Sit-down Dinner: This'll be like a 30-course dinner -- continually feasting, allowing it to digest. THE PASSAGE by Justin Cronin. An 800+ page "vampire" epic about a virus that almost destroys the world and a girl who holds the key to bringing it back. It's not a sexy True Blood Twilight vampire book, though, nor is it a Dracula -- the vampires are creepier, like insects. Everyone is talking about this book, and Cronin also happens to be Ellen's client, so that gives me another reason to want to read this book that everyone is hailing as the book of the summer. I think I'm going to take it to Mexico with me, but I'm kind of scared because I don't want to get sucked into it so much that I forget to come up for air and spend my entire vacation with my nose in a book.
Can I squeeze the word "book" in one more time?
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