2009 Summer Reading Lists
by Beth Carswell
People like lists. There's something comforting about an organized presentation of items, to be considered, ordered, completed. Checklists, to-do lists, grocery lists - all come with a sense of hope, of fresh starts, of good intentions.
Summer reading lists are no different. Each year newspapers, bloggers, magazines and celebrities put together their summer reading lists. They can mean different things to different people. For some, like me, they are a list of what they intend and hope to read over the summer (subject to change entirely and later be unrecognizable, for any or no reason). I chose a few new books I was excited about, as well as a book I've been meaning/dying to read for ages.
For newspapers and publishers, a summer reading list can be somewhere between an advertisement and a prediction - what will sell well? What will others pick up as the next hot book this season? For still others, like Stephen King or Oprah Winfrey, they can be an endorsement - a way to use their fame to spread a message and boost the sales and visibility of the titles they enjoy and find worthy. New books are often strongly promoted, but classics, like Hemingway's A Moveable Feast for instance, show up as well.
For your list-perusing pleasure, we've compiled some of the best summer reading lists of the year thus far.
Enjoy!
Summer Reading Lists
Stephen King's 7 Great Books For Summer
(Entertainment Weekly)- Shatter
Michael Robotham - Quicksilver
Neal Stephenson - The Tourist
Olen Steinhauer - Drood
Dan Simmons - Dog On It
Spencer Quinn - Handle with Care
Jodi Picoult - Little Dorrit
Charles Dickens
The Wall Street Journal
- The Food of a Younger Land
Mark Kurlansky - American Heroes
Edmund Morgan - Young Woman and the Sea
Glenn Stout - The Snakehead
Patrick Radden Keefe - The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe
J. Randy Taraborrelli - The Girl Who Played with Fire
Stieg Larsson - South of Broad
Pat Conroy - The Secret Speech
Tom Rob Smith - The Angel's Game
Carlos Ruiz Zafon - My Father's Tears
John Updike - Ravens
George Dawes Green - Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann - Do Not Deny Me
Jean Thompson - A Happy Marriage
Rafael Yglesias - Fragment
Warren Fahy - Border Songs
Jim Lynch - It's Beginning to Hurt
James Lasdun - That Old Cape Magic
Richard Russo - Heroic Measures
Jill Ciment
Oprah's 25 Books You Can't Put Down for Summer
- Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann - Heroic Measures
Jill Ciment - Yes My Darling Daughter
Margaret Leroy - Dreaming in Hindi
Katherine Russell Rich - What I Thought I Knew
Alice Eve Cohen - A Pearl in the Storm
Tori Murden McClure - Columbine
Dave Cullen - The Glister
John Burnside - Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith - Admission
Jean Hanff Korelitz - The Food of a Younger Land
Mark Kurlansky - The Peep Diaries
Hal Niedzviecki - Farm City
Novella Carpenter - Plan Bee
Susan Brackney - Poems from the Women's Movement
Honor Moore - Stormy Weather
James Gavin - Eye of My Heart
Barbara Graham (ed.) - One D.O.A., One on the Way
Mary Robison - The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards
Robert Boswell - A Meaningful Life
L.J. Davis - A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway - Lime Tree Can't Bear Orange
Amanda Smyth - Camilla
Madeleine L'Engle - Essential Pleasures
Robert Pinsky (ed.) - Provenance
Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo
NPR's 10 Best Cookbooks of Summer 2009
Recommended by T. Susan Chang- Cooking Know-How
Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough - The Flavors of Asia
Mai Pham - Memorable Gatherings: Favorite Recipes to Share with Family and Friends
Renee Behnke with Cynthia Nims - The Modern Vegetarian
Maria Elia - Preserved
Nick Sandler and Johnny Acton - Real Cajun
Donald Link - Soaked, Slathered and Seasoned: A Complete Guide to Flavoring Food for the Grill
Elizabeth Karmel - The Spice Kitchen
Michal Haines - Tacos
Mark Miller - Vefa's Kitchen
Vefa Alexiadou
NPR's Five Best Novels of Summer
Recommended by Jessica Crispin- Castle
J. Robert Lennon - Dark Places
Gillian Flynn - Follow Me
Joanna Scott - The Good Parents
Joan London - The Scenic Route
Binnie Kirshenbaum
NPR's Best Mystery, Crime Novels for Summer Sleuths
Recommended by Maureen Corrigan- Awakening
S.J. Bolton - Black Noir: Mystery, Crime and Syspense Fiction by African-American Writers
Otto Penzler (ed.) - The Scarecrow
Michael Connelly - The Shanghai Moon
S.J. Rozan - The Way Home
George Pelecanos
Beth's Best Bets for Summer 2009 (or 'What I'll Be Reading')
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir
Haruki Murakami
I love Haruki Murakami's writing. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a book I enjoyed tremendously. Where does Murakami come up with some of the bizarre, surreal and always imaginative material in his books? What makes him tick? Apparently, in part, running. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is rich and revelatory, both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in running. I couldn't care less about running, personally, but I'm curious enough about the methods behind Murakami's madness to be very excited about this book, even if I need to do leg-stretches before diving in.
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Fool
Christopher Moore
Recently my friend Angela lent me Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job. I was skeptical, I admit. I thought it would be too zany or wacky for my tastes. My humour tends to run more to dark or dry than slapstick or madcapped antics. And it was unmistakably zany in parts, but it was also clever, engaging, endearing and funny. The interactions between characters are touching and believable, and the plot, while ridiculous, is also a lot of fun. I enjoyed the book tremendously. Fool, Moore's latest, appears to be the story of Shakespeare's King Lear, but told from the perspective of Pocket, the king's beloved court jester. Am I skeptical? You bet - messing with Shakespeare takes a big pair, if you ask me. But last time I was skeptical, it turned out pretty well for me.
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Pygmy
Chuck Palahniuk
I've long been a big fan of Fight Club. I think it's one of the few examples of a book whose film adaptation equals it. But I digress.SinceFight Club, I've read a lot of Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters, Choke, Survivor, and Haunted with mixed feelings. I loved most, though certainly none rivalled Fight Club, and didn't love others so much. But eve the ones that didn't strike quite the right chord with me still blew my mind with the quality of writing. Palahniuk possesses the rare capability of description that leaps off the page in heartbreaking beauty or - arguably more often - visceral, gut-churning horror. His writing so impresses me that I will continue to read whatever I can of his, and Pygmy, the story of a diminutive exchange student in America, sounds funny and fascinating.
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Sometime Never
Roald Dahl
I'm bonkers about Roald Dahl. I think I own almost everything he ever wrote. From his gleefully gruesome children's books to his chilling and ironic adult writing to his captivating autobiographical books, I can't get enough. Sometime Never may well be the last of Roald Dahl's writing I've not yet read. I've been holding off reading it, making myself wait, like saving the best bite of the cookie with the most chocolate chips until the end. But I think I've waited long enough. The thing is... the book tanked. Yup. Flopped entirely. Couple that with the fact that it was published in 1948, and there aren't too many copies around. It was the first book about nuclear war to be published in America after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it IS Roald Dahl, so I'm sure I'll love it nonetheless.
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