Via ruminatrix @ Flickr.
Publishers fall all over themselves to line up their ”summer reads”–usually the big blockbusters or chick-litty mind candy that goes well with too much sun and a frosty margarita. If the shelves in my family’s beach house are any indication, their marketing is on target. A quick scan reveals an awful lot of dog-eared paperbacks, with special emphasis on the oeuvre of James Patterson, Sandra Brown and Patricia Cornwell, along with a stray Ruth Rendell mystery or two left over from my last visit.
I brought with me a couple back issues of Oxford American and Vanity Fair, plus the latest Nick Hornby novel, Juliet Naked, and Drood, a thriller about Dickens and Wilkie Collins that I’ve been reliably informed is almost as good as Dickens himself. We Harpies are big into Dickens; PhDork is reading Oliver Twist again this month. Pilgrim Soul reports that she relaxes with novels by that other great British observer of life, Penelope Lively.
What’ll you be reading this summer? Is there a particular author or series that just screams “beach read” to you? Y’all come discuss while I head out to the boardwalk for ice cream…
Bah humbug, holiday what holiday – these days we Brits in the US have to work on this day while you Yanks head off to the beach. Hmm I suppose that makes sense actually.
Anyway back to the reading – please tell me what Drood is like when you’ve read it, I keep considering it then stopping, then considering it.
Anyway as to my holiday reading, or just my reading because I’m not on holiday (I mentioned that didn’t I) – actually I’m really enjoying the book you gave me, The Help, which I’m about halfway through.
I tend to read a mixture of the serious and the utterly crap on holiday so when we did go away for a week (a wonderful period in which I managed to read 14 books as my daughter ran around the beach and garden, yes really, you can tell my husband and I are thrilling conversationalists) among them were Kate Summerscale’s excellent non-fiction The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, which looks at the real life detective who Wilkie Collins based The Moonstone on and his worst case, Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep because she writes fun New York set crime novels with a racing bent, this one had less crime more characters, A Partial Indulgence by Stephanie Theobald which was an insane novel set in the UK art world with gothic overtones and really entertaining, Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons which is just really good fun, a very trashy Penny Vincenzi second world war set family saga, White Tiger by Armavind Ariga, which i recommend as it’s very funny, The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry, which should really have won the Booker instead of the Ariga and which is very depressing but beautifully written, The Book of Evidence by John Banville because I love Banville and I’ve got a bit of an obsession with him at the moment, Elizabeth Wilson’s War Damage which is an excellent and very evocative thriller set in London just after the second world war and which reminded me of Patrick Hamilton and then two biographies one of Jean Rhys and one on Patricia Highsmith, both very good.
Right that was a long rant. Right now with six weeks to go till delivery my mind is on super trash which is why i intend to take two hours off work and eat strawberries while watching tennis and reading Jilly Cooper. Yes, really it will be almost like being at home. Sort of an anti-July 4th weekend.
@emilyanne: You aren’t the only one who can’t have a holiday because they are working. I seem to be the one who got the short straw, so I have to work EARLY sunday, while my friends and co-workers all head down the the shore for a 3 day party. I’m super bummed.
On topic, I’ve been reading Lullabies for Little Criminals, by an author that I can’t recall.It’s very intense and sad, but I can’t seem to put it down. It would feel like giving up on the main character. When I’m not reading that, I’ve been re-reading The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer, and I have on top of my book pile The French Lieutenant’s Woman By John Fowles, East of Eden, and the latest fluffy Molly Murphy mystery from Rhys Bowen.
Ms Pinot, I feel your pain – while i don’t actually have to work at the weekend, my husband also has to go in on sunday morning as well. Oh well. ps I love the Grand Sophy, great choice. Lullabies for Little Criminals is on my list to read soon, so I’m glad to hear that it’s interesting.
I own the soundtrack to the vampire-movie Underworld. I listened to this soundtrack a month or so ago, and it made me crave vampire-books like nobody’s business. I hadn’t read vampire books (aside from The Historian) for years, so I ordered everything from the library.
So at the moment I’m reading Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton. Something about it doesn’t sit quite right w. me, but I can’t quite figure out what. It just seems kind of silly.
I also just finished reading some fantasy books, and intend to re-read the Harry Potter-series over the holidays.
I love having time to read, now exams are over
I’ve been devouring books by Dick Francis by the bowlful. Set in the 60s, 70, 80s, 90s and 00s (he’s incredibly prolific) they are all short little mysteries having something to do with horse racing. It’s neat how he really captures the essence of the era that he’s writing in, and his characters are remarkably well developed. If you read too many in a row you notice that a lot of the same character archetypes are used in the books (they’re all different characters/situations, except for one recurring character in 3 books) so you have to break them up with some other books.
John D McDonald’s Travis McGee books are hilarious and definitely from the 60s. The main guy is a rogue investigator type guy that lives on a houseboat in Florida and is always entertaining some “beach bunny” or another. I chuckle and rant and chuckle some more.
Other authors I enjoy for beach reads: Kathy Reichs (the “Bones” series), Jonathan Kellerman (his Alex Delaware novels), and lately William Dietrich (Da Vinci code type subjects, better written!).
@Miss Pinot: I read Lullabies and I loved it, the writing was great, even though yeah, it was incredibly depressing.
I’m going on vacation at the end of this month and I don’t have a list yet. Its too early, because if I line up the books too soon I just end up reading them before the vacation.
@Rzep: oh the Travis McGee books are great beach reads. love them.
I’m going on two vacations this August, and I have the books all picked out:
- This will sound hopelessly dorky (and predictable to anyone who knows me), but I reread The Lord of the Rings every summer.
- After seeing the film, I’m now finally going to read Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting.
- And a friend gave me a copy of An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, about a mother who has a stillborn child.
Not really light, fuzzy reading, but that’s never been my thing anyway. I’m most relaxed when reading non-relaxing things!
Sarahofalessergod, Trainspotting is something I reread a lot, the book is much better than the film and more interesting, there’s a lot on religion and colonial attitudes in the book, specifically the Catholic/Protestant thing in Scotland (it’s important in the book that Renton has a Catholic mother and Protestant father). I think US editions include a glossary but let me know how you get on or if you have any slang you want to know about.
I don’t know what I’m *going* to be reading, but I recently finished a couple of really good novels:
-The Space Between Us, by Thrity Umrigar, is a really poignant story about the limits on women’s choices. It’s set in India, but I found the themes to be really widely applicable.
-The Last Witchfinder, by James Morrow, is tons of fun and an interesting look at Enlightenment thought in a kind of feminist way. Very rollicking, with a great female protagonist, and historical figure cameos (which I always enjoy).
@Anne – Totally read the Sookie Stackhouse books (even if you don’t watch True Blood). I’ve been reading them since the second book came out like 8 years ago and they’re so entertaining. Anita Blake is problematic, I agree with you, especially in the later books when it’s basically sex all the time such that I now know waaaaaay more about Laurell K. Hamilton’s fantasy life than I ever wanted to.
@emilyanne: Yeah, my version does have a glossary but I’m actually fairly proficient in Scottish slang due to a friendship with a lovely Scottish boy who has influenced me to refer to kids as “wee bairns” just as he does.
SOLG – ah excellent, well its a great read.
baraquiel – I enjoyed the Morrow book, it was a lot of fun. Have you checked out Karen Maitland’s A Company of Liars, also a medieval-set mystery and worth a look, it’s good fun.
Also maybe I should try the Sookie novels, I was put off by how much i hated Anita Blake. I have to say that Kelley Armstrong’s books are something of a guilty pleasure of mine being much more fun than Hamilton and with better plots.
@emilyanne – No, I haven’t but I definitely will now. I was on a string of 3 or 4 novels (including those above) that all had female protagonists and now I’m almost at the end of The Shadow of the Wind, in which all the women exist only in relation to men and honestly it’s jarring to go back to that. It really detracts from my reading experience.
As for the Sookie novels, definitely check them out. I find the characters to be more interesting and the writing to be more fun and realistic. The way the characters evolve over the novels is much better done than in Anita Blake.
I am re-reading my copy of wuthering heights. Also, my parents, who visited me a while ago, brought me The Journey to the End of the Night by Celine, which I recommend to anyone, although it is a very heavy read; and, I have some Zizek left I haven’t read. That’s going to be it.. No good bookshops here. I am nearing desparation; hence the blog-reading!
@Anne, @Baraquiel, @Emilyanne –
For paranormal-romancey stuff, Kim Harrison’s Rachel Morgan series (‘Dead Witch Walking’ etc) is pretty solid, too.
The Anita Blake books are an unusually extreme case–I don’t think I’ve seen a series plummet in quality like that since Robert Jordan–but part of the problem, I think, comes with the genre. The romance aspects demand some sort of crisis & resolution with each book, and the noir aspects demand some sort of discrete Sinister Happening, but having to fit the recurring romantic crises in with the Happening becomes difficult when it happens over and over again. (Hamilton’s approach–make the sex the entire plot–doesn’t exactly work, either.)
Incidentally, for feminist speculative fiction, I really really love Aqueduct Press. L. Timmel DuChamp’s ‘Alanya to Alanya’ is fantastic, as is Kelley Eskridge’s ‘Dangerous Space’, among others…
Oooh, I realize what I left out: part of the difficulty with doing paranormal romance in the never-ending-series format is the romance often emphasizes the -danger- of the romantic interest. But either you have to keep changing romantic interests, indefinitely delay the ‘resolution,’ or find a way to maintain the sense of danger despite a sort of ‘happily ever after’ thing. Not easy!
The Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Biggs (‘Moon Called’ etc.) is supposed to be good; haven’t read any.
Right now I’m reading ‘A Homemade Life,’ Molly Wizenberg’s (Orangette’s) memoir. It’s more a collection of essays, and it’s really good – especially now that we’ve gotten to adulthood.
I bought Kate Walbert’s ‘A Short History of Women’ today, too – saw it in the NYTimes Book Review a couple of weeks ago, but it was sold out everywhere (even a two-week wait online) for a little while. Got my hands on a copy today, and am psyched to start it.
I’ve heard awesome things about Drood, too – can’t wait to hear what you think of it.
My book club is doing YA fiction in August, so that should be interesting…I’m hoping for something non-supernatural, since I’ve read a few of those recently.
Oh, and!
My best friend’s first romance novel (one of a four-book series called Recipe for Love) comes out on September 1st. So, I’ll be reading an advance copy of that sometime soon. It’s about a chef and a food critic…who, of course, fall in love and have lots of sexy sex.
queenieinmanhattan – i’m interested in the Orangette book as i love her blog, it sounds good.
x.trapnel – agreed about the problems with the genre, I think Armstrong works because she switches heroines every couple of books while building up a wider world and while the old heroines feature in the newer books it’s less jarring. I’ll check out the recommendations though, thanks.
ferawle, i love Celine, although I didn’t get into Journey until my third attempt but then I fell in love with it.
x.trapnel – also I meant to say i love your name – I have a soft spot for Julian McLaren Ross who was the model for x.trapnel in the novels.
@x. trapnel: I’ve read and re-read the Mercy Thompsom series. I loved the first three, but for some reason, even though it still seems as good, the fourth hits me wrong. Maybe it’s the fact that you get the genre-typical ties to two strong supernatural males, but the fourth seems to have lost something for me.
I loved Kelley Armstrong’s first novel “Bitten”, as it seemed more along the lines of a wonderful stand alone novel, sort of like Robin McKinley’s ‘Sunshine’, which I also loved.
Good luck with DROOD, Becky – I just finished it yesterday. . . after starting it in March. I was reading other books at the same time, but even so, it’s a little overcooked. But, it is a fascinating insight into Dickens’ life (of which I knew little), the various characters are vividly written, some of the set-piece scenes are breathtaking, and I was compelled to finish it, in the end – although I suspect that after devoting so much time to its 780+ pages, that was more because I wasn’t going to let it beat me! Whatever, if Victorian Gothic fantasy is your bag, you will enjoy parts of it, if not the whole. A curate’s egg. I’m still making my mind up.
As for this summer, I just started Henry James’ Portrait Of A Lady, which I’ve never read and got FREE on my Kindle; Being Hal Ashby, a biography of the brilliant filmmaker who directed Harold & Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo and Coming Home (among others), written by my friend Nick Dawson; The Master And Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov – re-reading, as my mum just bought it me for my birthday; also finishing off The Beats, a graphic history by Harvey Pekar and others. I will be be dipping into Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Tales and The Best Short Stories Of J.G. Ballard, as I have over the past couple of months.
And, I don’t want to start a whole Kindle debate, but, I got so many free books (out of copyright) – many I had been meaning to read for years – that I know I won’t be able to resist sampling a few of these: HERLAND, Charlotte Perkins Gilman; CIVIL DISOBEDIANCE, Henry David Thoreau; TALES OF THE JAZZ AGE & THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED, F. Scott Fitzgerald; THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU, H.G. Wells; ANNA KARENINA, Tolstoy; THE WAVES/MRS DALLOWAY/THE SHOOTING PARTY, Virginia Woolf; THE VAMPIRE,Jan Neruda; CRANFORD, Elizabeth Gaskell; THE WHITE PEOPLE, Arthur Machen; MY ANTONIA, Willa Cather; SIDDHARTHA, Hermann Hesse; VENUS IN FURS, Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch; THE IDIOT/NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND/THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV/CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Dostoyevsky.
Obviously, I won’t read ‘em all – but you never know what takes your fancy at a particular time. Prospect Park, here I come!
@baraqiel and x. trapnel
Thanks for the recomendations! I’ve just begun reading Dead Witch Walking, and have ordered the first Sookie Stackhouse book from the library.
Considering what you’re saying about Laurell Hamilton, I don’t think I’ll read any more Anita Blake books. It was fairly entertaining, but I think she behaved quite irrational and weird some times, and if the books turn worse than that – I think I’ve got better things to do
Well, that’s what I get for having two computers. That last comment from Aeooo was from me.
Tsk tsk.
I’m just about done Dickens’ Little Dorrit – it is a Dickens summer, isn’t it? I love it so far, and I’ve seen the miniseries so I know I’ll enjoy the ending.
I’m also trying to read some of the Harry Potter series in French (I’ve read them all many times in English but I need something fairly easy to keep up my French when I’m not in school).
I’m looking for a big long book to tackle next – possibly War and Peace. Anna Karenina is one of my favourites so it seems like a logical choice.
dancingteacups, i love War and Peace, i have actually read it four times including once on honeymoon in Russia, and it gets better each time. Have you read Middlemarch? That’s another great big long book, infamously described as the only adult English classic by i sadly can’t remember who.
A recommendation for those tossing out the summer paranormal paperback recs – Ilona Andrews (a husband/wife team) wrote Magic Strikes, Magic Bites (terrible titles, though). Anyway, I love, love, love them. Cool Buffy-girl heroine, decent world building, and the romance builds- across three books, so far, without the obligatory and unlikely “consummation”. I know, I’m a bit of a prude but Laurell K. Hamilton traumatised me. Other recs: Robin McKinley, Michelle Sagara, Karen Chance, Victoria Laurie, Charlaine Harris’ other mystery series (I like Lily Bard and Harper Connelly characters the best), Jim Butcher, and F. Paul Wilson.
If it is hot outside, I just want a little escapism.
Aaaagh, how could I forget! The Temeraire series! “His Majesty’s Dragon,” etc., by Naomi Novik. Sort of like the “Master & Commander” books (well, I’m guessing, I only saw the movie) crossed w/ Jane Austen … with dragons! And the social/political commentary is a bit more front-and-center. If you have an iPhone with Stanza, the publisher is giving away the first one in the series–they probably are giving away a plain PDF, too, though I didn’t check.
Oh and thanks, Emilyanne–you know, I never thought to look up the basis for Trapnel. I suppose I assumed it would just be depressing. =)
[...] class assignments. Thus, The Wars of the Roses will be my last bit of summer reading. BeckySharper asked last month what we planned to read on our summer vacations, and I wish I had read more than I did this summer. Still, I got through [...]