Summer Reading

  I'm about halfway through The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.  It was the alternate selection for our book club and I'm really enjoying it.

The book we are reading this next month is Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage. If you enjoyed Eat, Pray, Love this is the same style. Lots of factual information, ruminations and some personal drama to keep it entertaining. 

A friend of mine whose writing a young adult novel turned me onto the Gone series, about a small town where everyone over the age of 15 disappears in an instant.


Amazon has a nice selection of summer reading here.

What's on your summer reading list?

Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore

We're reading this for my book group this month. It's quite a change of pace from our usual, which has been fun. (Last few books included The Help, Rooftops of Tehran: A Novel and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.)

Quick review: The style reminds me of Tom Robbins, but without the intellectual bit. I mean, Robbins had a talking tin can and a spoon, Moore has a talking fruit bat (and coconut for a brief moment). The wackiness is there, the convoluted funny story line, the cleverness in words, but without something that made it worthwhile reading to me. It's like the equivalent of a romance novel for guys or something. If you just want a total escape novel that's well written and entertaining and provides a few laughs, this is great. Just don't look for any depth.

Plot review: Tucker Case crashes the pink corporate jet of his employer, Mary Jean Cosmetics, after getting drunk and picking up a woman from a bar. His "friend" finds a job for him, flying a private jet at for a missionary on a tiny island in Micronesia. The pay is enough to let you know that something fishy is going on, plus the fact that they don't mind he lost his license to fly. Enter the Shark People, the native people of the island, a woman pretending to be a high priestess of the cargo cult that grew there after WW2, a lone cannibal ostracized from his tribe because of his appetite, and mysterious flights to Japan with a small cooler and an exchange of large amounts of money.

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Not a first book, but a first novel, a dark psychological drama.

It's 1907. A wealthy business owner from Wisconsin places an ad in a Chicago newspaper for a "reliable wife." The woman who answers it is not what she has pretended to be and sees an opportunity to marry the man and kill him in the near future so she inherits. Ralph Truitt has quite a story in his own past and plans of his own. He knows she's not what she's pretended to be from the moment she steps off the train, yet he marries her anyway. They each have secrets and secret motivations. As she begins to poison him with arsenic, the characters learn more about themselves and each other than you were expecting and as the days progress, the story unfolds in many delightful twisting ways.

Rooftops of Tehran by Majbod Seraji

This is a fascinating first novel, giving us a glimpse into the pre-revolutionary days of Tehran. It opens with a mystery (why is the main character in a hospital?) and with flashback catches up to the present, while then moving forward.

There is young love, political intrigue, and family drama, all full of beauty and brutality side by side. We're reading this for our book club and I will be eagerly awaiting everyone's discussion!

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

The happy couple in 1960's middle class England has planned on 6 children from the day they got married. The first four come in a whirlwind and without financial and physical help from their parents, they would have gone under. However, their home becomes the gathering place of multiple families, bringing together a diverse group and creating a haven.

From the beginning of the pregnancy with their 5th child however, their world tilts a bit. After the birth, it wobbles along a bit until everyone can see that the child is not normal. He seems to be a throwback to an earlier more primitive species, but how can that be? And regardless of what he is, how do you manage a child who's very presence threatens to destroy the happy family life they've created?

Oxygen by Carol Cassella

An anesthesiologist deals with the death of a child under her care. She questions her future and doubts her past, wondering what she missed and if she could be responsible somehow. At the same time, her personal life requires some attention and navigation through difficult waters as her aging father, from whom she's been estranged, is losing his sight.

This is a fine first novel, full of emotional waters and interesting characters, plus the glimpse inside a world hidden to many of us. Definitely a good read. It would make a good book club novel as there is plenty to discuss!

The Art of Driving in the Rain by Garth Stein

At Thanksgiving and other family gatherings, those of us who read fiction often bring the books we've recently read and enjoyed and swap with others, so hopefully we all go home with new reading material. My find this long weekend was The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel by Garth Stein.

If you have a dog or at least spend time around one, you have probably faced experienced a time when you're talking to them and they look at you with a look of intelligence and experience. You can almost swear they understand you and are trying to communicate back. Alas, it seems to be a one way conversation... But with Enzo, the likable narrator of this story, you'll get a feeling for what a smart compassionate dog might be trying to tell you. Enzo is with Denny, a race car driver. Denny falls in love with Eve and they marry and have a daughter. Life is good until Enzo smells the sickness in Eve and their lives are changed forever.

The facts of the story are a bit melodramatic but still believable. But regardless of the plot line, I loved Enzo's conversations with himself (and the reader). Many of us could learn much about life and living from Enzo.

Highly recommended even if you don't like racing. (I know next to nothing but still appreciated the life lessons and story of it.)

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

I first read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel (P.S.) by David Wroblewski when it first came out, back in 2008. A friend of mine had seen an interview with the author and forwarded it to me, thinking it sounded like something I would like.

I loved the book! The basic skeleton of the story is a mute boy growing up with his parents, who raise and train dogs. The dad dies while the boy is present. He tries to get help but can't, due to his muteness. There is an element of the mystical and supernatural and lots of dog lore and positing about what it means to train a dog and what dogs are capable of and what the relationship might be between dogs and people. It is a long book but I found it all fascinating and recommended it to several friends.

Fast forward a year and a half and the book club I'm in chose The Story of Edgar Sawtelle as our October book. I loaned my copy out and just got it back last week, plenty of time, I thought, to skim through and remind myself of the basics. But once I started re-reading it I couldn't stop. I didn't want to "skim through" so read it slowly, enjoying all the more the second time around.

It's one sign of a good book, I think, that you can enjoy it all over again even when you know the ending. Another sign is when I start reading slower and slower as I get to the end, because I love the characters so much I don't want to leave them. This book held true on both accounts. It's an astonishing first novel.

I hope Wroblewski is at work on another novel.