This is the time of year when the New York Times Review of Books, the Washington Post, NPR and others are publishing their "summer reading" lists.

What's on your list for this summer? Why? -- What have you heard about the books on your list that made you want to read them?

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Jerri Bell
Moderator

Summer Reading 2008



"There is no doubt that the last hour of any flight is the hardest.
If there are any clouds about to make shadows one is likely to see
much imaginary land. . . .

As I approached shore I strained my eyes to see something
recognizable, and there was nothing. However, I noticed
a low place in the hills, and I thought, like the bear, I would
go over the mountains to see what I could see."


* * *


And there it was. It was perfect and I knew it. The title for my next story collection. I raced to the files and piled together all the stories that belonged in. . . . . A Low Place in the Hills.

I'm not a lesbian, but still I grew up half in love with her, and I think a lot of other women did, too, in those vibrant years after her first flight, and then her last one. And Lindbergh's, of course, but she was America's Sweetheart, and it seems to me that she's just as sorely missed today as she was back then.

When Amelia Earhart disappeared in the Pacific after nearly completing her flight around the world, my mother, like everyone else in America, remained glued to the radio. Later, I grew up with that, because Mother talked of nothing else. (World War II, though my father fought in it, was never even mentioned.)

The idea, by the way, that Amelia and her navigator crashed into the sea and died almost instantly developed long after they were lost. Mother said there was an enormous amount of evidence - and she knew every single shred of it - that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan survived, maybe for a long time.

The notion that they "crashed into the sea" is absolutely preposterous. They knew the Electra was running out of gas. They were in the vicinity of Howland Island - we know that from the Itasca (the American Navy ship waiting for them at Howland). Certainly Amelia would have landed the plane - any other scenario simply beggars reason. She would have landed either on another Pacific island or on the surface of the ocean. Had they died in the attempt to land the plane on an island, which certainly was possible, there should have been plenty of evidence of that in the decades and numerous search expeditions that followed.

Amelia surely brought her plane down. It is beyond this point that we know nothing for sure.

I'm sorry. I do that. Get off the track. I'm giving you my summer reading list! Well, then:


Last Flight, Amelia Earhart, arranged by George Palmer Putnam [Amelia's husband], Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1937 (reading again)

East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart, Susan Butler (reading again)

Open Secrets, Alice Munro

The Lover of Horses, Tess Gallagher

The End of Alice, A. M. Homes

The Last Good Time, Richard Bausch

The Stone Fields, Courtney Angela Brkic (the only woman on my prediction list of future winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

Fire Lover, Joseph Wambaugh. True crime! If you enjoyed The Onion Field, you'll like this one (reading again)

All Weekend with the Lights On; Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman, Mark Wisniewski (author on my Pulitzer list)

Green River, Running Red, Ann Rule (one of my favorite true crime writers)

The Tragic Flaw, Ché Parker (reading again)

Bring Me a Unicorn, Anne Morrow Lindbergh (for the sheer beauty of language)

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch. This is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. If you don't read any others on my list, please read this one.

One Foot in Eden, Ron Rash (author on my Pulitzer list)

High Strung, Quinn Dalton

Madre, Nathan Leslie (author on Pulitzer list, reading again)

Child of God, Cormac McCarthy. My favorite among his books. (McCarthy remained on my prediction list of future winners of the Pulitzer Prize -- until he won.)

About Grace, Anthony Doerr (author on Pulitzer list)

The Color Purple, Alice Walker (one of the best novels I ever read)

The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, Jessica Anya Blau


* * *


Alcatraz Island Prison and the Men Who Live There, Warden James A. Johnston


My father was a handsome man.

Strong, tall, red hair, an Irishman. And, in my memory, always youthful, because he died young.

So it was a small shock recently to see, just inside the cover of a book, the photograph of a man who looked exactly like my father. That photo of Warden Johnston as a young man was taken in 1907. Although Father was some years younger than Johnston, they were contemporaries.

They were handsome, they lived at the same time, and both were in law enforcement. Father was a policeman and later a plainclothesman and private detective; Johnston was a prison warden.

The similarities probably end there.

What kind of man is psychologically suited to control the lives and living environment of the most violent, dangerous and incorrigible criminals in our society?

A mean man? A hateful one? A man harboring a capacity for cruelty that most of us could not fathom?

We'll see. . . .


* * *


Dan Wickett - literary superhero and champion of emerging writers everywhere - always asks the same final question when he interviews authors in his Emerging Writers Network, and I'd like to end my summer reading list by answering that question:

If you were a character in Fahrenheit 451, which work would you memorize for posterity?

My answer: Gerard Renny's THE MEN OF THE PACIFIC STREET SOCIAL CLUB COOK ITALIAN!!!!!



Arlene

Edited: 06/15/2008 at 11:49 AM by Arlene Sanders

Writing Seminars alumna and lecturer, Jessica Anya Blau, will be signing copies of her debut novel, "The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, (HarperCollins)" from 1 to 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 31 at The Ivy Bookshop in Lake Falls Village in Mt. Washington.

John Barth calls the novel "A California beach girl's hilariously painful adolescence in the High 1970s."

Stephen Dixon says, "Ms. Blau is a writer of wit, intelligence, deep feeling, humor and imagination and she gets into the head of a young person like almost nobody since J.D. Salinger."

Madison Smartt Bells says, "No one tells it as wittily, winningly, wisely and well as Jessica Anya Blau."

Larry Doyle says, "This book will make you laugh and cry in public."

Michael Kimball calls the book "A remarkable debut novel."

Ellen Sussman says, "You won't want summer - and this wonderful book - to end."

In addition, readings from "The Summer of Naked Swim Paties" will be held at 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 12 at the Barnes and Noble bookstore on Honeygo Ave and at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, July 2 at the Borders in Lutherville.

JIM KENDRALL'S recommendation is absolutely irresistible. I'm adding Jessica Anya Blau's The Summer of Naked Swim Parties to my summer reading list right now, and after I sign off, I'll put it on my Goodreads list, too.

Many thanks!


Arlene

Edited: 05/29/2008 at 05:40 PM by Arlene Sanders

I'm am having a summer of revisiting old friends. Many of my favorite contemporary writers have come out with new books in the past few months (these are writers I like so much that I go out of my way to purchase the hardcover edition of their books), so I'm catching up on:
Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje
Trauma, by Patrick McGrath
The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace
And two books that I've owned for more than a year but haven't had a chance to get to:
Lighthousekeeping, by Jeanette Winterson
Port Mungo, also by Patrick McGrath.

Below those on the list are some short story collections by Murakami and by Alice Munro. (I'm especially interested in reading more Munro because while I was teaching several of her stories this spring, a whole new story of my own blossomed in my head, and I'm convinced that had something to do with having Munro's voice in my head at the time. I'll have to thank her if the story ultimately works. . .)

Mark

I have a "books to be read" shelf that has been full to overflowing for about two years. Yesterday, off from work and waiting for x-ray results (my older son whacked his knee), I took the books off the shelf to see what I'll be reading this summer -- in addition to The Summer of Naked Swim Parties!

My shelf is a mix of "good" fiction that I should've read in high school or college, newer fiction that looked interesting, and a little nonfiction.

Here are a few titles:

Lord of the Flies (William Golding) - Just finished this, and as the mother of two boys about the ages of a "big 'un" and a "little 'un" I may be scarred for life. Never got around to reading this in high school. Our senior English class had to read two books from the teacher's "classics" shelf each month, but the short ones like this were always in high demand by the football team so I never got to read them. For the same reason, I may get around to reading The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) for the first time this summer.

Here We Are In Paradise (Tony Earley) - A first collection of short stories by one of my favorite contemporary Southern authors. I dipped into the first story in this book when I was at the water park with the kids on Sunday. "The Prophet from Jupiter" has a really interesting first-person narrator, who often comments in the same paragraph on several topics (his former wife's adulterous liaison and subsequent pregnancy, water level maintenance at the dam he oversees, and the imagined/passed down lives of the inhabitants of the town drowned when the dam was built, and the tale of the story's namesake).

I have one anthology of contemporary fiction from Arabic countries, an anthology of contemporary Japanese fiction, and an anthology of Isak Dinesen's short stories. It wouldn't be possible to read all of it this summer, but I'll choose randomly from those in between reading other things.

The Essays of E. B. White.

The Inheritance of Exile (Susan Muaddi Darraj). Picked this up at the spring thesis reading.

Plainsong and The Tie That Binds (Kent Haruf). My sister picked these up for my mom, who "couldn't get into them" (her taste runs to Danielle Steele and Jodi Picoult, so I have no idea what Sis' was thinking when she bought them). They look kind of depressing, so I've been saving them for a VERY rainy weekend or two.

Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem, Philip D. Curtin, Grace S. Brush, and George W. Fisher, eds. This is a collection of natural history essays that takes the Chesapeake Bay region from deep in geological prehistory to modern times. I really dig this stuff. There just isn't much of it out there.

Finally:

I'm going to finish Dante's Inferno in a side-by-side Italian/English edition. Part of the point is to improve my reading-Italian, which is better than my spoken Italian but still not good. Part is to savor the way the poetry sounds in Italian. No English translation can do it justice.

And:

I'm going to read Dostoyevsky's The Possessed (or The Devils, as modern translations have it -- it was The Possessed when I was taking Russian lit classes in college) -- in English translation.

I'm also going to read something short in Russian. It has been a few years, and I'm getting rusty. Haven't decided what yet: maybe some of Gogol's shorter works, like "The Nose" and "The Overcoat" (old favorites).

Should keep me pretty busy.

Jerri

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Jerri Bell
Moderator

Since I already have a lot of "old" books on my "things to read before I die" list, I don't consult the New York Times or Washington Post because I feel guilty enough about all the stuff I haven't read and don't need the added pressure. (A note to my pal, Jerri-- You are a better woman than I!) Anyway, just thought I'd pass along the following with regard to recommendations. Earlier this week, I read an article about Martin McDonough, a contemporary playwright who has written a lot of stuff I really admire, especially The Pillowman. Anyway, McDonough talked about how much the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges influenced him and because Borges was an author who'd been collecting dust on my list for about five years, I decided to try him out. Probaby some of you out there are familiar with Borges, but for those who aren't and especially if you lean towards enjoying stories that are metaphysical, have lots of symbolism, and read sort of like fables, you should give him a try. "Death and the Compass," for example, is a murder mystery with two investigators (one smart, one kind of stupid) and four murders. This is not your average murder mystery, but rather a labyrinthine story with lots of arcane clues and symbols and the story (I think) explores notions of reality, idealism, and logic in the detectives' search for the criminal. It's a fairly short story and really nicely constructed. I'm also paging through Borges' The Book of Imaginary Beings, which is a little encyclopedia of "the strange creatures conceived down through history by the human imagination." Included are descriptions (and sometimes little drawings) of the Banshee, the Behemoth, Chimera, Golem, the Harpies, Hydra, dragons, elves, fairies, etc..You get the picture. Fun to read and probably inspirational, too, to those of you drawn to Magical Realism. Mary P.S. - I know the above mentioned titles should've been italicized, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.

JHU Writing Seminars lecturer Jessica Anya Blau's novel, "The Summer of Naked Swim Parties," has been named a Top 10 Summer Read by the "Today Show," The New York Post, and New York Magazine.

The San Francisco Chronicle says, "It's hard to recall a debut as warm, charming and comically satisfying as 'The Summer of Naked Swim Parties.'"

Congratulations Ms. Blau!