filed in Daily Life
What’s On Your Summer Reading List?
My tastes don’t veer towards light reading whether baking on the beach or huddled by the fire. So bearing that in mind, I just finished Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. And I’m halfway through The Empire of the Senses by Alexis Landau. I highly recommend them both.
Illustration by Jean Jullien
Discussion
42 comments for “What’s On Your Summer Reading List?”
Leave a Reply
About this Site
FIRST PERSON SINGULAR is a guide to surviving, thriving and sometimes just getting through a single day. Created by Wendy Braitman (more…)
Follow First Person Singular
Greatest Hits
© 2010 First Person Singular. 
Loved Citizen: An American Lyric. Just starting Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. And also have The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer. Both are birthday presents. I love books for gifts. The Coates is off to a good start. My light reading is cook books.
I’m also very interested in Coates’ work. Let us know how you like it. That’s funny about cookbooks, which are my sacred reading.
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald is a wonderful book that I just finished. I am now reading Redeployment by Phil Klay, which is intense. On deck are The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I love reading in all seasons.
Loved The Namesake. Jhumpa Lahiri is a favorite of mine.
I like Lahiri’s compilations of short stories.
Agree, really like Jhumpa Lahiri’s short stories. She’s a spectacular writer and her short stories may out shine her novels.
Have you checked out the Booker Prize long list? It was just announced today: http://goo.gl/FLzUt2
I was never much of a fan of short stories until I became friends with a short story writer. She changed my outlook. And now I love them.
I felt the same way, but I was really turned on to Ann Hood’s short stories. I had already read novellas too…a staple of Victorian literature.
Ann Hood must be like the gateway to short stories.
Jules, I seem to remember you recommending her book before.
I’m sure you’re right Wendy. I think you would enjoy her short stories particularly.
Asking our community about books is one of my favorite posts. I get so many good ideas.
The Namesake is a great book, Cathy!…..also a good movie! I’m almost finished reading “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” by Jon Ronson about social media’s power to shame people. Kind of dark, but an interesting topic. Just watched Cary Fukunaga’s ‘Jane Eyre’ and it’s inspired me to read it again! Much lighter than Ronson’s book.
I heard Ronson interviewed on the radio, recently. It was very interesting. And so timely.
I’m currently reading Gretchen Rubin’s “Better than Before”, and my next book is Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”.
I also don’t enjoy “light reading”.
Solitary Diner–I borrowed the Kingsolver book from a friend a couple of years ago and LOVED it. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy!
I told a friend about this post, and she defended light beach reading. We laughed about it.
I’m totally in support of light beach reading…for other people…I just don’t enjoy it!
I’m with you, solitary dinner. It’s nice to hear your voice.
Woo-hoo, book and reading post!!! Not a fan of fluffy, light reading either (seems to be a thread with your FPS tribe here, Wendy). This summer I’ve read Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie), An Unnecessary Woman (Rabih Alemeddine), Home (Marilynne Robinson), and perhaps my favorite, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery). The latter took me two tries–I bought it a year ago, tried for about 50 pages and gave up. Tried it again this summer, got past the first 50 pages and then was hooked.
Books with interesting protagonists and deep themes–my kind of fiction reading. I might be following Jules and picking up Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book next.
We are quite a literate bunch here!
Ta-Nehisi Coates deserves all the attention he’s getting right now, but Petra, also check out Citizen, as it’s coming from a woman’s perspective.
Yes, please don’t miss Citizen. It resonated deeply and has some incredible visuals.
Citizen sinks into your bones.
Petra, I had the same experience with The Elegance of the Hedgehog. Just didn’t get into it on my first try and put it down for over a year. Not sure what compelled me to pick it up again, except that I was probably going through my bookshelf and feeling guilty for some of the books I had not finished. And on the 2nd try, I couldn’t even remember what I didn’t like the first time around!! It was a lovely book, I really enjoyed it. The characters were just amazing.
That’s an interesting experience, Lola. What doesn’t resonate one year will resonate the next. And that makes sense, given how much we’re in flux.
‘Between the World and Me’ is also on my list! So is ‘Go Set a Watchman.’ Judy Blume’s new novel ‘In the Unlikely Event’ is also on there. I’m currently reading ‘One of our Thursdays is Missing’ by Jasper Fforde and ‘Gathering Blue’ by Lois Lowry.
Go Set a Watchman is breaking all kinds of records. Not surprising.
Recently finished Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku. (Mind-boggling theories about how the universe works.) Now a few chapters into Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson. (Example: his job as a patent clerk actually kept his mind free to explore the ideas that lead to relativity. Academia would have stifled his creativity.) After that will be So, Anyway… by John Cleese (memoirs of the former Python) and re-reading Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. (Deconstruction of the super-hero genre, murder mystery, and political thriller, all rolled together. Very deep and subtle; the movie did not do it justice.)
Always a pleasure to hear from you, Len. Quite a list!
Hi everyone first time poster here! I’ve just started The Elegance of the Hedgehog and enjoying a lot. Just finished All my puny sorrows. What A Book
Welcome Ruth. Great to meet you!
So many good suggestions here! I finished In the Unlikely Event a week ago, and must say that I didn’t love it. Maybe I missed the point. Just downloaded The Girl on the Train yesterday but haven’t started it yet, looking forward to getting into it this weekend.
Sounds like I’m more on the “fluffy” side of things than some of you. But that’s ok right? 😉 Takes all kinds and I just love the feeling of getting absorbed in a book.
Some novels that were once considered tawdry or low-class by the standards of their contemporary audiences are now the stuff of high academic literature. The way that we the written word changes over time :-).
Our experience of Shakespeare today is nothing like contemporaries viewed him.
To give you examples, Huckleberry Finn and Wuthering Heights were considered complete trash at the time they were published :-).
Really?
And don’t forget Dickens. If I remember correctly, some of his work was first printed in serial installments in a magazine.
Dickens’ success popularized serialization, and he continued to publish his novels that way. Maybe it’s time to bring it back.
Second time in 2 days that I’ve heard someone mention Girl on the Train.
50 pages into Hild. Ugh. I was being nostalgic about Kristin Lavransdatter. I should have bought H is for Hawk and enjoyed some decent prose. I don’t think I can force myself to read the rest of it! Straight to the donation bin it goes. I may as well have lit my 18 dollars on fire.
Life is too short to be reading a book you don’t like.