Photo by Lienhard Schulz
First let’s take a moment to share a collective gasp over the stunning fact that we’re already seven months into the year 2012. What happened? And why so fast?
Well, what better way to cauterize the pain as we stagger into these remaining dog days than a discussion about what you’ve read this summer so far and what you’re looking forward to reading in the Fall. Are your reading habits different depending on the season? Do you reserve your guilty pleasures for Memorial Day through Labor Day Weekend? I.E., are you chained, right now, literally, to the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy? Has this been your Summer of S&M, and come September 5th you’ll be wrapping the naughty books up in your white clothes and burying everything in the backyard?
While I haven’t had the pleasure, guilty or otherwise, of reading Fifty Shades, I wouldn’t save it for the summer. I pretty much read whatever no matter the time of year. Although I tend to stick exclusively with literary fiction, I changed things up recently and read Mark Haskell Smith’s Heart of Dankness, a riveting narrative nonfiction work exploring the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam and the medical marijuana industry in California. Then I dove into John le Carre’s spy-thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy before returning to familiar ground with Jonathan Franzen’s latest “how we live now” novel Freedom. Next up was the YA novel Dark Eden by Patrick Carman, about a group of kids involved in a therapeutic experiment of questionable ethics, and am now currently reading A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2011.
This Fall I’m looking forward to Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth, Antoine Wilson’s Panorama City (by the way, I also recommend you check out his first novel, The Interloper) and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior.
So what have you read this summer, what are you reading now, and what are you looking forward to in the coming Autumn months?
About to finish the audiobook of Stephen King’s “It.”
Now I know a lot of people look down their noses at audiobooks, but a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts concluded those people are idiots filled with misdirected rage.
I like being read to sleep and, to be honest, I’d never tackle a book over a thousand pages long with just my mind.
“It” surprised me. I’d avoided the book for years after seeing stills from the TV mini-series that looked really bad. I realize now that this is a bad way to assess quality. After all, I never judge a date by the clothes she’s wearing. It’s what’s inside that matters.
I’ve listened to well over 100 audiobooks in the last eighteen months. In that time, I would never have read this number of books. This doesn’t make me stupid, just lazy and inventive.
Next up, “61 Hours” by Lee Child.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the comment, John. I’ve listened to a few audiobooks in my day, but for me the experience just isn’t as rich as reading the book directly. Perhaps it’s that I don’t want the book “interpreted” for me, i.e. why sometimes I have to read a book before seeing it adapted into a film.
But I certainly don’t look down my nose at you. I’m just going to buy you a shirt I kept seeing on my vacation: “Lazy But Talented.”