Letters to the Editor
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Not bad, as picks go
The Laura Lippman and Val McDermid books are particularly good.
But would it kill you to dig a little bit and talk about some of the less well-known gems that aren't supported by 5,000 ARCs and an army of publicists large enough to take Omaha beach? There are a lot of great thrillers out this year, particularly some great, midlist debuts.
Stretch a bit. Break out of the conventions imposed by the publishing behemoths. Risk something and recommend a book a million people haven't already heard of.
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What the Dead Know
I have to second or third the recommendation for What the Dead Know. It's very good. I don't usually read a lot of mysteries because I find them formulaic with bad endings. This is a great family drama/mystery with a very satisfying ending.
I haven't read the new Val McDermid but A Place of Execution was very good too. Probably the two best mysteries I've read!
I'll add more great summer reads:
Then We Came to the End
The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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Baited Breath
for Jasper's Fforde's next work in the Thursday Next series.
Catch up if you haven't read these. Thrilling and hilarious. Harry Potter meets Dave Eggers, but with more wit and less pretension.
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Any re readers out there
I have a stack of Mishima I'm plowing through. Great stuff. Other than that it's pretty much nonfiction.
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Am I going to the wrong beaches?
Can I ask a question here?
Every June or so the media is inundated by articles like this. One gets the impression that every summer our beaches are filled with people (mostly women) who spend hours under an umbrella reading.
I have never seen this.
Am I going to the wrong beaches or something? We're in the New York metropolitan area, and the beaches we go to are either Orchard Beach in the Bronx, or Jones Beach or Robert Moses State Park on Long Island. Last year out of curiosity I looked around and all summer, out of thousands of beachgoers, I counted exactly eight people reading books. Most of the people reading were looking at magazines. But the great majority were either watching the kids run around, chatting, watching the ocean, or lying down soaking up rays.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed the disconnect between what seems like a media fixation on reading on beaches and the reality of what actually happens there.
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Laura Miller & the Neglected Cheap-Shot
Dear Ms. Miller,
You must be a person of rare self-restraint.... you review a book containing both a "Tenille" and a seaman, and you DON'T go for the obvious joke?
Good for you. I couldn't have done it.
Level Best as Ever,
David Terry
www.davidterryart.com
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Wrong Beaches
Captcrisis, if you're going to the wrong beaches, I'm bringing the wrong books. I consider vacation the time to sink into a long involved book that I don't always have time for during my regular busy life. I'm the one on the beach with the 900 page A Suitable Boy or some such thing unlike what the media presents as summer reading.
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reading on the beach...but not in the summer
In the summer we usally vacation somewhere nice and cool, last year was Iceland, this year Quebec. In the winter, however, you will see me hiding under a sunshade on the beach in Mexico reading a pile of books. I'll be adding these to my list!
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Where's Harry?
Is Salon ignoring what's potentially going to be the biggest summer read in history, or do you think that readers will need no guide whatsoever when they arrive in bookstores that fateful July midnight?
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The Historian
I'm reading this right now, on the recommendation of a friend. There is rather a lot of on-the-nose, "as you know, Bob" dialogue. There are also some amazing tin-ear moments, the most memorable of which are "moth-eaten towers" and "no stone unpublished."
All that said, I'm three quarters of the way through and still reading it. And even though the characters (nearly all brilliant academics) are often unbelievably dense and/or historically ignorant in the service of the plot, somehow I still care about them.
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Re: Where's Harry? Where can I get a Harry Potter filter?
Why do even grown-ups have to talk about Harry Potter?
I understand its a charming book, especially for KIDS, but every book and film site on the web is innundated with hype for these books and movies, most of it created by adult users. Its always recommended on Amazon even though I've never purchased anything remotely related. Come on grown-ups, there's a whole world of fantasy books out there just for you! Some even have the sex and relationships you write about in your HP slash fiction.
Fine it exists, I just want a filter on my computer so I never have to read or see anything about wizard schools again until my little nephews can read.
That said, Salon should make a list for kids of books to read after they finish the new Harry.(I assume they're all re-reading the other books before the new one comes out).
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What about historical fiction?
Your coming lists are mysteries, ch**k lit, fantasy, sports and memoir. I always used my summers to dig into a hefty tome of something suitably historical. With an impressive concentration of historical novelists descending on Albany for the Historical Novel Society Conference this Friday (Diana Gabaldon, Bernard Cornwell, Sandra Gulland etc. etc.), I'm sure we could come up with a shortlist for you.
While I realize you can't be exhaustive, I'd just like to plug the genre closest to my heart.
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Summer Reading
My favorite summer mysteries are the Lew Archer novels by Ross MacDonald. Most of them were written in the 60s and pay homage to the Hammet and Chandler novels of the previous decades… with better character development and more complex plots. I read some or all of them every summer. Start with “the far side of the dollar”, “the Galton case” or the “Zebra Striped Hearse”…. Really wonderful summer reading.
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And furthermore, Anonymous Harry Potter fan,
Why will that July evening be "fateful"? Is that a threat? We're going to be watching you very closely from now on. All those death threats and bomb threats you have called in over the years are getting old.
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captcrisis
When I vacation, I take a pile of books with me.
From a villa in St John to my husband's family no-plumbing, no-electricity, but-plenty-of-mosquitos cabin in northern Maine, I park myself near water and read until I fall asleep.
Granted, with kids, I can only do the reading when they are asleep, but that's still more reading time than I get at home.
I second the historical fiction: "Slammerkin" by Emily Donnaghue and " A Whistling Woman" by A.S. Byatt (the 1960's which is hard to call "historical") were both beach books. Also, funny apocalyptic "Good Omens" by Neil Gaimon came home water-stained. (As was "The Historian" but I really was disappointed. Each character spoke in exactly the same voice, and I didn't find the denouement, or the villian's objectives, satisfying or sensical. But the descriptions of exotic cities and historically tangental villages was wonderful).