Summer Reading

It’s summer! It is not actually summer, of course, but really. Summer enough for summer reading! The last time I made a summer reading list, I gave it the depressing .doc “Summer (Life?) Books” because I was all mopey that I would have a job and no summer vacations and summer books wouldn’t mean anything. Sad, sad. Also sad was that there were thirty-one books on that list and I read four of them. I mean, I read a bunch of non-list books, sure, but one likes to see one’s plans fulfilled.

I have little doubt that this list will itself gang agley. However, the alternative – no lists to disappoint – seems dour. And what I am doing in this “Summer Reading” program, unlike last year’s big books on Life and Theory (one was The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth – yikes, spikes!) or 2006’s Year of the Great White Male Narcissists, in which I attempted the tetralogies on Zuckerman (success) and Rabbit Angstrom (25% success), is going to be Books I Wouldn’t Underline. This is for two reasons: one, I am poor, and will be getting most of these from the library; two, they are the sort of bellelettristic non-fiction that I imagine one can do without underlining. It is dominated, I hardly need to say, by people who have been on staff at the New Yorker:

1) Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz (if this one is good, I will go for his A Voyage Long and Strange)
2) The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
3) The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh by Linda Colley (on the Times Best of 2007 list)
4) The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin (also NYT Best of 2007)
5) The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
6) The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? by Francisco Goldman
7) The Post-America World by Fareed Zakaria

I think that should be a good list. And it will lead to a new column: adventures in the non-underlined, or something, and according to my records the last time I read a book remotely like any of the foregoing, it was (maybe) The Rest is Noise and (considered more rigorously) …Jesus, the Red Queen, which I read on the bike at the gym in Williamstown while I lived in Mission. So you know, a while.

And it should be fun. Summer reading tends to be fun, even, according to one of my creative consultants for this blog, for people who normally are unimpressed with reading. I’m not sure why. Why do you guys like summer reading, assuming its appeal is as universal as my consultant indicates? And what are you planning to read? Tell us, or beg for advice, below!