Saturday, May 16, 2009

Summer Reading—What’s on Your List?

blog46 Most writers are avid readers, even when we can’t find enough time to do the reading we’d like to.  Since it’s a hot and summery Saturday (here in North Carolina, anyway), it seems like a great time to exchange book lists.  I, for one, can definitely use some new reading material.  Currently I’m enjoying Lisa Miscione’s Smoke. Right now it’s a missing person’s case, but I’ve got a feeling a body will be popping up on the scene soon.

Stephen King gave his summer reading recommendations recently to Entertainment Weekly.  There were a couple of surprises: King reads Jodi Picoult and Charles Dickens. Who’d have guessed? I like Picoult myself, but guess her new book must be more on the thriller end of things than her usual.  Dickens I’ve admired for years, but I don’t usually wade through his novels during my all-too-brief summers (there was a period of time—can we say Bleak House?—where Dickens was being paid by the word.  He must have been trying to send someone to college at the time.)

My list here will be pitifully short (this is why I need help pulling a longer list together.) Right now I’ve got Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (because I didn’t get around to reading it last year) and the follow up The Girl Who Played with Fire (Coming out July 28.)  I also want to read M.C. Beaton’s next in the Agatha Raisin series, A Spoonful of Poison. P.D. James has Original Sin coming out on July 14, so I want to catch that, of course. My beach read will probably be Dorothea Benton Franks’s Return to Sullivan’s Island.

Any good recommendations—for any genre?