Summer Reading List!

Welcome to the Summer 2006 Reading List and thanks to all for giving me a list way too enormous to read. The most frequently recommended book was Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides followed by The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. For non-fiction, the number one recommendation was The Spirit Catches You And You Fall Down by Ann Fadiman. The obvious choice is to start with Middlesex. That way, I'll be discouraged by its length and can just throw the rest of the list away. No seriously, I'm starting with it because Mary Hurley was nice enough to ship me a copy!

While we're on the subject, my recommendation to you, dear reader, is Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra. And if you're not at all moved to read this summer, you can just heed the advice of Kimber who says, "Why don't you just act like a normal person and watch TV while you breastfeed. What are you, un-American? Nothing really compares to Gomer Pyle re-runs."

Without further ado, here is the reading list for Summer 2006. I left in your comments once I realized I could, and probably should, leave them in. Fiction suggestions are followed by Non-fiction. Please feel free to email additional suggestions.

FICTION

• Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta
  
• The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez
  
• The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
  
• Trance by Christopher Sorrentino
  
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
  
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  
• Broken For You by Stephanie Kallos
  
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  
• Herzog by Saul Bellow
  
• Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham
  
• Three Junes by Julia Glass
  
• A Sorrow beyond Dreams by Peter Handke (Jeffrey Eugenides introduction) I would recommend a few of peter Handke's books. Really great writer - some of his stories have been made into films. I probably have all of these and read them years ago - mostly in the eighties, but I remember them being very deep, but also very sad.
  
• Left-handed Woman by Peter Handke
  
• A Moment of True Feeling by Peter Handke
  
• Short Letter, Long Farewell by Peter Handke
  
• The Weight of the World by Peter Handke
  
• Blindness by Jose Saramago - an epidemic of blindness (contagious blindness) - shows the worst in human nature when under times of stress - really awesome book.
  
• A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley - drama about a family on a farm - sister stuff
  
• Real life of Sebastian Knight by Nabokov - surrealist detective novel about identity
  
• The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  
• Bangkok Eight by John Burdett
  
• Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  
• Book of Evidence by John Banville
  
• The Thornbirds
  
• The Power of One- Bryce Courtenay. Excellent book about a little English boy raised in South Africa during WW2. It is really great.
  
• Memiors of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
  
• The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
  
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen - gets in the head of each member of a wonderfully (and yet not extraordinarily) dysfunctional family
  
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon) - wonderful, quirky characters and span of years (good old-fashioned storytelling)
  
• The Known World by Edward P. Jones - beautifully written tale of slavery from an unusual perspective
  
• Native Speaker and A Gesture Life by Chang-Rae Lee - amazing writing, deals with race and dislocation in America
  
• Turn, Magic Wheel and The Locusts Have No King by Dawn Powell - solid storytelling from the '30s and '40s
  
• American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain by Philip Roth - these are favorites, although Roth is always brilliant even when the books aren't quite satisfying
  
• Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer - even when they're imperfect they're uniquely heartbreaking
  
• Houseboat (Penelope Fitzgerald) - tight little story (as all her books seem to be)
  
• Anything by Salman Rushdie - also wonderfully imaginative even if they don't quite come together perfectly (favorite: Midnight's Children)
  
• Also like Iris Murdoch - such an interesting woman (favorite is probably The Green Knight, although I also enjoyed her husband's nonfiction about her)
  
• Do the Windows Open? by Julie Hecht (it's really really funny I liked it and you'll like it too)
  
• A friend just loaned me "Sam the Cat" short stories by Matthew Klam and I loved it, very sharp perception about modern culture, issues with money and class, intimacy
  
• Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill
  
• Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison
  
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  
• No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith--I think there are 6 or 7 now...
  
• I recently read the Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier, who wrote The Girl With the Pearl Earring... not great literature, but I got into it. I like the art history aspect.
  
• I recently devoured the Da Vinci Code--it's a TERRIBLE book, horribly written. Yet fascinating and impossible to put down. Urgh! Can't wait to see the movie, which I hear is also pretty lame.
  
• I'm sure there are others... some are just junk food mysteries/thrillers. A good one I read recently was The Murder Book by Jonathan Kellerman. His wife Faye Kellerman is good, too.
  
• And I love the Janet Evanovich Stephanie Plum mysteries --Stephanie's an incompetent bounty hunter from New Jersey and it's all very slapstick.
  
• I also can't wait for the third installment of Julie Smith's Baroness Pontalba AKA Talba Willis series. Her Skip Langdon series is good, too--all set in New Orleans. If you like that kind of stuff. And I do.
  
• Books I thought were good, but are rife with murder, mayhem and mental anguish, perhaps not the best subject matter for nursing: The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and Case Histories by Kate Atkinson.
  
• The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.
  
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night by Mark Haddon a story from the point of view of an autistic boy.
  
• One of my favorite pieces of fiction is a book called, "Homeboy" by Seth Morgan, sadly out of print, but find-able.
  
• Anyway, nipple reading...Jacqueline Winspear is the author of three mysteries set immediately after WWI, Maisie Dobbs, Birds of a Feather, and Pardonable Lies. She writes elegantly. She also brings to life a world we are not intimately acquainted with.
  
• Human Oddities - Noria Jablonski Local SF writer that was recommended to me by another local SF writer (NOT Laura Albert!) I'm about to go pick this up. I also like short stories for the same reason Raymond Carver wrote them. You can enjoy
  reading in short bursts if you have kids, limited time etc.
  
• I was totally absorbed in Isabelle Allende last summer, especially Daughter of Fortune, but Eva Luna was the one that got me going. Somewhat fantastic/magical and political with great characters and plot twists. Much of Daughter of Fortune takes place during the Gold Rush in San Francisco.
  
• I just finished The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost which gave me a good laugh - a young 20-somehting and his girlfriend live on an island in the equatorial Pacific for a couple of years. Nothing deep, but some experiences I could relate to - no power, no water, no beer, not fresh food, no sewage, and lots of stray animals. I'm curious to read the sequel - Getting Stoned With Savages - to round out my summer.

NON FICTION

• Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
  
• Tis- Frank McCourt
  
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Ann Fadiman
  
• The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't think for Themselves by Curtis White
  
• My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
  
• Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast
  
• The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad
  
• Clandestines: The Pirate Journal of an Irish Exile by Eddie Yuen (Introduction by) and Ramor Ryan
  
• Absolute Convictions by Eyal Press
  
• Hand to Mouth by Paul Auster
  
• The Spear of Destiny by Trevor Ravenscroft
  
• The Devil in the White City by Eric Larson
  
• Consider the Eel by Richard Schweid -- the best non-fiction I've read in years
  
• Agony and Ecstacy by Irving Stone - about Michaelangelo - fascinating history of renaissance italy
  
• For the Time Being by Annie Dillard - gem of a book.
  
• German Boy by Wolfgang Samuel
  
• 
  How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton
  
• Blink by Malcom Gladwell
  
• Freakanomics by by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
  
• Taylor Branch's Series on Martin Luther King
  
• The Know it All by AJ Jacobs
  
• The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio by Terry Ryan
  
• I love the book I'm reading now called Eye of the Albatross by Carl Safina. My dad loved it and leant it to me. It tracks the life of Amelia a real albatross living,flying and brooding her chick all around the Pacific. All around because she flies in average about 200 miles a day.
  
• In the biology/great science writing vein: my favorite author Jonathon Weiner. My favorites: Time, Love and Memory about biochemistry and the use of fruit flies to track down genes that code behavior.
  
• Also by Weiner, Beak of the Finch. Great book about evolutionary biologist furthering Darwin's theories in the Galapagoes.
  
• My favorite book in the last 5 years has been "The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. I had never read her before, but this is the book she was born to write. I truly believe that over the next 200 years, this book will stand the test of time - and be considered one of the great books on living, dying, grief, and memory. It was breathtaking and I'm holding onto my first edition with hot hands.
  
• If you haven't read "Seabiscuit," you don't have to be a racehorse lover to appreciate the greatness of that book.
  
• "Size of the World" - Jeff Greenwald Great travel writer from Oakland (he calls himself a "professional fool") I saw his performance at the Marsh in Berkeley. A one-man show with a spinning wheel of fortune on the stage. Each hieroglyphrepresented a very funny/poignant/incredible/insane/sad travel story and/or mishap from some remote place on the globe. The kind that we have all had...your rickshaw story in India with Doug comes to mind where the floor was
  covered in raw mutton?
  
• The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural
  Farming - Masanobu Fukuoka I heard about this book from my permaculture friend
  and immediately thought of you. (She's giving me acopy soon) She said that Fukuoko's approach to life makes so much sense that it makes you want to change
  the way you think about leading your life...
  

• and finally, a list of books that looks good