And, here's my reading list from the past summer. Sorry I have been remiss in keeping the MySpace page hip to my book-stack, but I was working (poor excuse) -- "the lazy librarian blames his work load"...

A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE -- By Wm. Manchester. My second read of this window on life in the Dark Ages. Do you think you know the story of Galileo, Thomas More, and Megellan? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. Read this book and see how electricity and pencils haven't made all that much difference in human behavior.

HORSEMAN, PASS BY --By Larry McMurtry. "L McC" wrote this long ago, but that doesn't mean it won't make you howlin' sad. Calling another of his books 'vintage McMurtry' doesn't do justice to the work or the artist.

QUENTINS by Maeve Binchy. Want to go to Ireland and fall in love with an Irish girl? Can't afford the airfare? Read Binchy!

ENDURANCE: SHACKLETON'S INCREDIBLE VOYAGE - by Alfred Lansing. Okay, you may think the language will be an obstacle -- it's not. You may think the story is boring (trapped in the ice? Yawn.) -- it's not. You may have seen the TV movie -- so what. You. Will. Be. Fascinated. And. Will not. Believe. Human beings. Could. Survive this. But they did, every single man.

NORTH RIVER -- by Pete Hamill. The most lucky I have been in the last year was a rainy weekend in the mountains. There was only me, my dog, and NORTH RIVER. Travel in time to the 1930's and meet people who would shine in any decade. Immediately ordered all Hamill's works from my neighborhood bookstore.

MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR -- by Herman Wouk. Old-school pot-boiler of that Morgentstern girl growing up in NYC in 1936. Not finished yet so neither is this revi....

THE YELLOW-LIGHTED BOOKSHOP by Lewis Buzbee. A sweet memoir of selling books, reading books, stacking books and simply loving books in some of the greatest -- and lost -- bookstores of Northern California.

THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR by Andrew Keen, a smart writer who would see the irony of my mentioning his book on a MySpace Webpage.

THE LAY OF THE LAND by Richard Ford. A hilarious fictional exposes of selling real estate in Jersey. I'll be looking for all the others in Ford's series.

THE TOURISTS by Jeff Hobbs, a anthropological study of New Yorkers who graduated from Yale and have yet to recover. I read this one like lightning.

THE RUM DIARY by Hunter S. Thompson. Makes you want to toss everything and head to Puerto Rico, write for a newspaper, drink nothing but rum, and live like Thompson. It makes such a life look glamorous and fun. So authentic and effective, I felt hung over and needed a long nap when I finished.

THE DIANA CHRONICLES by Tina Brown. A very fair book, I thought. Read it as a companion piece to "The Queen", with Helen Mirren and Directed by Stephen Frears.

WHITETHORN WOODS by Maeve Binchy. I am a sucker for Maeve's books. All of them. And this book is told in a long chain of individual, linking stories. The woman amazes me.

What have you been reading?

Coming Soon

SUMMER READING SUGGESTIONS.

Check out "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid", a memoir by Bill Bryson.  Bryson makes growing up in Des Moines, Iowa sound like our own kid-years in places like Oakland, Cleveland, or even Chico, California.  If you can remember wanting a vibrating electric football game, then getting one and realizing it was one of the dumbest inventions ever, Bryson's book will have you howling.

Bryson is a superb writer.  Next on my list of his books is "A Walk in the Woods", which I don't even have yet.  I have read  ''A Short History of Nearly Everything" and found it fascinating.  I wrote down passages that I thought brilliant -- a must read for those of us who know only brief histories of just a few things.

You HAVE to read Pete Jordan's "DISHWASHER: One Man's Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States."   I consider "Dishwasher Pete"  to be a genius -- not only because he took the job of dishwashing and raised it to a  Religious Calling, but also because his writing made me laugh out loud.    If you have done time with a Hobart Dishwashing Machine at any time in your life (me? Three months of 1975 - 6 pm to 2 am at a Dinner house in Oakland's Jack London Square ) the book will resonate like a tactile memory.  If you have only dirtied dishes in restaurants, Dishwasher Pete will merely regale you.

Hey.  If you are not reading something this summer, get cracking!

Coming Soon