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!