by Sarah Zettel
It is officially summer. I can tell, because I’ve just told my kid he has to go play outside because it’s a gorgeous day. He is responding to this command with all the grace I mustered when I was his age and my mom threw me out of the house. It is just one of those rituals that is passed down through generations.
Summer is the time when you’re supposed to do something different, to change pace, either speed up or slow down, it doesn’t matter, it’s just supposed to be different. You are to go somewhere or do something you could not or would not do at any other time of year.
It is also the season of the Reading List. While you are off doing your Different Thing, you are commonly expected to take a book with you. As someone who takes a real or e-book with her everywhere and always has, this has always puzzled me a bit. No one has winter reading lists, or fall reading lists, but everybody’s got one for summer, and it usually has something to do with reading at the beach, which is something else I’ve never understood. The beach is a terrible place to read. The wind blows the pages, the book gets full of sand, and your kid wants you to come swim, or build a sandcastle, or deal with sand that’s gotten into places it has no business being.
All that said, I have been thinking about what I would recommend for solid, satisfying reading at the beach, in the tub, on the porch, or, my favorite position, stretched out on the couch with a tasty beverage (if you’re looking for something different to do that really is conducive to reading, try a pitcher of homemade lemonade. Dead simple and, oh, the summer yumminess…)
Some of these titles are fairly recent, some have been around for awhile. All are currently available, and all are books I have enjoyed and recommended elsewhere. The order was determined by the carefully crafted method of looking across at my bookshelf and saying, “Oh, yeah! That one too!”
1. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. I am a huge Gaiman fan, and have been since the first issue of “Sandman” back in the day, but I didn’t think much of CORALINE. I didn’t feel like it fully used Gaiman’s gift for humanizing the fabulous, and fabulizing the very human. The Graveyard Book does all that and much more.
2. Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa. The manga, not the anime, this is a reading list after all. The story of two brothers who sold their bodies, and almost their souls, to try to save their mother and each other. This is an amazingly well-written, gorgeously plotted series, full of great characters, great emotions and great action. It is also some wonderful world-building. This was the series that showed me manga was everything everybody said it was.
3. Cathy’s Book (and the sequels) by Sean Stewart. Cathy finds out her boyfriend is immortal, and he’s not a vampire, neither does he sparkle, but he has got a highly…problematic family. Sean Stewart is an amazing writer. He can paint a scene with beauty and clarity. What I’ve always found weakest about his adult novels, however, was the actual plots. But it turns out in the shorter form demanded by YA, he plots beautifully. All the wonderful emotion, character and ability to paint a scene is retained from his adult work and it’s, combined with a engaging plot executed without a single wasted move.
4. The Jennifer Morgue by Charlie Stross. Confession: I haven’t finished this one yet, but the beginning definitely made me sit up and take notice. The series itself is in a universe where James Bond meets HP Lovecraft (which you’ve got to love right there), but on the whole the writing is better and smoother than Ian Fleming or Lovecraft ever actually managed. I’d been hearing about these and picked this one up because I liked the title, and then read the opening, which was an utterly enthralling scene about deep sea drilling. If an author can pull that off, they are definitely worth a read.
5. The Boleyn Inheritance, by Phillipa Gregory. This is the sequel to the fine historical romance The Other Boleyn Girl, from which both a mediocre movie and a mediocre TV series got made. The Other Boleyn Girl covers the Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall in the court of Henry VIII. The Boleyn Inheritance covers all the successor wives. I picked it up because I enjoyed the first one and I wanted to see what she was going to do with Anne of Cleeves, the least regarded and smartest of the wives. She’s the one who agreed to the divorce and retired quietly. I really wanted to see how she would be treated. As it turns out, this minor wife was brought forward as a major character and treated intelligently and in a way that introduced a surprising amount of suspense to her narrative.
6. A Free Man of Color, by Barbara Hambly. The first of an excellent historical mystery series. Set in 1840s New Orleans, they follow the life of Benjamin January, a former slave who trained as a surgeon in Paris and returned home when he lost his wife, and failed to find work as a medical practitioner. The writing is fantastic, the mysteries are engaging, but it is the characters in their complex humanity who really make the books.
7. Death of a Red Heroine by Qui Xialong. Another mystery, this one set in 1990s Shanghai. It’s not only an engaging mystery but it is an intimate and human look at the living, modern China with all its conflicts and contradictions. The pacing is interesting, slow by American settings, and very thoughtful, almost formal, but continually fascinating.
8. Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio. This is a small press comic book series by, so you’re probably not going to be able to find this in a bookstore, but you can follow it at www.girlgeniusonline.com. Girl Genius relates the steam punk adventures of Agatha Heterodyne. Agatha is a “spark,” a mad scientist and last daughter of the lost house of Heterodyne. It’s got over-the-top adventure, wild humor, ambiguous monsters, mad science, a talking cat and some of the best comic book writing I have ever read.
9. Lord John and the Private Matter. A spin-off series by Diana Gabaldon, author of the spectacularly popular Outlander, series (you don’t need to have read Outlander, to read this, I haven’t). This is another historical mystery series, set in late-1700s London in which Lord John’s private matter opens up into a case of treason and espionage. Along with a good mystery and an engaging set of characters, she effectively draws a vivid, vibrant portrait of London that neither white-washes the conditions of a rapidly expanding metropolis in the days before indoor plumbing, nor makes the world feel so impossibly bleak you start to wonder why you’re reading this when you could be at the beach. It’s also got one of the most quietly outrageous openings I’ve ever read.
10. Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. The first book in this long-running, highly successful series of Napoleonic-era naval adventures. As much as I like historicals, I did not think I was going to like these. Bunch of guys floating around in the middle of the ocean, occasionally shooting at the French. Not at all my usual cuppa. But I was stunned. They were gorgeously written, dryly humorous, fantastically and intricately detailed and best of all, the ongoing tale of one of the most unusual, most believable, friendships in literature.
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