I read to a lot of young school children, and in the last several weeks I have started to see “suggested summer reading lists” surfacing at the schools I visit. So I thought I’d put together my own list for grown-ups. Like anyone else who reads a lot, I always want to tell everyone I know about great books I have read that they might otherwise miss. So here is my first summer reading list.
Three caveats. First, these aren’t all new books, they are just books that I happened to read recently. Second, I’m not saying they are the best books of the year or anything, I just really liked them when I read them recently and think others should read them. And third, a couple of these are not books for first graders.
1. Peace Like a River and So Brave Young and Handsome by Leif Enger. Leif Enger is a relatively new writer who has written two books that are absolutely engrossing. Peace Like a River is about an eleven year old asthmatic boy who ends up traveling the country with his sister and dad in search of his outlaw older brother. So Brave Young and Handsome is told through the eyes of a struggling novelist who ends up traveling (you may notice a theme here) with an elderly outlaw. These books are offbeat in the best possible way, Leif Enger has a writing style that is unique and that I could read for days.
2. The Night Gardener (or any of a dozen other books) by George Pelecanos. If you were a fan of the classic HBO police series The Wire, then you are a fan of George Pelecanos. He was a chief writer and producer for most of the show’s five seasons. When you read The Night Gardener or any of his other crime novels, you can tell that you are reading the work of someone who helped create that classic tv show.
3. Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch. This is hardly a new book—it came out when I was starting law school in 1989, and won the Pulitzer Prize. But clocking in at over 1,000 pages, I had bought it and never gotten around to reading it. I finally did, and wow. I had a pretty decent familiarity with the story of the civil rights movement, but the details and vivid storytelling in this book make the story even more gripping. The book focuses on Martin Luther King and the period 1954 through 1963.
4. The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Many people already know Cormac McCarthy as the author of the book that was made into the movie No Country for Old Men. The Road, which is also about to be a movie, is one of those books that is impossible to put down but also hard to read—a grim story about a father and son in a post-apocalyptic America, and their love for each other.
You can’t go wrong with any of these books, and you can get them all at your local public library.
