My Summer Reading List

1. The Purpose Driven Life, Rick Warren
2. Tristan Betrayal, Robert Ludlum
3. Oblivious, (I must have been, because I never noted the author’s name)
4. Whisker of Evil, Rita Mae Brown
5. Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich. A writer takes a series of minimum wage jobs to see what people do in order to get by.
6. Twisted, Jonathan Kellerman
7. Sea Change, Robert B. Parker
8. The Broker, John Grisham
9. A Catskill Eagle, Robert B. Parker
10. The Mad Cook of Pymatuning, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
11. The Mermaid Chair, Sue Monk Kidd
12. Marker, Robin Cook. Disappointing.
13. A Year in the World, Frances Mayes. I rushed through this, wanting to get to the travel parts. Much of it revolves around food, but enough is enough.
14. All Our Yesterdays, Robert B. Parker
15. Smashed, Koren Zailckas. Apparently she’s not an alcoholic, but sure lived like one for a few years.
16. School Days, Robert B. Parker
17. Sea Glass, Anita Shreve. Several different threads of different points of view are brought together in the end. Key word: foreshadowing.
18. The Godwulf Manuscript, Robert B. Parker
19. God Bless the Child, Robert B. Parker
20. Mortal Stakes, Robert B. Parker
21. Eat the Document, Dana Spiotta. Wonderful story of a radical gone underground, and her life through the 70’s-90’s.
22. The Hunt Ball, Rita Mae Brown
23. Predator, Patricia Cornwell
24. Wilderness, Robert B. Parker
25. All He Ever Wanted, Anita Shreve. Hey—it’s Anita Shreve—great stuff.
26. An Almost Perfect Moment, Binnie Kirschenbaum
27. The Pilot’s Wife, Anita Shreve. Didn’t see what the big deal was with this one.
28. The Judas Goat, Robert B. Parker
29. This Book Will Save Your Life, A.M. Homes. Or not.
30. The Great Influenza, John M. Barry. I never knew how horrible conditions really were: sick people having to lie in bed with the recently deceased since there was no one well enough to carry out the dead.
31. A Savage Place, Robert B. Parker
32. The Footprints of God, Greg Iles. Something about computers becoming intelligent.
33. Pale Kings and Princes, Robert B. Parker
34. There are Worse Things I Could Do, Adrienne Barbeau. C’mon, she was pretty cute, you must admit.
35. Looking for Rachel Wallace, Robert B. Parker
36. The Widening Gyre, Robert B. Parker
37. Let Me Finish, Roger Angell. Well written stories from the fiction editor of The New Yorker. I think I’ll have to find his baseball writings now.
38. Man in the Shadows, Efraim Halevy. Former director of the Mossad. You would think it would be really cool, but it plods along with little in the way of secret insights.
39. Ceremony, Robert B. Parker
40. Death in Dublin, Bartholomew Gill. I loved it since I’ve actually been in some of the places described in Dublin, and some of the action takes place in Dun Laoghaire, where daughter Ann and her husband Peter live.

As you can see, quite a run of trashy reading with the occasional redeeming serious work. My goal is always 50 books, so I’m a little short this season. I could extend the summer on through September, but I still wouldn’t hit it. Time to tackle the mountain of magazines that accumulated over the past few months.