So, what's on your summer list? My mother tells me that schools are already out in my Southern hometown, and that got me to thinking about the subject.
When third-grade is done, Junior wants to start a collection of books by Patricia
Polacco and hopes to read a new graphic novel in a favorite series,
Sardine from Outer Space #5: My Cousin Manga and Other Stories. His school encourages everyone to read during vacation, but does not specify which books.
Maybe I'll pick up T.H. White's
Once and Future King, which I avoided the summer it appeared on the tenth-grade reading list. Should I write a book report and email it in late...very, very, very late? Right now I'm into
Selected Stories by Alice Munro. When I finished
Jhumpa Lahiri's latest collection,
Unaccustomed Earth, I knew I had to read something just as good or better next, so I turned to a master short-story writer. I'm not disappointed at all. In her review of
The Progress of Love for the
New York Times, Joyce Carol Oates wrote, "Like her similarly gifted contemporaries Peter Taylor, William Trevor,
Edna O'Brien and some few others, the Canadian short-story writer Alice
Munro writes stories that have the density—moral, emotional,
sometimes historical—of other writers' novels." Amen to that.
The
Selected Stories will keep me busy for a while, but what after that? My blogging pal Tanita S. Davis's young-adult novel,
A La Carte, coming from Knopf in June, is definitely a must-read for me. Other suggestions are welcome. And I'm curious to hear what's on your summer list.