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Summer Reading

Posted at 7:47 PM on June 29, 2009 by Marianne Combs (3 Comments)
Filed under: Books

It's the time of year when Minnesotans love to sit outdoors and enjoy the great weather, and many of us prefer to do it with a book in hand, whether it's on the deck or by the lake.

Today on Midmorning, Kerri Miller discussed the best bets for summer reads with Washington Post book editor Ron Charles and Los Angeles Times book reviewer Sarah Weinman. Their conversation resulted in a list of books they (and Midmorning callers) think would make for time well spent.

So what are you paging through this summer? And what would you vote for as the perfect summer read? (My choice? Anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

Comments (3)

I would like to add the following books to the Summer reading list.
I most heartily recommend "Brooklyn" by Colm Toiban. A beautifully written small book with a very big impact, particularly if you have ever found yourself living in a foreign country with your family far away.
"The Little Stranger" by Sarah Waters - a gothic tale set in post WWII England.
"The Forgotten Garden" and "The House at Riverton" by Kate Morton - the perfect books for a lazy afternoon in the hammock.
I also read "The Help" and thought it was a wonderfully insightful story of a certain time in the South.

Posted by Joan Palmer | June 29, 2009 9:08 PM

I always try to read books over the summer that are going to be made into movies in the fall/winter. This year it's "Push" by Sapphire, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" by Jon Ronson, and "Shutter Island" by Dennis Lehane among others.

Posted by Alex C. | June 29, 2009 9:54 PM

"He pictured the poor agents looking all over for him, afraid their boss would bawl them out. He laughed out loud. Slowing down, he looked around at the countryside, something he had never actually done before. Always on his way to arrange or discuss something somewhere, he had come to think of space as a negative value, a waste of time, an obstacle to his progress."

"People have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect."

both quotes - out of sequence - above from THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, Milan Kundera

---

A few days ago I received a speeding ticket in what might be called an unneccessarily strict interpretation of traffic law; it might have been punishment for something else; it might have been a way to collect money, a form of punishment and an unnecessarily strict interpetation of traffic law.

Yesterday I removed and killed a queen bee from a bee hive; about an hour later, I put a queen bee purchased from a queen bee breeder into the queenless bee hive. There is some doubt in my mind that the queen bee replacement was necessary.

The replaced queen bee's pheromones were utilized to protect the new queen bee from being attacked and killed by the bees in the hive.

Posted by Mike | August 19, 2009 5:15 PM

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