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May 28, 2006

Summertime

and the livin' is literary...

How many of you have to work this weekend? Raise your hands. Me, too! Due to somewhat tight deadlines and egregiously poor time-management skills, I’m stuck spending this holiday weekend indoors with only my sharpened red pencil and a mountain of copyedits to keep me company. (Mr. Tall is also working. But the dogs say they may fire up the barbecue and make a pitcher of margaritas later. Traitors.) So I’m daydreaming about what I’ll do when I have more free and the answer, of course, is read.

Here’s what’s on my to-be-read list. Please feel free to make additional suggestions:

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse. No, not THAT Kate Moss. (I think.) This book comes highly recommended by a librarian friend, and it’s supposed to be chock full of twists and turns and scandal and mystery, paralleled through time, with one heroine living in present day and the other living 800 years ago, protecting the Grail in France. Sort of a female DaVinci Code.

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Another epic novel that spans centuries, continents, and ten pounds of intrigue in a one pound bag. Castles, crypts, and Dracula figure heavily into the plot. Nothin’ wrong with that! This was the “it” book last summer, and I missed it, so it’s top of my list this year. Don’t tell anyone I’m behind the trend.

Honeymoon With My Brother by Franz Wisner. I see these guys every year at the L.A. times Book Festival, and they’re always funny and adorable. This is the true story of how one of them got left at the altar by his bride-to-be, and since he had non-refundable tickets for his honeymoon in Costa Rica, he ended up taking the trip with (you guessed it) his brother. And then they both ended up quitting their jobs and traveling the globe for two years. Men. This memoir has been sitting on my to-be-read pile for ages, but its time has finally come! If the narrative is half as engaging as the authors, it’ll be a gem.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Somehow, I never got around to reading this, even though I was an English major in college. But after reading Whitney’s juicy summary, how can I resist?

Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. The true story of two scuba divers who discover a German U-Boat sunk off the coast of…New Jersey??? Everyone said they were crazy, including the government. But after an elite diving team confirms the find, the obsession begins and the mysteries start to unravel. I’m not much into diving or WWII, but everyone who's read it gushed that they couldn’t put the book down, so I’m going to see for myself.

Make Him Look Good by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. I recently attended one of Alisa’s signings and she hooked me after reading one scene from this novel. It’s smart, funny, and is rumored to be inspired by the behind-the-scenes antics of a certain Latino superstar. Count me in.

Devil’s Teeth by Susan Casey. A non-fiction account about two biologists toughing it out in really, really inhospitable terrain to study really, really vicious sharks with really, really sharp teeth who will kill you as soon as look at you. Sold!

Of course, I’ll also be reading my fellow literary chicks’ and all my author friends’ books-- that goes without saying. But none of them write about bloodthirsty sharks (yet), so sometime you have to expand your horizons. So what about you guys? What books are you dying to dive into?

Posted by Beth at 2:46 PM | Comments (3)

Comments

Posted by: Christina at May 28, 2006 4:11 PM

Posted by: Eileen at May 28, 2006 6:28 PM

Posted by: May at May 29, 2006 5:39 AM