Ok, so I buy a lot of tomes yet I'm a librarian...'book me' for my crimes...
There's something absolutely relaxing about spending a rainy afternoon in a local bookshop. I've been known to spend upwards of hours just purusing the shelves for reads of any kind--fiction, non, cooking, knitting, and the like. It's like the bookshop and I are soulmates, everlasting companions, and downright addicted to each other--I get the experience of touching the books, stacking my new to buy pile high and lamenting for .3 seconds about the coins I'm about to drop, and reading those little cards staff members write to convince you to pick up the tome, while the bookstore has me browsing and taking all my dollars. Symbiosis? Methinks.And on my latest trip to the bookshop, I picked up a splendid set of summer reads to get me started. My list is ever-growing, but I know for sure these will be gobbled in the coming weeks:1. Cakes and Ale by M. Somerset Maugham2. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie3. Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski4. My Life in Heavy Metal by Steve Almond5. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko6. The Hours by Michael Cunningham7. The Astonishing Life of Ocatavian Nothing: Traitor of the Nation Vol 1. The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson8. Friction by Joe StretchSome of these I'm pretty ashamed I have yet to read, but then again, I just saw some interesting article about "How to Fake Like You've Read" a particular book because its absolutely impossible to have read everything, mathematically...so, I guess I can say it's o.k. that I'm not getting to Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony" until now even though it is considered one of the greatest American Indian novels of all time--I was busy being pushed by my family to read A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris, Navaho Have Five Fingers by T.D. Allen, The Road to Dissapearance by Angie Debo, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Matthiessen, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, Prison Writings by Leonard Peltier, Tracks and Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, and a whole host of stuff by Sherman Alexie, one of my favorite Indian fiction writers.The list is going to get longer, too. With vampires all the craze, I want to revisit Bram Stoker's Dracula, since it's been nearly a decade since I read it and my sister just did a re-read of it. And I have a few other Native books on my list, including that Y.A. book from Sherman Alexie, as well as getting back to Roots by Alex Haley, which I just started last week and its so mesmerizing but absolutely too large to tackle in bed.What does your summer reading look like?