Summer Reading

I want to mention some happy books; I feel we’ve gotten a little weltschmerzy.

Steven Almond, 6/28/05 on Open Source

Taking names and titles this hour for the summer reading list. Never to be confused with the Christmas list of gift books, or coffee table books. Summer books are beach towel or back-porch books. And usually not those tasty best-selling trifles like Blink or 1776. The ideal summer book is sustained reading for a month or two: the collected Danelle Steele or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Moby Dick, the Dickens you never finished before like Bleak House or Pickwick Papers, or the boxed set of Faulkner masterpieces that Oprah has dared you to open. The other goad we never had before, a whole meaning of the company of books, comes out of the Internet which lets an enterprising reader write her own book review, share a discovery or a passion, join a book group across the globe, or find the inner circle of Proustians.

Margo Lockwood

poet, owned the independent bookstore “The Horse in the Attic” in Massachusetts for 12 years

[in the studio at WGBH]

Steve Almond

creative writing teacher at Boston College, author of Candyfreak

[in the studio at WGBH]

Maud Newton

literary blog: Maud Newton

[by phone from New York City]

Dennis Johnson

literary blog: Moby Lives

[by phone from Hoboken, NJ]