I know that summer begins on the solstice, but for the purpose of my summer reading list the season starts on Memorial Day, Monday, May 25 and ends on Labor Day, Monday, September 7. This gives me more time to read!
As usual, my list is an eclectic and ambitious one. The sixteen books on the list include two care taking memoirs--Bobby Wonderful: An Imperfect Son Buries His Parents, by Bob Morris, and Bettyville, by George Hodgman--as well as a collection of essays by Rebecca Solnit, Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.
I want to read the 2015 Ferro-Grumley award-winning Mr. Loverman, by Bernadine Evaristo, An Unnecessary Woman, by Rabiih Alameddine, and coming out in June, The Little Paris Bookshop: A Novel, by Nina George Also on the literary fiction deck are Louise Erdrich's The Painted Drum and Colm Toibin's The Master (in part so that I can return the copy I borrowed to its rightful owner).
Two sleuths that I follow have new adventures on the way: Bess Crawford (A Pattern of Lies, by Charles Todd) and my beloved Armand Gamache (The Nature of the Beast, by the wonderful Louise Penny). When the summer is winding down, Deanna Raybourn introduces a new character in A Curious Beginning: A Veronica Speedwell Mystery.
The house-designing part of me plans to read Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, and to tackle, pattern-by-pattern--certainly not all at once--A Pattern Language, a treatise on architecture, urban design and community livability by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa.
On a lighter note, I am very much looking forward to spending some more time with HHC--His Holiness's Cat--in The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Power of Meow, by David Michie.
Inevitably, there will be temptations to deviate from the list and/or to add to it, especially after the Golden Crown Literary Society conference in New Orleans in July. And I might add a novel by Henry James, after reading The Master.