Books For Summer

A couple links to some books recommended on NPR for Summer Book Recommendations 2008.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90589316

See the complete list of 2008 Summer Books recommendations

A list from my favorite NPR reviewer, Alan Cheuse: Summer Books to Feed Your Literary Addiction

Nancy Pearl is a librarian in Seattle who does great radio book reviews. Nancy Pearl (KUOW)

Check out Nancy's website

Some picks from Independent Booksellers: Booksellers' Selections for Summer Afternoons

City of Thieves: A Novel by David Benioff sounds interesting. "Set during the Siege of Leningrad in 1941, City of Thieves combines masterful storytelling with poignant historical insights — and, in the end, a joyous conclusion."

Some of my recent reads that could occupy a summer afternoon:

Right as Rain: A Novel by George P. Pelecanos. 'Right as Rain' started the Derek Strange and Terry Quinn series of crime novels set in Washington DC by George Pelecanos. Pelecanos creates some vivid characters - an inner city drug lord, a junkie or two, a couple of redneck drug suppliers, as well as members of the urban black middle class. Pelecanos was one the writers (along with creator David Simon and Dennis Lehane, Ed Burns, and others) who made 'The Wire' (The Wire - The Complete First Season) one of the best TV dramas of all-time. In the written word, Pelecanos creates the same gritty feel for the underbelly of the city's drug trade and of its collateral damage.


The Triumph of Caesar: A Novel of Ancient Rome (Novels of Ancient Rome) by Steven Saylor. Steven Saylor returns to the Roma Sub Rosa series for his twelfth volume featuring Gordianus the Finder, a private eye in Rome around the end of the Roman Republic. This volume finds the now 64-year-old Gordianus returned from Egypt and, as always, rubbing elbows with people several levels above his pay grade like Caesar, Caesar's wife, Calpurnia, Cicero, and Mark Antony - as well as numerous lesser known Romans, such as Fulvia (with her sights set on Antony), the young Octavius (later and better known as Augustus Caesar), a playwright named Laberius, Vercingetorix, the imprisoned leader Gallic chieftain awaiting his imminent execution, Cleopatra, her young son Caesarion, and her defeated sister Arsinoe. Saylor weaves a page-turner mystery with fascinating details of Roman political and social life (including the development of the Julian calendar).


Dissolution by C. J. Sansom features one of the more unusual `detectives' in the crime fiction genre: Matthew Shardlake, a 16th century attorney in the employ of Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII's vicar-general. Shardlake also happens to be a hunchback. Cromwell sends Shardlake to investigate the murder of one of a royal commissioner at the fictional monastery at Scarnsea on the Sussex coast while Cromwell has embarked on the dissolution of the formerly Catholic monasteries. Lust for power, money, and more bodily sins dominate this fascinating tale. Shardlake's story continues in Dark Fire and Sovereign: A Matthew Shardlake Mystery (Matthew Shardlake Mysteries).