My Summer Reading List

Due to popular demand (well, OK. One person did inquire) I am publishing my Summer 2007 reading list. I only managed 25 this year, largely due to the demands on my time. That darn New Yorker is relentless. It comes every week, whether you’re ready or not. I must be ten issues behind. Between that and PC World and Discover magazine, it’s a wonder I got any real books read at all. So here you go:

1.The Time Traveler’s Wife by Alice Neffennegger. Absolutely wonderful.
2. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I’ve never quite forgiven his slam against Cleveland in another book.
3. The Promised Land by Robert B. Parker
4. Gone by Jonathan Kellerman
5. Panic by Jeff Abbott
6. Terrorist by John Updike. My favorite author, though he is fading lately. Still a good story.
7. Blue Screen by Robert B. Parker
8. Next by Michael Crichton
9. The Cheaters Guide to Baseball by Derek Zumsteg. How to steal signs, fix the basepaths, throw a spitball and much more. Just in time for the World Serious.
10. Blowback by Brad Thor.
11. How Doctors Think by Jerome Groupman. Wouldn’t you know it? Another New Yorker writer. Still, it’s a great book to read before you see your doctor again.
12. The Headmaster’s Wife by Jake Haddam
13. Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett. I had to see what it was all about. Now I don’t remember.
14. Mary Mary by James Patterson. OK if you like Patterson
15. Ducks Flying Backward by Tom Robbins. I still like Robbins’ stories. Very funny.
16. When the World was Young by Tony Romano
17. Dropping the Ball by Dave Winfield. Good ideas about how Major League Baseball should be run.
18. The Big Girls by Susanna Moore. Prison psychiatry.
19. Digging to America by Anne Tyler. Couldn’t help it—had to read another Anne Tyler.
20. The 10th Circle by Jodi Piccoult. Odd book with graphic novel pages in each chapter. Drawings were too dark and confusing to see any detail, though.
21. Nature Girl by Carl Hiassen. Gotta love Hiassen.
22. Do’s and Don’ts Around the World by Gladson Nwanna. Nifty things you never knew.
23. Mater by Rita Mae Brown. Great story, and no talking animals.
24. One Mississippi by Mark Childress. Very good story about a family from Indiana growing up in in that benighted state.
25. Freakonomics by Stephen Leavitt. How economic incentives really work. How Row v. Wade lowered crime twenty years later. All kinds of stuff like that.