Today, Blair President Carolyn Sakowski shares her summer reading plans–and her reaction to E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. Enjoy!
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Sum..Sum..Summertime. I was going to devote my summer reading to lofty literary fiction and the latest offerings from my favorite mystery/detective writers, but my plans suddenly changed course the first weekend in June.
I joined a group of five college friends for a beach reunion. We’re talking about women in their mid-60s here—all intelligent, voracious readers with enough disposable income to indulge in purchasing dozens of books every year.
Our usual conversations revolve around family and ailments, but this year, something new entered the discourse. Yep, the Fifty Shades trilogy. They all wanted to know what I thought about it. Of course, I was aware of the phenomena, but I had purposefully avoided reading the first book. I just couldn’t fathom any serous interest in reading about bondage and sex toys. I will admit that I like to read a good romance every now and then, but this just sounded too trashy.
The first afternoon of our weekend, while my friends took their naps, I picked up the first book someone else had been reading. Several hours later, we were all down at Pelican Bookstore getting our fixes. I had to get my own copy to take home; one person had just finished book two and had to have the third. We were all disgusted with our reactions to this trilogy, but were certainly not alone. Neilsen BookScan numbers show 815,000 copies of this trilogy sold during the week of May 21-27. They accounted for 13% of all trade paperbacks sold that week. Total sales topped 10 million that same week. Will sociologists look back on the spring and summer of 2012 and analyze why so many women went crazy? I especially loved what one of my hairdresser’s clients said when asked if her sex life had improved after reading these books. She answered that after you read these books, you won’t need a man—just get a dog.
What do you think? Have YOU read–or do you plan to read–Fifty Shades of Grey?
The pool is open, half of my coworkers are out of the office on holiday, and it’s hot enough to enjoy a glass or two of sweet iced tea (or perhaps something stronger) on the porch. So here are a few of our favorite books to read when you’re taking a break from the real world this summer. Enjoy!
“Remember your first John Grisham? Country music veteran Dill (he served as a personal manager for Minnie Pearl, Dwight Yoakam, and other greats) doesn’t miss a beat in this debut high-adrenaline thriller full of twists and turns.” —Library Journal, starred review
Judd Nix, a 23-year-old unpaid intern at Elite Management, welcomes the chance to become
the paid assistant of Simon Stills, one of country’s biggest managers, but he soon finds himself a witness to an assassination attempt. When a gunman takes aim at megastar Ripley Graham, Stills’s most important client and the last hope for the troubled recording industry, on stage at the Grand Ole Opry, the shooter misses and seriously wounds Stills instead. Nix and his co-worker, Megan Olsen, decide to investigate on their own, but with music executives plotting a major merger, they can’t be sure whom to trust.
Murder on Music Row leads readers through a maze of twists and turns that connect Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, and London in a behind-the-scenes look at an industry where there are no limits in the pursuit of money, power, and fame.
God Bless America is a meditation on the American dream and its discontents. In his most ambitious collection yet, Steve Almond offers a comic and forlorn portrait of these United States: our lust for fame, our racial tensions, the toll of perpetual war, and the pursuit of romantic happiness.
Each of these 13 stories is an urgent investigation of America’s soul, its particular suffering, its injustices, its possibilities for redemption. With deft slight of hand, Almond, “a writer who knows us as well as we know ourselves” (Houston Chronicle), leavens his disappointment and outrage with a persistent hope for the men and women who inhabit his worlds. God Bless America offers us an astonishing vision of our collective fate, rendered in Almond’s signature style of “precise strokes… with metaphors so original and spot-on that they read like epiphanies” (San Francisco Chronicle).
Still not sold on this book? I’ve got two reasons more:
This isn’t your typical light read for the summer. This is a book of substance. It is a universal story of loss, grief, and human dignity.
Set amid the perils of illegal border crossings, The Iguana Tree is the suspenseful saga of Lilia and Hector, who separately make their way from Mexico into the United States, seeking work in the Carolinas and a home for their infant daughter.
Michel Stone’s harrowing novel meticulously examines the obstacles each faces in pursuing a new life: manipulation, rape, and murder in the perilous commerce of border crossings; betrayal by family and friends; exploitation by corrupt officials and rapacious landowners on the U.S. side; and, finally, the inexorable workings of the U.S. justice system.
Hector and Lilia meet Americans willing to help them with legal assistance and offers of responsible employment, but their illegal entry seems certain to prove their undoing. The consequences of their decisions are devastating.
If you’re looking for a book that humanizes the agony and elation of illegally entering the United States without politics, this is for you.
“Michel Stone’s first novel, The Iguana Tree, is an astonishing achievement, a daring but plausible leap into a world unnoted by most of us yet close around us daily. This story is at once a page-turner and a moving, psychologically genuine drama.”
—Rosa Shand, author of The Gravity of Sunlight, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year
“Part whimsical memoir, part cultural anthology, Hank Hung the Moon is a celebration of the music, the man, the era, the lore, and the magic of the South’s most beloved songster. If I were stranded on a desert island with only one book that captured everything I know and love about the South, this would be the one.”
—Cassandra King (Conroy), author of The Sunday Wife
The dark story of America’s Pulitzer Prize–winning hillbilly singer has been told often and well, but always with sad country fiddles wailing. This latest Hank Williams paean will make readers laugh as well as cry. Hank hung the moon and left his fans behind to admire it. He transformed the musical landscape, as well as the heavens, with his genius. And that’s a good thing.
More a musical memoir than a biography, Hank Hung the Moon is the author’s evocative personal stories of ’50s and ’60s musical staples—elementary-school rhythm bands, British Invasion rock concerts, and tearjerker movie musicals. It was a simpler time when Hank roamed the earth. The book celebrates a world of 78 rpm records and five-cent Cokes. Hank provides the soundtrack and wisdom for this Last Picture Show of a book.
A Cajun girl learns to understand English by listening to Hank on the radio. A Hank impersonator works by day at a prison but by night makes good use of his college degree in country music. Hank’s lost daughter, Jett, devotes her life to embracing the father she never knew. A newly minted recording artist buys a belt from Hank himself at a Nashville store that country’s first superstar bought to pacify a nagging wife.
Finally, here are stories readers haven’t heard a thousand times before about people—some famous, some not—who loved Hank. This lively little book uses Hank as a metaphor for life. Readers will tap their toes and demand an encore.
Newly hired deputy Marla Easton and Sheriff Dugan Walton are amazed at the performance of Dr. Sylvester Hopkins in a local 5K footrace. At age 65, Hopkins posts a world-class time of 17:35, two minutes faster than he has run in the past few years. Walton suspects Hopkins has concocted some new performance-enhancing drug.
A trail of bodies from Frisco to Nags Head, North Carolina, leads Deputy Easton and Sheriff Walton to the discovery of the Methuselah serum—a new drug designed by Hopkins that reverses aging in human cells. A nefarious triumvirate of pharmaceutical CEOs known as “the Medical Mafia” wants the formula at any price. So do the FBI and the president of the United States. But Sheriff Walton believes that he and Deputy Easton have been divinely chosen to guard the formula and serum, and they take their mission seriously—much like the angels posted in Eden to guard the Tree of Life. Their mission turns perilous when Deputy Easton’s seven-year-old son, Gabe, is kidnapped.
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Well, that’s all for today. Want to know what else we’re reading? Check our our staff picks on Pinterest. And share your favorite summer reads with us in the comments section.
In the sweltering heat of the summer months, I like to read books that take me to another time or place, or at the very least, distract me enough to forget how hot it is outside. I just finished Doc from my summer reading list (below), and it is in direct competition with Ann Patchett’s fabulous new book, State of Wonder, for being named the Best Book I’ve Read All Year. I can’t wait to read the rest!
Sister by Rosamund Lupton
Initially intrigued by the starred review in Booklist, that describes British writer Rosamund Lupton’s novel as a remarkable debut that “. . . is a masterful, superlative-inspiring success that will hook readers (and keep them guessing) from page one,” I was further enamored when I heard Lupton on the Diane Rehm show. (You can listen to this broadcast and read a free excerpt from Sisterhere). The novel unfolds in the form of a long letter from Beatrice to her adored, and recently murdered, younger sister—juicy mystery meets sisterly love and loyalty.
Doc by Mary Doria Russell
I’ve read everything published by Mary Doria Russell—my favorites include The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace—and I am always amazed by the broad range of subjects and genres Russell covers in her books. Russell surprises us again with her newest novel, Doc, “. . . this terrific bio-epic set in a revisionist version of the Old West . . .” (Kirkus, starred review), where she retells the story of the O.K. Corral and Doc Holliday. The Washington Post is “. . . in awe of how confidently Russell rides through this familiar territory and remakes all its rich heroism and tragedy.” Read an excerpt from Doc at Mary Doria Russell’s website.
The Snowman by Jo Nesbø
Translated from the Swedish, The Snowman follows Detective Inspector Harry Hole as he tries to capture a serial killer who is leaving snowmen in his victim’s front lawns. Jo Nesbø is repeatedly described by reviewers as the next Stieg Larsson. I’m anxious to find out if the shoe fits— although the awards the novel has won helps convince me. The Snowman was awarded the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize 2007 for Best Novel of the Year and received the Norwegian Book Club Prize (Den norske leserprisen) 2007 for Best Novel of the Year.
Zeroville by Steve Erikson
The kind man at the Europa booth at BEA this year gave me a copy of Zerovilleby Steve Erickson, after we discussed some of my favorite past Europa reads. He promised I wouldn’t be disappointed. The cover copy describes Zeroville best: “On the same August day in 1969 that a crazed hippie ‘family’ led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above Los Angeles, a young ex-communicated seminarian arrives with the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift — ‘the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies’—tattooed on his head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cinéaste but ‘cineautistic,’ sleeping at night in the Roosevelt Hotel where he’s haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. Vikar has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: strange drugs that frighten him, a strange sexuality that consumes him, a strange music he doesn’t understand. Over the course of the Seventies and into the Eighties, he pursues his obsession with film from one screening to the next and through a series of cinema-besotted conversations and encounters with starlets, burglars, guerrillas, escorts, teenage punks and veteran film editors, only to discover a secret whose clues lie in every film ever made, and only to find that we don’t dream the Movies but rather they dream us.”
It must be summer: the office is half empty because my coworkers are at the beach or the mountains, I spend my weekends at the pool, and fresh berries and stone fruits are making appearances at every farmers’ market. This means it’s also time for Blair staff to share their summer reading picks. First up: Blair president Carolyn Sakowski muses over her newest books and just how to read them. (Anyone else dealing with that conundrum?)
I just finished A Visit from Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan on my iPad. I enjoyed this book in e-book format. The assortment of changing characters and the contemporary narrative seem perfect for the electronic media.
Yet while recently reading The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht on my iPad, I kept noticing that I was yearning to read this story on real book pages. I’m still pondering why the desire to read the folktale that Natalie’s grandfather told about the tiger and the deaf-mute on the printed page was so strong, but it’s led me to a summer reading experiment: to determine which books are suited for the iPad, and which are suited for the physical book.
So for the summer, I’ve purchased Karen Russell’s Swamplandia in book form and Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks as an e-book. After reading these two books, will I wish Russell’s story about the clan of alligator wrestlers in southwest Florida had been in e-book format for easier reading while traveling or on vacation? Will Brooks’ story about the Wampanoag Indian who graduated from Harvard in the 1600s be another story that I find myself wishing I had read in physical book form?
From her earlier works, I assume Ann Patchett is going to take me deep into the world of the Amazonian rainforest in State of Wonder, so I ordered a physical copy of this book. When I added Craig Johnson’s The Cold Dish to my list after reading about his latest offering in the series about Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire, it seemed like a perfect iPad candidate, especially for the airplane traveling I’ll be doing this summer.
As for which format to try for Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, which has been compared to Charles Portis’s True Grit, I’m just going to have to give that some more thought. Any suggestions from you, blog readers?
By now you’ve met Angela and Carolyn through their literary voyages to Ireland and Sweden, so today I’m going to offer you my summer reading list. I’m Brooke, Blair’s publicity assistant, and usually the voice behind The Blair Essentials. And although I won’t be taking you to Europe today, we will be traveling beyond the world of American fiction.
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I’ve started off my summer reading with David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which was just released in the States a few weeks ago. Mitchell is an English author who spent much of his time in Japan, so most of his novels are a mix of eastern and western worlds. You’ll find more of that in Thousand Autumns, a love story from 18th century Dejima, a manmade Japanese island requisitioned by the Dutch as a trading post. The book starts off with a page of author’s notes to explain how to read it, including that dates in the book are based on the lunar calendar, and the Japanese characters’ names begin with surnames. Let me tell you, I nearly put the book down right there! Mitchell needed to offer instructions on how to read his book?! Thankfully I turned the page, and was instantly captivated. Mitchell has a way of turning prose into poetry, and in some places his plot turns into a thriller. And although the reviews say it’s no Cloud Atlas, which is widely regarded as his best book, I can’t wait to get back to this one.
But I’m also a fan of the classics, which it seems are forgotten by most people after they leave school. And after a trip to Florence earlier this year reunited me with E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, I’ve decided to check out his A Passage to India next. It was selected as one of the 100 great works of English literature by the Modern Library, and Time Magazine included the novel in its “TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005″. A Passage to India is another East-meets-West book that plays out during the Indian independence movement during the 1920s. The plot focuses on the trial of an Indian man in colonial India and brings out all the racial tensions and prejudices between the locals and the colonists.
And my next summer reading pick remains a mystery, even to me! I’m waiting for the longlist of this year’s Booker prize finalists to be released next Tuesday, July 27. The Booker Prize is the award for contemporary British fiction, so when they release the list of contenders, it’s like a book nerd’s Christmas. They’ll release the shortlist in September and the winner in October, so sign up for email updates if you want to stay on top of who’s in the running.
The official start of summer is just around the corner, which means we’ll be reading by the pool or on our way to our favorite vacation spots before you know it. We at Blair thought that it might be a fun way to introduce ourselves to you by sharing our summer reading lists. These lists might be what we’re reading this summer or what we think you might like to pick up during an afternoon thunderstorm. No affiliations or paid promotions here, just our favorite literary classics, guilty pleasure mysteries, and downright good books–that’s what you want to read, right? So to start, sales director Angela has generously written up a little post about three Irish mysteries that she recommends this summer. Enjoy!
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Faithful Place by Tana French
I’ve been a big fan of Tana French since she introduced me to Adam Ryan and Cassie Maddox in her first book, the Edgar Award winner In the Woods. And I loved getting to know Cassie even better in French’s second installment, The Likeness. So I’m greatly looking forward to a similar experience in her third book, coming out this July, Faithful Place, where we’ll pick up with a new story, this time centered on Frank Mackey, Cassie’s old undercover boss. All three books have lots of Dublin flavor. The connection in each book is the characters, so they’re not really true sequels, and each plot stands alone. So even if you haven’t read Tana’s first two installments, you can still enjoy Faithful Place.
Darling Jim by Christian Moerk
Darling Jim by Christian Moerk is now out in paperback. This modern gothic novel of suspense reveals, through their diaries, the story of sisters who fall in love with a beguiling stranger, Jim Quick. Jim, a bard who shows up in the small Irish town of Castletownbere, has murkier motives beyond telling tales of wolves and kings in pubs across Ireland. This book promises to be a thrilling mix of noir, horror, mythology, and fairytale. If you want to learn more about Moerk, check out his Web site, where you can also read about Moerk’s other two novels not yet published in the United States.
Elegy for April by Benjamin Black
Fans of Booker Prize winner John Banville will be interested in reading his mystery series, written under the name Benjamin Black. Elegy for April is this year’s episode, continuing the saga of pathologist Garrett Quirke, set in 1950s Dublin. While this book could stand alone, don’t miss the previous two installments, Christine Falls and The Silver Swan. I recommend listening to the audio versions, narrated by Timothy Dalton, for true Irish flair. All three books are full of devious socialite families with more than their fair share of secrets, which conservative 1950s Irish society demands for propriety’s sake. Suspicious incidents linked to the Catholic Church abound.
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Check back soon for more summer reading suggestions from the rest of the Blair staff!
Our usual conversations revolve around family and ailments, but this year, something new entered the discourse. Yep, the Fifty Shades trilogy. They all wanted to know what I thought about it. Of course, I was aware of the phenomena, but I had purposefully avoided reading the first book. I just couldn’t fathom any serous interest in reading about bondage and sex toys. I will admit that I like to read a good romance every now and then, but this just sounded too trashy.
I’ve started off my summer reading with David Mitchell’s 
But I’m also a fan of the classics, which it seems are forgotten by most people after they leave school. And after a trip to Florence earlier this year reunited me with E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, I’ve decided to check out his A Passage to India next. It was selected as one of the 100 great works of English literature by the 
And my next summer reading pick remains a mystery, even to me! I’m waiting for the longlist of this year’s Booker prize finalists to be released next Tuesday, July 27. The Booker Prize is the award for contemporary British fiction, so when they release the list of contenders, it’s like a book nerd’s Christmas. They’ll release the shortlist in September and the winner in October, so 
I’ve been a big fan of 
Darling Jim by 
Fans of Booker Prize winner John Banville will be interested in reading his mystery series, written under the name 
