Summer Reading

I posted a list of favorite summer reading last July (see here), and mused on it as well in 2011 (here, and here, and here).

But there are so many great books I’d recommend, and love to take with me right now to some pine-shaded cove in view of the Aegean or other bodies of water closer by—my attention torn between the page and view.

Tucker Malarkey, An Obvious Enchantment (Kenya)

Henry James, The Ambassadors (Paris)

Henry James, Roderick Hudson (Italy)

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Bath)

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (South America)

E.M. Forster, A Room with a View (Florence)

Colette (France)

Richard Bradford, Red Sky at Morning (Santa Fe)

Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy (Southwest)

N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (or, in a funny typo I saw, Housemaid of Dawn) (Southwest)

Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (Southwest)

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (Southwest)

David Payne, Confessions of A Taoist on Wall Street

Mark Salzman, The Laughing Sutra (China and San Francisco)

Marguerite Duras, The Lover (Indochina)

Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo (northern Italy)

Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves (esp. “The Adventure of a Reader”)

John Cheever short stories (esp. “The Golden Age”)

Graham Greene short stories (esp. “The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen” and “Cheap in August”)

M.L. Longworth mysteries set in Aix au Provence

Shelby Hearon, 500 Scorpions (Mexico)

Mary Wesley, Harnessing Peacocks (England)

Robert Hellenga, The Sixteen Pleasures (Florence)

Keri Hulme, The Bone People (New Zealand)

Jodi Picoult, Picture Perfect (Africa, California)

Jennifer Vanderbes, Easter Island

James Houston, The Last Paradise (Hawai’i)

Robert Goddard, Into the Blue (Greece and England)

William Boyd, Brazzaville Beach (Africa)

Charles Pellegrino, Unearthing Atlantis (Greece, Mt. St. Helens)

Bon appetit!

image:  Henri Matisse, Interior with a Young Girl Reading