Summer Reading Radar

By now, you are probably hundreds of pages into one of the recommendations made in my last blog post. But in case you are still looking for more, today’s post is dedicated to books that are on my must-read list and are scheduled to be downloaded to my iPad soon.

1. My Blood by Ellen Ullman. Set in the radical 1970′s fallout from the prior decades’ “free love” society, this story takes eavesdropping to a whole new level. The journey begins with a disgraced professor who takes an office in a downtown tower to plot his return. The walls are thin, and he’s distracted by voices from next door— his neighbor is a psychologist, and one of her patients dislikes the hum of the white-noise machine. And so he begins to truly hear: the patient’s troubles with her female lover, her conflicts with her adoptive, avowedly WASP family and her quest to track down her birth mother.

2. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. History made sexy is irresistible. In the first of this series, 16^th century England is depicted as a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Yet Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe oppose him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. What price will he pay for Anne’s head?

3. Once Upon a River by Bonnie Campbell. American literature has always had a love affair with loners living off the land. But what makes this story memorable is that the individual surviving in extreme and extraordinary circumstances is our heroine.

4. Winter of the World: Book Two of the Century Trilogy by Ken Follett. Okay, this pick will have to be a late summer read as it doesn’t debut until September. But it’s worth the wait. Winter of the World picks up right where the first book left off. Its five interrelated families —American, German, Russian, English, Welsh— enter a time of enormous social, political and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of the Third Reich, through the Spanish Civil War and the great dramas of World War II, up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs.