Ah, summer: a time for relaxing, running through the sprinklers, sweating when you're too cheap to pay for AC, slathering on the aloe lotion, spitting out watermelon seeds and washing sand out of hard-to-reach places. Unfortunately, once the joy of the general frolic wears thin, it can also be a time of intense and debilitating boredom. Because Cardinal Lit is forever at the head of the vanguard fighting against mental atrophy, it is the civic duty of this page to provide its readers with a list of books for their summer reading enjoyment. Whether those readers choose to drool watermelon juice or spread SPF 45 into the books' page creases is entirely their concern.
(Alfred A. Knopf)
Although Carl Hiaasen's \Basket Case"" is not a brand-spanking new release, it is relatively recent, and shows that over time, Hiaasen only gets better and funnier. Jack Tagger, former investigative reporter for a South Florida newspaper, has been relegated to covering obituaries after a moment of brutal honesty at a staff meeting when his newspaper changes hands.
One of the obituaries that cross his desk is that of Jimmy Stoma, a once-famous rocker (lead singer of the Slut-Puppies, no less) who died in a very odd fishing accident. As Tagger digs deeper, he finds himself trapped in a flawless web of lies, deceit and confusion, the likes that only a master storyteller like Hiaasen could create.
Although his books are grounded in reality, Hiaasen has a knack for taking the grim and making it absurdly hilarious. His wit is ever-present, and, as any veteran reader of Hiaasen novels knows, the books have to be read slowly in order to savor every hilarious word. Carl Hiaasen has outdone himself in this novel, setting the bar even higher for the rest of the cockamamie South Florida writers such as Laurence Shames, James Hall, Hialeah Jackson and Tim Dorsey.
(Houghton Mifflin)
It should come as no secret that after exam week, few students have a deep, all-consuming desire to tackle Kafka or Dostoevsky. For many, brains are so fried that the back of the Honey Nut Cheerios box becomes a dense work of literature.
For those who don't want to read up on General Mills' offers all summer, however, there is an answer: small words, short sentences and big, big pictures. James Marshall's collection, ""George and Martha: The Complete Stories of Two Best Friends"" offers all these factors-and lots of them.
Each story is a complete tale of the two title characters, a pair of hippopotami learning the ropes of life and friendship. Lessons include being honest enough to say you don't like split pea soup, wearing sunscreen and that it's okay for male hippos to dance.
Given today's world, these are invaluable stories of love, support, hygiene and how to be happy. As an added bonus, few words have more than six letters, the perfect fit for small children, hippopotamus aficionados and burnt-out college students alike.
(Penguin)
College can be a time of great stress and uncertainty, when we wonder what the future will bring and who will make the trip with us. For all of us, a summer trip to the stress-free world John Steinbeck creates in ""Tortilla Flat"" is a good idea.
""Tortilla Flat"" focuses on Danny, a loafer in Monterey, California who inherits a house from his grandfather in the wake of World War I. Over time, the house becomes a home and clubhouse for a growing assortment of friends and drifters. This episodic novel follows the adventures of these strange and lovable men through treasure hunts, eccentric romance and endless drinking.
In Steinbeck's world, loyalty, generosity and camaraderie take priority over material wealth and competition. Steinbeck's gorgeous yet playful prose and wonderful characters make ""Tortilla Flat"" a genuinely life-affirming experience and an indispensable addition to anyone's summer reading list.
(Alfred A. Knopf)
As good poetry for summer, Kevin Young's collection, ""Jelly Roll"" is fit for two types of reading. It can be taken as quick as a late August day, the daylight slipping away like the last few lines of Young's poem, ""Intermezzo,"" ""Me, ashore, as sun skips/ Like stones off the steady water.""
Or Young's words can be stretched out like a lazy June afternoon, going on longer than sunlight and drawing every syllable out for minutes. Like returning from a road trip that has all evening, ""Song of Smoke"" suggests an idea of infinity on a human scale. ""To watch you walk/ Cross the room in your black/ Corduroys is to see/ Civilization start..,"" leaves any reader longing just to watch the sun set, rise or just meander across an endless blue sky. The easy, breezy, slow reading is meant for the summer that is composed of road trips that don't need to finish and nights on the terrace that turn minutes into generous hours.
(Bloomsbury USA)
Ever felt like you just had too much stuff? John D. Freyer felt so weighed down by his material goods that he decided to sell them. All of them.
In his book ""All my Life for Sale,"" Freyer recounts his experience of selling nearly everything he owned on eBay. But it doesn't stop there.
After receiving an invitation to visit his salt shaker in Portland, Maine, Freyer begins to wonder what happened to all of his other things, which were scattered across the United States and beyond.
He sends out a message to his bidders telling them that he is going to embark on a trip to visit the people who had bought his things.
So begins the book, which catalogues many of Freyer's goods, from his waffle maker to a little package of cocktail parasols. Each object carries a description of the significance it had in Freyer's life and an update on how the object is now making memories with someone else.
Freyer's book provides the perfect summer read-quick, light and strangely fascinating. It's also a bizarre reminder of the importance our stuff has in our lives, not because of material value, but because of the memories these objects evoke.
(Little, Brown and Company)
Scarred, cynical, idiosyncratically thoughtful and endlessly funny, David Sedaris is perhaps the ultimate writer for any college student to follow. In ""Naked,"" he chronicles his life in 17 fast-reading essays, crafting a brilliant life story.
A lot of Sedaris' strength lies in his vast collection of interesting stories and his ability to unearth the funniest and most interesting aspects of each of them. From describing the adverse relationship between his father's Greek immigrant mother and his own non-Greek mother to his experience playing an elf in a mall's Christmas display, Sedaris hits the reader with an unrelenting stream of disarmingly funny stories.
But what really elevates Sedaris is the underlying humanity in his voice. For all he makes fun of his family, there is unmistakable love underneath. Under all the humor of his stories there is real pain. This makes his stories more genuine and relatable and makes his humor even more powerful.
(Bloomsbury)
Beautifully written and spiced with humor and tragedy, Douglas Coupland's ""All Families Are Psychotic"" tells a story of a broken family's first reunion in years. The Drummond family congregates in Cape Canaveral to see daughter and sister Sarah's launch into space.
The divorced parents, Ted and Janet, in the presence of Ted's new wife, Nicki, contribute feelings of tension and resentment, while the relationships between siblings Wade, Sarah and Bryan perfectly articulate the friendships, embarrassments and rivalry every set of siblings go through.
The most heartbreaking part of the novel is Wade and Janet's struggle trying to live a normal life while dying from AIDS. With a harebrained scheme to make some quick cash, the family is forced to work together and eventually realize that with all their problems and annoyances, depending upon and trusting one another is the only way to achieve a second chance at life.
From the beginning of this novel, the reader is thrown into a story with uncountable twists and turns with brief elaborations and explanations spread throughout the novel, producing a perfect balance of intrigue and curiosity, a quick read that is never boring.
