Tim Grobaty: Our annual summer reading list

We have been giving you the gift of our summer reading list for decades (probably two), and we've yet to see anyone reading any of our recommendations while sitting poolside at a swank hotel drinking mai tais out of plastic cups and shouting at their kids to stop running.

It's always some huge-selling thing like "50 Shades of Harry Potter" or a "history" book written by a no-big-words-knowing FOX News loudmouth.

Undeterred, we offer this year's batch. For the love of all that's holy, will you at least consider one or two?

Summer reading list

1. The best in our sunflower-and-conch-decorated beach bag this season, and by a fairly good margin, is "Tenth of December: Stories," a 10-piece set by George Saunders, who has become the country's best short story writer.

Saunders' yarns leap all over the place, from wrenchingly heartbreaking to gloriously hilarious. "Tenth" is bookended by its two best stories, "Victory Lap," that manages to mix terror, humor and squalor, and the title piece, an emotional tightrope walk of a story about the homecoming of a PTSD-troubled soldier.

2. "Benediction," by Kent Haruf, is, in contrast to the Sanders collection, an elegant and straightforward novel set, as were his earlier two brilliant works "Plainsong" and "Eventide," in the small town of Holt, Colo. It's not a happy story, but it's beautiful in its simplicity and in its study of its subjects.

3. "The Interestings," by Meg Wolitzer, is the beachiest of our summer reads, all ready for the big screen with an enjoyable and broad cast of characters, from its middle-class plain Jane narrator to her lifelong cast of friends that includes a wealthy Manhattanite, a Matt Groening clone, a pretty-boy loser and others who met in summer camp and stayed entwined through good and bad and tragic in subsequent decades.

4. "The End of California," by Steve Yarbrough, isn't about the state's anxiously awaited (by the other 49) calamitous demise. It's about a family that escaped Mississippi and managed to live in California for 25 years before scandal drove them back to their old home in the South, where their old neighbors' grievances and their own past sins are still alive and vibrant.

5. "Let's Discuss Diabetes With Owls," is the latest in humorist David Sedaris' experiment to prove that he can give a book any title he wants and it will still go to the top of the charts. The foremost comedic observer of the past dozen or so years is becoming a bit too comfortably cozy with his life in France with his companion Herb, and his Euro-problems are a bit less likable than his stories of growing up that he mined profusely in his previous five collections. Still, it's a fine summertime read if you're a fan of owls, diabetes and humor.

6. From its title-derived epigraph by Thomas Wolfe to its crashing conclusion, "A Land More Kind Than Home," by Wiley Cash is a dark and Gothic look at an Appalachian town overrun by a Church of Christ in Signs Following creepy but appropriately charismatic carpetbagger of a minister and the strange goings on in his dubious house of worship, with its windows covered over with yellowed newspapers.

7. "Inferno," by Dan Brown, features the further exploits of your code-busting Harvard professor Robert Langdon, etc., etc. We're just including it so you'll read something on our list this summer.

tim.grobaty@presstelegram.com. 562-714-2116.
http://www.presstelegram.com/general-news/20130605/tim-grobaty-our-annual-summer-reading-list
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