Chip on Your Shoulder

I still remember the excitement of my first summer reading list, a single page that listed half a dozen books I was supposed to read the summer before I started high school.

If it weren't for that first reading list I might never have read "Main Street" by Sinclair Lewis. Who knows when, or if, I would have gone on to read "Babbitt," "Arrowsmith," "Main Street" and "Dodsworth," the reported novels that won Lewis the Nobel Prize in Literature and stoked my infatuation for language, story, and character into a lifelong obsession?

This summer's just a few days old, but I already feel like something's missing without one. Fortunately, summer reading lists are in season on the Internet. Here's a sample:

NPR's Susan Stamberg consulted three independent booksellers for their summer reading suggestions.

Her NPR colleague, "All Things Considered"'s Alan Cheuse, offers his own picks. The story includes audio links, featuring several author readings, or in the case of John Gregory Dunne, who died before his last book could be published, a reading by his widow, Joan Didion.

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Dale Peck Buries the Hatchet By Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel Author and occasional book reviewer Dale Peck was tolling away at The New Republic in relative obscurity, writing 4,000- to 6,000-word reviews of books well after their publication date. Suddenly, one pungent line (and a profile in The New York Times Magazine, posed with a hatchet) catapulted him into the literary spotlight. Peck wrote, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation," and suddenly became known as the meanest critic in America. Wanna learn more? Check out our reporting, writing, and editing seminars. Sign up to receive Chip on your Shoulder by e-mail: * Click here (sent Tuesdays)

The New York Times' Janet Maslin touted her summer reading choices on "CBS News Sunday Morning." 

As the brother of a former librarian, I know how valuable their tips can be, so I was glad to find this list from a Seattle librarian on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer site. 

One way to recapture the excitement of that first summer reading list is to check out what today's kids are expected to consume over the next few months. Education World, a website for teachers, offers a list of lists. I especially like the one from Vermont public school librarians, which includes their annual summer and holiday suggestions from 1994, and the non-fiction and fiction picks for high school students in Mountain Brook City Schools in Birmingham, Ala.

I always want to know what other writers are reading. In 2003, AuthorsontheWeb.com asked 60 writers for their summer reading lists.

Google-ing for summer reading lists also turned me on to The Unofficial UC Berkley Summer Reading List, a collection proffered to incoming freshman by college faculty and staff.

Although I didn't know it when I started reporting a story about Southern fiction writers last December, by the time I finished it would amount to the mother of all summer reading lists — more than 150 novels by 65 contemporary southern writers. I'm still reading through them.

And finally, here's my own personal list of books I'd like to read this summer:

• "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy. I confess: I never read it and honest, I got the idea before Oprah.
• "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman. As a recovering pessimist, I hope this cognitive therapy manual can help.
• The American Scholar summer 2004 issue. One of the last issues edited by Anne Fadiman, whose ouster by budget-cutting trustees of the Phi Beta Kappa Society was a literary crime.
• "Pull Me Up" by Dan Barry. Barry, the About New York Columnist for The New York Times, has written a haunting, poetic memoir that I devoured in nearly one sitting and want to savor.
• "First and Long: A Black School, a White School and Their Season of Dreams" by Greg Borowski, a city hall reporter for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, shows the power of being there.
• "The Essays: A Selection" by Michel de Montaigne. The Frenchman who started the personal essay craze more than 400 years ago.
• "Seasons of Real Florida" by Jeff Klinkenberg. Klinkenberg's outdoors reporting and prose demonstrates how "where" can be the most important of the Five Ws.
• "Ego and Ink" by Chris Cobb. A look at a Canadian newspaper wars.
• "One Man's Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream" by Phyllis Vine tells the story of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black man who bought a house on a white Detroit street in the 1920s, and the legendary lawyer who defended him in court when the move led to tragedy.
• "Off Ramp" by Hank Stuever. This collection of newspaper features and columns includes one of my favorite leads from a Washington Post Style-ist who began a piece on funeral homes with "Let's say you're dead."
• "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett. My wife says I'm missing something if I don't read this.
• "The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing" by Ben Yagoda. I know I can learn something from this biographer of The New Yorker and student of the Art of Fact.

What's on your summer reading list?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this column incorrectly stated the Summer 2004 issue of The American Scholar will be Anne Fadiman's last. Fadiman's last issue will be the Autumn 2004 edition, which will feature essays by John Updike, Jacques Barzun, Sven Birkerts, Frederick Busch, Todd Gitlin, Vivian Gornick, Pico Iyer, Edward Hoagland and Cynthia Ozick. It will also be the last issue for William Whitworth, John Bethell, and Pat Crow, who lost their jobs to budget cutbacks as well.