Summer Reading- The Non Lame Addition

Hi, all! *waves* I know my blog has been deadity dead here lately, but there's been a good reason for it. See, the thing is... the book sold.

YAY!!!!!

Now, having said that, I should add that I still...some more...again... can't talk about it due to various PR related things with the publishers, who shall, at this time, remain nameless. But needless to say, I'm thrilled to bits about all this. Being a writer, like, for a living has always been my dream, and I'm still kind of in a state of disbelief that it's happened. I can't wait to tell you all the details, because the people who bought it are an absoute dream, and my editor is oh-so-awesome, and has worked on some really great books. So stay tuned and I should be able to spill the full story by the end of June or so!

In the meantime, I have a meme to complete, courtesy of my dear friend Ally. It goes like this:

1. Pick up the nearest book.

2. Open to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the next 3 sentences.

5. Tag 5 people.

My nearest book is Joe College by Tom Perrotta, and the fifth sentence, and the three sentences following are actually dialogue, so I'm counting each exchange as a sentence. I can do that. It's my blog, dammit! :)

"It's okay," I told him. "Forget about it."
"It's not okay," Jess said sharply. "Can't we go to a party just once without you doing something stupid?"
"I was trying," he insisted, his voice contrite and defiant at the same time. "I thought you'd like it."
"Oh yeah," she said. "I love it when my boyfriend makes an ass of himself in public."

Hee hee! I heart Tom Perrotta. If you haven't read Election and Little Children, you must run out immediately and get them. They were made into really good movies as well, but the book is always better. Well, most of the time. Election the movie was pretty damn excellent, and the film version of Little Children would have been close to perfect had they not felt the need to add a WTF? moment to the ending. Okay, so I tag Felicia, Cindy, Amber, Maureen, and Amie.

Now, on to the meat of the blog! As a former English teacher, I know the words "summer reading" fill most people with dread. Even I'm not above the occasional groan at the words, namely in 7th grade when I was forced to read Tom Sawyer. Ugh. I know I'll probably get my Southerner, and English Degree-Holder, and Writer, and Decent Human Being licenses revoked for this, but I...um... I donotlikeMarkTwain. There, I said it! Well, I take that back. I liked that speech he did about "onanism." That's some funny stuff.

But I'm not talking about the sort of reading that mean ol' schoolteachers make you do. I'm talking about pure, old fashioned pleasure reading, books you read by the pool, or on the beach, or draped over your air conditiong vent in a dark room (if you have ever experienced August in Alabama, you know what I mean by this.)

This afternoon, I went to get my summer pleasure reading from the nearest library, and came home with all sorts of goodies: Barbara Michaels The Dancing Floor- hooray for old school Gothics!-, Sarah Addison Allen's Garden of Spells- ooh, Southern flavored Magical Realism!-, and Lauren Willig's newest "flower book", The Seduction of the Crimson Rose- holy crap, chicklit/historical romance written by someone with a Ph.D in history from Harvard! I'm really pleased with all of my picks. They all felt "summery" to me. There's something about hot weather that makes me long for 3 types of books: 1) Big, fat Gothic thrillers, ala past Summer Books, Anne Rice's The Witching Hour, and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian , 2) Anything set in the South, like Joshilyn Jackson's Gods in Alabama , and 3)Pretty much any big, epic, historically set romance,see: oh, everything I read between the ages of 12-18. They don;t really make books like those anymore, but you know the ones I'm talking about. Think Judith Krantz, Alexandra Ripley, older Danielle Steele, and Colleen McCullough. One of my fondest reading memories is reading The Thorn Birds while lying on my stomach on the diving board of my aunt's pool. I think I was about 13, definitely too young to be reading The Thorn Birds, because I was way more freaked out by a scene wherein everyone got lice and had to have their heads shaved than I was about the whole "Catholic priest has forbidden affair with girl roughly 1/3 of his age, oh and also people die in horrible ways, like getting suffocated by wild boars, no really, they totally do" parts of the book.

Yes, browsing through the stacks today definitely made me long for books of summers past, books that I will be blogging about tomorrow, God willing and the creek don't rise (my favorite Southern expression ever.)

But as for you, loyal- and patient!- blog readers, what are your favorite books to read in the summer? Or any season, come to think about it! I definitely have books that are best for fall/winter reading.